IRP Book Talk: Robert Courtney Smith on Dreams Achieved and Denied: Mexican Intergenerational Mobility

Siers-Poisson [00:00:05] Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research & Policy podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’m Judith Siers-Poisson. For this episode, Dr. Robert Courtney Smith joins us to discuss his new book titled “Dreams Achieved and Denied, Mexican Intergenerational Mobility.” That was published by the Russell Sage Foundation. Robert Courtney Smith is a professor of public and international affairs in the Marxe School at Baruch College and also in the Departments of Sociology and Political Science in the Graduate Center, all at CUNY. Rob, thanks for joining us today.

Smith [00:00:42] Thank you for inviting me, Judith. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Siers-Poisson [00:00:45] I’d like to start with some basics. Can you describe the landscape of Mexicans living in New York City?

Smith [00:00:52] Sure. So, Mexicans have been in the City since at least the 1920s, but they didn’t become a big population, they really grew in the 1990s, and part of that was driven, there were a number of things, but part of it was family reunification after the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, where lots of parents who legalized their status reunited their families. So, you had this big jump in the number of youth there. The population was quite skewed to men and single workers, and there was a lot of family reunification and then settlement after the legalization program. And my study captured the height of that, where there was, by around 2000-something, there were five or 600,000 people, Mexican-descent people, citizens and foreign born, but there was a much higher ratio of foreign to U.S. born, right? So it was something like 60-something percent foreign born versus U.S. born, and it was three times more Mexican born teenagers in 1999-2000 than U.S. born teenagers. Now, the ratio is 10 times more U.S.-born teenagers than foreign-born teenagers because all of those children born to people who had come in earlier, or even the grandchildren of the people who had come in earlier, are now teenagers.

Siers-Poisson [00:02:18] So that shift from predominantly undocumented Mexican residents to predominantly documented, does that also go along with the change in economic mobility between generations?

Smith [00:02:31] Yes. In general, the migration of Mexicans to New York and to the U.S. has slowed, right? The numbers peaked over a decade or more ago, and the numbers of people coming in have reduced. Part of it, I think, is that the demographic boom that Mexico had experienced 30, 40 years ago, their fertility rates have fallen dramatically, and so there’s just not as much push pressure for people to come here. And so having more people who were documented and who are U.S. born has changed the mobility trajectories quite profoundly because lacking legal status is, as other scholars like Roberto Gonzales and Cecilia Menjivar and others have analyzed, is a master status that blocks your ability, for example, to convert effort in school into labor market outcomes as an adult, right? You’re just not going to earn as much and you’re not going to have the same sort of life chances. And so if you have an increasing number of a population that you have documented or U.S. citizen parents who then have U.S. citizen children, there’s no sort of artificial status barrier blocking your upward mobility.

Siers-Poisson [00:03:50] And we’re going to talk a lot more about legal status as that master status, as you just described it, Rob, but first, I’d really like to have you share the scope of this research. You have been following the folks in your study for a very long time.

