Poverty Research from Every Angle, Part 1: Migration

Episode Topic: Migration

In this episode, sociologist and demographer Professor Amy Hsin guides us to a critical junction in the fight against poverty: the profound intersection of immigration policy and systemic inequality.

Featured Speakers:

• Amy Hsin, University of Notre Dame
• Annika Singh '27, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/75d0fe.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Poverty Research from Every Angle. 

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Transcript

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Introduction and Immigration Lens

1 0:11

Thank you, Professor Sullivan. Um, you stole my whole introduction right there, but once again, I'm Anika. I'm a junior here. Um, I'm from Boston, but I live in Cavanaugh Hall, and I've been honored to be a part of the poverty research community since interning at LEO last summer. Um, as someone who comes from an immigrant family myself, I'm so excited to hear our next speaker talk about her family history and her research. Questions of how policy and inequality shape young people's educational and labor market outcomes inspired me to study economics and become involved in LEO's work, and they're some of the same questions that our speaker addresses in her scholarship. Amy Hsin is a prof- professor of migration at the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs. A sociologist and demographer whose research examines immigration, inequality, and education, she focuses on how legal status shapes the lives and opportunities of immigrant families and young adults in the United States. In addition to her academic research, she engages in public-facing work on immigration policy, including writing a- including writing amicus briefs in defense of deferred action for childhood arrivals and, most recently, birthright citizenship. In 2019, she was appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to co-chair a New York City commission tasked with advancing educational equity in the city's public schools. Please join me in welcoming Professor Amy Hsin to the podium.

Speaker 2 1:56

Thank you so much, um, for having me and for this opportunity to share my work and also just to kind of reflect a little bit about, uh, my own intellectual journey and, um, and thinking about, um, my own research from a little bit of a narrative angle. Um, so before joining the faculty at Notre Dame in August, um, I spent fifteen years at the City University of New York, uh, one of the most diverse public university systems in the country and a powerful engine of social mobility. My students came from all over the, the world. Many were the first in their families to attend college. And in that setting, it was hard not to miss how immigration policy quietly shapes educational and economic trajectories, often in ways that are invisible to institutions and even to policymakers. And policy, in this sense, serves as an architecture of opportunity, structuring who gains access to education, work, and mobility in a-- in, in what ter-- in what terms. So how do we-- how did I come to study immigration and immigration policy? So I studied economics and mathematics as an undergrad, but life is, uh, unpredictable, and I end, ended up getting a PhD in sociology, right? Where I trained as a social demographer and a quantitative scholar. My early work focused on what-- on core topics in demography, um, kind of bread and butter questions about p-parental investments in children and educational disparities, using nationally representative surveys and administrative data.

The CUNY Data and Its Stories

Speaker 2 3:39

Over time, my interests shifted to, um, towards immigration, immigrant families, and youth, and that shift was, um, driven by something that we don't always say as researchers, the availability of really great data sometimes shapes the, the topics that you, you can focus on, right? And at, at CUNY, I came across a really unique administrative data set. So universities routinely collect, um, detailed information on students, right? Their high school transcripts, their demographic information, and their progress in, in the institution. Um, what made this data set, this CUNY data set unusual is that the City University also collects students' legal status, something that is almost never available at scale, right? Um, and this was possible because New York State at the time was among a handful of states that offered in-state tuition to undocumented students who graduated from a high school in New York City. And so to obtain in-state tuition, to be able to pay to go to college, you had to disclose your status through submitting an affidavit. So that policy created a really strong incentive for individuals to disclose their status, and in doing so, it made a largely hidden population visible in the data. Um, for a quantitative soc- uh, sociologist researcher like me, that's a goldmine. It's like a rare opportunity, um, to, to conduct, um, research, and it allowed me to study undocumented students at scale in one of the largest public university systems in the country. And these-- In using these data, I published papers on how legal status shapes educational outcomes, including how access to work permits through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, uh, shapes, um, educational attainment At the same time, working with these data, um, made s- clear the limits also of quantitative work, right? Um, admin-administrative records are amazing because they give you these large Ns, right? Mass-- you-- population, right? But the number of variables are very limited, and we were seeing patterns in the data, um, that we could not explain, that we had no context for explaining. And, and so much of the, the, the research up to that time on undocumented re-- on undocumented youth was focused on Latino populations, mainly Mexicans living in the states of California and Texas. But the CUNY data revealed far more racially and nationally diverse populations. Roughly a third of the undocumented students in CUNY, um, were from Mexico or from Latin America, but a quarter were from Asia, a quarter from the Caribbean, and large shares were coming from the Middle East and, um, Eastern Europe. And actually, the-- among undocumented Asians, the largest share was coming from South Korea. And that raised questions, right? Um, that we couldn't answer from the literature. Um, why do individuals from such varied parts of the world, including high-income countries like South Korea, become undocumented in the United States? How does this diversity shape and potentially stratify their experiences of illegality and their life chances, right? That was, that was when I kind of pivoted from, um, quantitative research to qualitative research, um, because I realized the, the data lim-limitations, um, and just were not sufficient to answer the questions that I was trying to ask. And so over the next ten years, I applied for grants to build the infrastructure to conduct in-depth interviews with undocumented young adults in collaboration with my, um, co-author, Sophia Aptaker, who is another fellow sociologist at CUNY. And during this time, we conducted a hund- over a hundred interviews during the first initial months of the, the first Trump administration under a period of great heightened un-uncertainty. And we conducted extensive fieldwork in legal clinics and community organizations. And this work allowed us to move beyond identifying patterns in the, in the administrative data to understanding processes that produce them,