Smith [00:04:06] Yes, a ridiculously long time. I’ve said to grad students, never propose to do a 20-plus year longitudinal study. Nobody wants to fund that, and no one thinks you’re going to actually finish. The reason I’ve been able to follow so many people, and there are 96 developed cases that I followed for between a decade and a half or more than 20 years, is because I went to grad school and then got jobs in the same city where I was doing my fieldwork. So, it wasn’t like I had to go somewhere to return. But the thing about the study, so there’s 96 cases and it was a propulsive sample. So, I picked people who as teenagers had done well, and poorly, and still up in the air in school, people who were documented, undocumented, even numbers roughly of men and women, people who were in gangs or out of gangs and other kinds of variations. So, we didn’t pick winners. So, the fact that we have a mobility rate, a graduation from college that is three or three and a half times higher than every other study done in every other place in the last 40 years, right? Every other study has a 13 to 14% second generation college graduation rate for Mexicans. Mine has a rate in the forties, which corresponds to the census, which has 42% of men and 49% of women in 2020 had college degrees, you know, aged 25 and older. So, there’s a dramatic empirical puzzle here. And I didn’t start off knowing there would be this puzzle. I just followed to see what was going to make people go upwardly mobile or downwardly mobile. But it is a useful and convenient thing for me to have the census data sort of tell the same sort of story. And the question you asked was about the sort of scope of the study. So over 60%, perhaps 65% of the cases are thick cases, meaning that I interviewed them and maybe a sibling or friends, I’ve probably followed them doing ethnographic work. Some of them I’ve talked to their teachers. I’ve interviewed them at time one, time two, and a fair number at time three. Often, it’s not just one interview. Often it’s more than that. So, I could have 10 or 15 hours of interviews with a person and have followed them around for a few days in school. And then, there’s very few cases in the book where it’s just a one-off or two-off interview, right? Most of them are thick cases. So what this has done then is that, you know, there’s a thing I heard called the “time one encapsulation effect” where you have pretty deep data at time one when they’re teenagers and then you have outcome data, but you don’t know what happens in the middle. I have a very thick story that allows me to do both intracase process tracing of how a particular person’s outcomes happened and cross case. For an ethnographic project, this is a huge sample, not only very, very long, but also huge. And I also analyze that data using both narrative ethnographic, narrative case analysis and statistical analysis, and set theory analysis. But it enables me to do things like assess the impact of American immigration policies that allowed parents to get legalized or not, the correlation between American policies, parents’ legal status, and adult outcomes. The people whose parents legalized through IRCA in 1986 did better than people who came just maybe the year after who were not able to, their parents were not able to legalize. And I trace how that is so through the deep dive data that I have.

Siers-Poisson [00:07:42] And the people that are part of your study come from, if I’m remembering correctly, predominantly two communities in Mexico, where you actually visited and interacted with them in the communities there as well. Yeah.

Smith [00:07:56] The field names for them are El Ganado and Ticuani. And I spent about a decade going back and forth between the, you know, New York and those places. I would stay for a month or two or something like that doing field work. It was super fun field work, but yeah, so I have deep relationships with the community for a very long time. Some of these people are now my friends, right? I’ve gone to their weddings or some increasingly now funerals for some of the older guys, which is really quite sad. They were very kind to me. It was a good work to do.

Siers-Poisson [00:08:31] I want to dig into your research, but first I just want to ask, how do you feel like you were successful in gaining the trust of these individuals, their families, and even their broader communities?

Smith [00:08:43] You know, this is a podcast. I’m a white guy named Robert Smith, right? I speak pretty good Spanish and I have a rural Mexican accent. Like my accent is the accent of the place that they come from. So, because I showed up and did lots of things with them and hung out with them, I became a member of the community. I mean, I’m not Mexican. They didn’t, and there was no question of that, but it was normal for me to be there. I also did anything I could to help both the, you know, the community and individuals in it.

Siers-Poisson [00:09:14] So we’re all starting with the same baseline knowledge, can you explain what having legal status as an immigrant gives you and what lacking status keeps out of reach?

Smith [00:09:25] Having legal status or being born in the U.S. and having citizenship or acquiring citizenship gives you full access to all of the American institutions that make modern life possible, the educational system, the labor market, social security and social welfare benefits and things like that. Actually, I misspoke there. Undocumented students have a right from Plyler v Doe in 1982, 83 to have access to public education. But in fact, it becomes extremely difficult if you’re undocumented. So one of the things I did in the set theory analysis was to compare the outcomes of people who were documented or citizens versus undocumented and what their practices were. So if you did your homework all the time and you never cut school and you didn’t hang out on the street, you did all the stuff your parents told you to do and you were a citizen, pretty much you ended up in the top two outcome categories of college grads or high flyers. If you were undocumented and did all of those things, you still ended up in the bottom two outcome categories. And the only way that U.S. citizens ended up in the bottom two outcome categories was to do two or three of the wrong, quote unquote things wrong, right? So, you had to cut school a lot, never do your homework, and hang out with gang members on the street to end up in the lower outcome categories if you were a citizen. For example, mentors played a huge role in the upward mobility of the people in my study. But mentors who opened doors for undocumented kids, those kids couldn’t walk through the doors, right? I had a woman who wanted to work with young children. She wanted to be an early ed teacher to help students the way her mentor had helped her. She was in college, but she couldn’t do an internship because she didn’t have a social security number. And she was afraid she couldn’t get fingerprinted without the social security number, so she couldn’t do the internship. She did not get the internships that she needed to go into the helping profession she chose until five or six years later when DACA was passed and she got DACA and she went back to her old professor and said, “Can you help me?” And she got an unpaid internship while she was working. But if DACA hadn’t happened, she would have been out of luck.

Siers-Poisson [00:11:37] I thought the emphasis that you put on mentoring was so interesting because it seemed like some of the undocumented young people were actually much more aware of how little they could take advantage of those opportunities, whereas their mentors and their parents often thought, “well, if you work hard, if you take these advantages, of course, you’re going to be able to overcome the status.” But the young people often had that sense like, “this is just that for me.”

Smith [00:12:07] I mean, I’ve been living in a world that’s divided by legal status for so long because I’ve been doing this work since the 1980s, right? And so it was shocking to me to hear parents talk about the idea that if you were a good kid, you weren’t in trouble with the police and you graduated from high school and you went to college, they’ll give you an opportunity. They just couldn’t believe that the United States would not allow a child raised here who spoke English, who wanted to go join the military, as many of the kids I had in my study wanted to do, or go be a teacher or something, they didn’t believe that the U.S. wouldn’t give them a chance because they’d seen lots of Mexicans who were here, right, who had status. And so, no, and it was sort of magical thinking. And the kids, it was quite shocking, and my book’s not the first to describe this, but it was quite shocking for some of them to realize that their parents were wrong. And so, it was really rough. And I think what we’ve done here is we’ve had several generations of undocumented youth in this country. One of the things that happens is that being undocumented decreases how much effort a lot of the kids ended up putting into school. But they were right! They were right that graduating from high school, even going to college, would not enable you to get legal status. It wasn’t until DACA that that changed, but DACA, you’re still undocumented, right? You have a work permit that makes you documented towards the labor market, but, you know, you’re still deportable. And, you know, who knows what will happen. The President tried to end DACA in 2017 and his effort was stopped because he ended it the wrong way. He violated the Administrative Procedures Act. So, he could end DACA with an executive order, presumably.

Siers-Poisson [00:13:54] Going back to the aspect of deciding how much effort was worth putting into education was so interesting to me because there were young people who were saying, “I’m a really good student. I could graduate at the top of my class. I could maybe even go to college, but I’m going to come out of whatever education I get only to be able to take the lowest paying jobs that I would get right now as a high school dropout.” So basically, they were doing some pretty sophisticated assessments of what possibilities were or were not available to them.

Smith [00:14:30] Yeah, I think you’re thinking of one young man in my study who sounded like an economist talking about opportunity costs and made the calculation as a sophomore in high school to drop out of high school because his mom was working 14 hours a day. They’d come to the U.S. because his dad had died and then their grandfather who was sponsoring them also died and his math teacher went to their house to beg his mother to put him back in school. Right. He was that good of a student and he was being mentored by kind, good teachers, but they didn’t understand about legal status and there was no way for him to fix legal status. And this young man, when DACA came out, he was just under the cutoff. I reached back out to him and offered to help him get DACA. I had a project that was helping people do that and he didn’t want to do it because he was afraid to give the government his information. And I think it made him very sad to think about the life that he could have had if he’d been able to go to college because he’s really quite a smart guy. So there’s a dramatic human cost here and I think it gets lost in the political debate often with the sort of soundbites and demonization of undocumented people. These are our children, right? They’re somebody’s children, but they’re also our children. They’re America’s children.