Stratified Illegality and Migration Pathways

Speaker 2 8:13

right? Um, and so what this research made clear is something quite simple, right? That immigration policies shape who is able to move, um, how they were able to move, and what happens when they arrive to the United States. And because policies vary across countries and visa regimes, they generate, um, very different migration pathways I describe this as stratified entry into illegality. Um, people do not become undocumented in the same way, right? They are sorted into distinct migration pathways by policy, and those pathways continue to shape their opportunities after they arrive to the United States. And we explore these, uh, dynamics in a forthcoming book. Um, but today I'm just gonna focus on some smaller, uh, s- very specific examples, right? Um, so in the beginning of the talk, I kind of talked about, um, I noted that undocumented student populations at CUNY were very diverse, right? But w- and we initially lacked the context for understanding that diversity. Our interview, interviews helped us make sense of these patterns. So many of the S- the South Korean individuals who we spoke to came from middle-class families. There were-- many were fleeing from, um, economic, uh, collapse during the, the nineteen ninety-seven Asian financial crisis in, in, in, um, Korea, and they entered U- um, the United States legally on tourist visas, which tends to select on individuals who have financial resources, right? And so as a result, some arrived with savings, and even when they fell out of status, they could start small businesses. And many found opportunities within pretty wealthy ethnic enclaves where co-ethnic networks provided access to jobs, capital, customers, right? In contrast, the Chinese migrants who we interviewed faced highly restrictive visa regimes at home and in the coun- in, in, and in, from the United States that made legal entry very difficult. And so they turned to smuggling, to being smuggled in smuggling networks. In two thousand and eighteen, the cost of being smuggled from China to the United States was in excess of eighty thousand dollars per person, um, which is, you know, compared to the cost of, of, of being transported from Central America into the United States was less than three thousand, right? And so that, that tremendous cost, um, shaped their experiences once they came to the United States. Um, Chinese migrants who arrived had significant debt. The moment they stepped foot in the US, they had to start basically paying off a mortgage, right? Um, but they could, you know, enter a dense ethnic enclave where there were available jobs that were demanding, um, and they had to work long hours, but it was possible for them to pay off that debt and then bring, um, family members. Mexican migrants, by contrast, often entered without inspection across the US-Mexican border, a pathway shaped by geographic proximity and labor demands. But while the upfront cost, um, was lower, it entailed greater exposure, um, to immigration enforcement because of our immigration policy. Uh, enforcement is very racialized and, and much more instability. And unlike the Korean and Chinese migrants, they often act- lacked access to well-resourced ethnic enclaves where they could be, th- where they could find, um, jobs, and so were often sorted to some of the most physically demanding and precarious sectors, such as agriculture and construction. So there were these three distinct pathways into undocumented status that produce very different conditions for life after arrival. And this is what we me-- this is, uh, this is one of our findings for, of, of the stratified entry into illegality. Policies sort people into different starting points, and those starting points later on go on to affect life chances.

Personal Story and Closing

Speaker 2 12:27

So I want to end with a brief reflection on why I study immigration. Um, you know, we-- I don't think we always fully understand what draws us to certain questions and why we spend years, sometimes decades, working on them. Um, so certainly there are parallels between my life and the people I study. I am an immigrant. Um, I am the child of immigrants, and like many immigrant families, my parents don't talk about their past, and I only learned pieces of my migration history over time, right? My great-grandfather was a textile industrialist in China, um, in Shanghai. But in the nineteen-forties, there were-- this was a period of tremendous upheaval: war, invasion, civil conflict. The Republican government was fighting the Japanese, who were invading, and the communist forces that were, um, creeping up, and by the time my grandmother, uh, was pregnant with my mother, the situation had worsened, and the nationalist Republican army were fleeing to Taiwan. And so, like many families, my family had to decide, "Do we stay or do we leave?" My great-- uh, my grandmother, uh, my grandparents, unlike their cousins and, and relatives, did not have vast estates and land and holdings. My grandfather was a bank clerk, right? And so they didn't have much tethering them to the land, so they decided to leave. Um, and they, um, left on a golden boat, one of these boats that where the retreating army had filled up with all the national treasures and the gold bouillons, um, uh, um, to, to bring to Taiwan. Um, and in Taiwan, my grandmother rebuilt their-- my grandparents rebuilt their lives, invested in their children's education, and that investment made it possible for my uncle to come to the United States for graduate school. And once he came to the United States, he became a citizen, and he sponsored my grandmother, and then my grandmother sponsored me. Um, and that's how I came to the United States. Looking back, I see this wasn't just a family story. Um, it was a, a story sh- uh, shaped by war, by poverty, by policy and inequality, forces that can, um, that make people decide whether, you know, shape people's decisions to move or to stay. And studying immigration, you know, gave me the language to see my family story not as a series of isolated events, but as a part of a larger system, right? Shaped by history, policy, global inequality. And to me, that's what's most powerful about research and what research can do. It helps us see these structures that shape other people's lives, but also our own. Uh, my family was fortunate. Education opened doors for us, and those opportunities ultimately brought us to the United States where I was able to become a college professor. I am deeply grateful for that opportunity, and I see my own life as a reflection of what those opportunities can, can be-- for what those pop- opportunities can make possible. And at a time, um, when many feel that these opportunities are narrowing, the work being done here, research and programs like the Poverty Initiative matter more than ever. Um, this work helps us see and understand the invisible architecture that impedes mobility and generates inequality, and think more clearly about how it would-- it can be changed to make a, a fairer and more just society. Thanks.