Siers-Poisson [00:15:49] A lot of the aspects that we’ve just been talking about really make up the concept of the immigrant family bargain. And it’s a very complicated situation, partly because of differing legal statuses, often within a family, but there’s what the parents are promising to children, what children are promising to parents and family units, and then even older children to younger siblings. Can you talk more about that immigrant bargain? Because it seemed to really permeate so many of your interviews and so many of the relationships that you were looking at.

Smith [00:16:23] Every family has a family bargain, right? But the immigrant family bargain is in some ways more freighted because the parents have in fact given up their old life to come to the new world. And in my first book, I talked about the immigrant family bargain as the children of immigrants redeeming their parents’ sacrifice and coming to the U.S. by going to school, being good people, working hard, helping their siblings and parents. So that was done, the first book, when these children were mostly teenagers, maybe early adults. The immigrant bargain changes as you get older, as established adults, people in their mid- to late-20s through their mid- to late-30s, the bargain, it goes two ways, I realized, as I was following up. One is that the older the children get, as adults, they are able to keep the bargain, if they have citizenship, they’re able to keep the bargain more substantively because, for example, a family that has like a dad and a mom making $30,000, both $30,000, that’s a $60,000 family income and they have six people, but then if their older two children start working, in one case, I’m thinking that the one was a cop who made about 90 grand and the other was a teacher that made about 75, suddenly your income is dramatically higher. So, the younger children in that family grow up in a middle-class household, whereas the older children grew up in poverty. If you’re an undocumented older sibling, as you become an adult, your income doesn’t grow dramatically. And if you drop out of college, you can’t do the other stuff that the citizen kids who go to college do, which is help their younger siblings navigate the high school application process—which is complicated in New York—the college application process, they can help their parents get a mortgage or refinance or do other kinds of stuff that people who know those kinds of institutions can do. The parents on the other hand, right, their part of the immigrant bargain is to love their kids and work hard. And with very few exceptions, that was the case in this study. But the thing that the parents need to do is give their kids the platform to launch, right? Which you as citizen parents can do because they’ve given their children mostly citizenship, but undocumented parents can’t. I mean, the parents didn’t do anything wrong. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just, it’s a horrible structural set of exclusions because the parents are working very hard. The kids are working very hard and neither of them can keep the bargain that their counterparts who are documented can keep. It’s kind of cruel, actually.

Siers-Poisson [00:18:52] You compare three basic categories of status. I think the two most obvious ones are legal status from birth and those who never were going to be able to receive legal status. But then there are status changers, and I found their stories really interesting. Can you tell us what that means and how that played out for some of your participants?

Smith [00:19:12] Right. Because the study was so long and I followed people for so long, some of the undocumented people became documented and got permanent legal status during the study, right? And then in the last round of data collection, DACA happened. So they, some of them were partly documented, but the people who got permanent legal status, their lives dramatically bettered, their income tripled, sometimes quadrupled. They were able to get married when they had been holding off from doing that for fear of various things. They were able to get health insurance. They were able to do all of the things that somebody who is educated and works hard, all the things that you get in adulthood in terms of a quality of life. And so epistemologically, this is super powerful because I’m tracing the changes within one case, right? If a person goes from have lacking legal status and then they impute all of these betterments to having legal status, but I also have it across a bunch of cases so that I can treat my process tracing as qualitative causal analysis because it’s the same person whose life is improving. You can’t say it’s some extraneous thing. No, it’s that they got status. That’s what I think. That’s what they think. And that’s what happened with all of the cases where all these conditions held.

Siers-Poisson [00:20:30] We talked quite a bit about education and how legal status really affects decision-making there. And we also talked about work, and you just mentioned romantic relationships, whether or not to start a family. One of the really interesting things for me as a reader was how their legal status influenced choices that they made about their social environment, and that was friend groups, social networks, whether or not to join a gang. Can you talk about how that came out in the interviews?

Smith [00:21:00] Right. So I think my answer engages the question, but not exactly as it’s framed. One of the really interesting things in American sociology for most of its history, integrating into white friendship and social groups has been a key indicator or has been taken as a sign of assimilation, integration and upward mobility. But in fact, in New York City, we have a lot of non-white, middle-class, and upwardly mobile spaces. I’ve had people in the study who have no white friends, have gone to schools without white people, have gone to CUNY and other public colleges where there’s mostly been non -white students, and then go into middle-class jobs in schools or nonprofits or healthcare where there are not very many white people. And the classic thing with upward mobility in most of these sorts of studies is you have a Black or a brown person and they’re moving upwardly mobile into a white college environment and then into a white professional environment and there’s a culture shock or there’s, you know, microaggressions, etc.. For some of my participants, that was not what happened. And for the other ones who went into mixed places, they were not all white dominant spaces. Some of them were, but a lot of them were white, Black, brown and Asian. In many professional places in New York, it’s much more integrated. And so, it’s a very different story than the one typically understood as a white reference group in American sociology. And I think that that has been a huge thing. And in fact, blackness correlates quite strongly with upward mobility. Some teenagers in my study identified as Black as teenagers, but when they moved into their early twenties, they abandoned that idea, but they were upwardly mobile and they became Mexican in their self -identification again. The reason they identified as Black was one of them said, “I want to be a cool Black girl.” She wanted to be smart and do calculus and advanced biology and all that kind of stuff. And it was the Black girls who were doing that in their high schools. And so being Black was seen as being cooler, being more high achieving, being smarter, being more powerful. Now this is also circa 1999, 2000. There’s three times more teen Mexicans than U.S. born Mexicans at that time. Mexicans are in fact leaving school at high rates then because they’re teenagers. There was this huge family reunification. Migrating when you’re 12 or 13 or 14 years old is extremely hard and there was a lot of pressure to work. And it takes five years to learn a language, write a second language. If you come up when you’re 14, you’re going to be 19. It’s a very, very hard adjustment. And I don’t think anyone was ready for it, but the legal status figures into this because if in fact you’re undocumented, it’s going to change the calculus of what you want to do and who you’re going to hang out with. And so you’re much more likely to cut class and that could get you more involved with the gang activities that were happening at that time and into friendship groups where you’re only hanging out with Mexicans as an identity thing at home and at school. So, you know, in the study, if you had Black friends your first two years of high school, you were 36% more likely at age 28 to end up as a high or a college grad. If you had only Mexican friends at home and in school, you were 20-something percent less likely. If you had Mexican friends at home and other kinds of friends in school, there wasn’t much of an effect either way, right? It was just how hard you worked and whether you did your homework and stuff like that.

Siers-Poisson [00:24:40] You also look at second chance mechanisms and the impact of that, as you call it, “master status” of whether you are documented or not. Can you share just a couple of brief examples of what those second chance mechanisms look like and how outcomes did vary significantly due to legal status?

Smith [00:25:00] So second chance mechanisms are when a kid has made mistakes, they’ve messed up in school or legally, there are mechanisms that try to ensure the future life chances for that kid. So, summer school, weekend school, there’s special schools for kids who may age out, etc.. Those are all second chance mechanisms because instead of just failing the year of school, you get a chance to make it up. In the legal realm, there’s a thing called Youthful Offender status. This was the main one that I saw used. And it means that if you are a first time youthful offender, age 19 or under, there is a provision in New York State Criminal Code to allow you to get youthful offender status, meaning that even if you are found to be liable for the charges against you, even if violent, depending on the judge’s discretion, if you’re still an adolescent, a youthful offender, you can be on probation, stay out of trouble, and then that’s sealed. You don’t have a conviction, right? So, I had one student who is now a teacher and administrator in the schools who would have been unable to do this because when he was in college, him and his friends saw that the school store was open while they were waiting to go for a party and they stole chips and soda. And instead of just having them report to the dean on Monday, the university arrested them and brought them to county jail, which is like, what the, like, why would you do that to some kids just being stupid? I can’t imagine race doesn’t play a significant role in that decision. But second chance mechanisms then keep the door open for you, right? That you don’t have a criminal record, so it doesn’t eliminate all the possibilities for that. And that’s for U.S. citizen kids. For a second chance mechanisms for undocumented kids, particularly in the criminal justice system, once you’re in the criminal justice system, the only thing that’s seen about you is your undocumented status, right? And a lot of these were before New York City wasn’t cooperating with ICE detainers. So, if you got put in, you were likely to get deported. There’s just not the same sort of opportunities even for very high achieving kids who are undocumented.

Siers-Poisson [00:27:10] I want to make sure that we at least touch on the idea of masculinity that you address in your book. There are a lot of stereotypes and assumptions about concepts of masculinity in a Latino context. And you spend quite a bit of your time discussing the complexities of different definitions of masculinity. And I thought very interestingly how legal status and life trajectory influence the type of masculinity that’s pursued.

Smith [00:27:37] Yeah, I’m especially pleased with the chapter on masculinity here. And it’s a current that goes through the book too. Most research on masculinity mainly looks at assessing the types and theorizing, empirically. also analyzing types of hegemonic or marginalized, etc., etc. There’s only a very little bit of work that looks at the ways in which different types of masculinity affect adult outcomes, right? One of them talks about a Daddy bonus that straight white men with families, if they embody that kind of masculinity, they end up making more money. I find that an entirely plausible argument. But what I’ve tried to do here is to create two models of masculinity from what people told me. And one of them is gang masculinity, which was decidedly the minority. And it was a relatively small number of cases as teenagers who mainly enacted this masculinity. The other one is Mexican mobility masculinity, which I named Mexican because this is the intersectional piece of this. People experience gender and ethnicity together. And it was the predominant masculinity in this community, right? There was not one father who was teaching their kid to go be a gang member, right? In fact, families were collaborating and strategizing for how to get kids who were in gangs or flirting with being in gangs out of them. But one of the key things that’s interesting here is that your masculinity had an effect both on your long -term outcomes and the meaning of your Mexicanness in context. So I looked at, for example, one young man who had been arrested several times by the police, never charged with anything, but was in a gang and ended up dropping out of school and he had an early transition. Actually, he knew more white people than most people because he started working in Greek restaurants as a teenager, right? And then quickly, because he spoke English, he quickly rose into sort of a management level in inside these delis, increasingly big delis and catering services. But he ended up working with undocumented coworkers who would say to him, “Why are you working with us in a deli? You speak English. You were born here. What’s the matter with you?” They would call him like a buey, an ox, right? They would tease him about “Why are you working with these guys?” I did a comparison between Federico, a U.S. citizen teenager who is in an honors program in a better school, in a better neighborhood, and Xavier, who’s an undocumented teenager who lives in a bad neighborhood, gets stepped up to and threatened all the time and goes to a worse high school. And Federico ends up with better life outcomes at age 30 because he ends up getting DACA, marries his girlfriend, and becomes a citizen. But his Mexicanness becomes an ethnicity rather than a harmful status, as opposed to Federico’s, which becomes a harmful status because he’s working in a place with undocumented Mexican people or Central American people who are exploited because their ethnicity signals that they’re undocumented and therefore exploitable. Versus someone like Xavier, who works in the medical field, whose presence there is seen as a positive and teachers whose presence was seen as a positive, their status as Mexicans is something that makes other teachers or staffers invest more in them because they’re an example to the children that, you know, you did it, then they can do it. So there’s a key mechanism people talked about all the time, which is when someone steps up to you, if you get a hard look in high school, right, like someone’s challenging you, if you look down or de -escalate versus looking back and escalate, you get $17,000 more of income at age 28 and three years more of education, right? It’s a huge bump and that’s a key manifestation of de-escalating is mobility masculinity and escalating is gang masculinity.

Siers-Poisson [00:31:35] So Rob, what do you see as the implications of your research for policy initiatives, whether at the federal, state, or even local levels?

Smith [00:31:44] When I compare my much better outcomes here in my study and in the census data to those in other places, it’s not strictly speaking, comparing New York to Los Angeles, for example, where other studies have been done, it’s comparing the outcomes of the people in my study versus the people in those studies. But my study, the tracing the processes that help does in fact lead to some insights about things that I think helped a lot. One of them was legalization, right? Legalizing the parents of the participants in this project made their outcomes better and blocking that legalization made their outcomes worse. So, it’s a no-brainer and the amount of tax revenue that it brings in over the course of a lifetime, others have done estimations of this, it’s huge. But it also allows you to raise children who are not worried all the time that their parents are going to be separated from them, right? It’s a thing that I noticed, particularly in the period after New York stopped collaborating with ICE, that kids weren’t scared that their parents were going to be gone in a way that in my studies in upstate New York, they are, right? They’re afraid because in a 15-year period in New York State, 69% of the people deported were deported with no conviction. And almost all of those people were handed over to ICE by local law enforcement. The key and most important mechanism there was racialized traffic stops. So, kids up there are terrified of the police and terrified that their moms are not going to come home. That was much less so the case in New York City. I mean, there’s lots of studies showing toxic fear is bad for brain development, it’s bad for educational development, all kinds of other things. Second, that New York gives everybody access to health care one way or the other, whether you can pay or not, that New York has done things to recognize immigrants regardless of status as members of the community, right? So, like creating IDs or recognizing consular IDs so people can get into their own kids’ schools or visit their own kids in the hospital. Those things make a huge difference. So those are key things. I think also investments in public equity, that the subway is really cheap, that you can get around very cheaply from one place to another. In Maria Rendon’s study, only one kid had a non-family mentor, and 47% of mine had mentors. And that meant that if you had a mentor who could get you an internship in Midtown for free or for cheap, you could be at that in 30 minutes, right? And in her study, nobody could get jobs outside of their immediate neighborhood. And it’s not necessary that you have a subway. There could be, for example, Uber and Lyft, they’re everywhere. You could create a fund that would allow kids to be able to go do those kinds of things. You don’t need a subway. It made it easier here. So, I think legalizing people would be a key thing. I think supporting the intra-family mechanisms that promote mobility, right? Maybe tax code changes to help people who are buying houses together, intra-family houses, that could be very useful. So I think those are key things. I also think that there should be a recognition of the right of families to stay together. It used to be more so under American law, that if you had a U.S. citizen child, it was easier for you to stay. And then over time, the standard has now become that you have to have a grave and unusual hardship to a U.S. citizen, right? So, if you have a child with leukemia or something like that that would be harmed by your deportation, that could help but won’t always. But the fact that you have a U.S. citizen child is zero impediment to your being deported. I think that’s a little bit of an upside-down moral universe, that for a country that says it’s dedicated to family and family values, it seems weird. I also think there’s a very important example from early in America’s history. So, we had a Revolutionary War. We broke away from England. There were lots of people, Tories, who had sided with England in the war. After the war, we had to decide what to do about them. Now, if this was today, we would have put them in jail or deported them. But we didn’t do that. If they were otherwise of good character, meaning, like they hadn’t broken laws, they had no conviction, they would be allowed to swear an oath of fealty to the U.S. and become American citizens. So if we could do that for people who sided with an enemy on U.S. soil in a war, why can we not do that for the children who have come here at two months old or two years old, who’ve only grown up here, who speak English natively and want to become full-fledged Americans? It’s the most short-sighted policy I could possibly imagine.

Siers-Poisson [00:36:28] Well, Rob, thank you so much for taking the time to discuss your book with us. There’s so much in it, and I really learned a lot reading it and talking with you today.

Smith [00:36:38] It’s been my pleasure to talk with you.

Siers-Poisson [00:36:41] Thanks so much to Dr. Robert Courtney Smith for joining us to discuss his new book, titled “Dreams Achieved and Denied, Mexican Intergenerational Mobility.” That was published by the Russell Sage Foundation. You can find a link to the book in the program note for this episode. The production of this podcast was supported in part by funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. But views expressed by our speakers don’t necessarily represent the opinions or policies of that office or of any other sponsor, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Music for the episode is by Poi Dog Pondering. Thanks for listening.