The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Stephanie Canizales on the human tragedy of undocumented and unaccompanied migrant youth in the US.

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Six months or so ago, I had a fascinating interview/discussion with Stephanie Canizales about her book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, which described her five year PhD project interviewing young people who had migrated from Central America as undocumented and unaccompanied minors in pursuit of a better future. These children were sent by their parents because they had no other choice, either to protect their lives from violence or because they had no means to support them at home. Once these children arrived in the US they were met by either impoverished relatives who often couldn’t support them. With no access to education or any legal means of supporting themselves they were forced to take low-wage jobs just to survive. I believe our society should be judged not by how well we keep people out, but how well we treat people when they are here. The story of these children is heart wrenching, and raises many complex issues, which may challenge previous notions you may have about such things as child welfare laws, about how we treat these young people who were driven here not out of choice, but through necessity, and who our society largely abandons once they arrive. Because of the vicissitudes of international affairs and other unexpected factors, we were not able to release this dialogue before now. But perhaps there could be no more opportune time to address this issue. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia came to this country as a 16 year old, a minor sent by his family to protect him from local gangs. In the intervening 14 years in the United States he was never charged or convicted of a crime, just as he had never been so charged or convicted in his home country of El Salvador. He had a job, and had several children with his US citizen wife. Nevertheless, he was recently illegally deported, without any trial, back to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, leading to a vigorous public debate. During the public discussions, Kilmar, and other illegal immigrants have been vilified for the acts of desperation that led them to enter the US illegally. But very little has been discussed about the harrowing challenges people like Kilmar met when they arrived here, alone, as children. My discussion with Stephanie will hopefully add a new dimension to the current public debate on this issue, focusing on real people rather than statistics, and on both the causes for the recent illegal migration to the US, and also the actual impact both on the country and on the immigrants while they live in the US. In so doing, I hope this expands your perspective of this complex problem, which is, after all, one of the purposes of this podcast, and of the Origins Project Foundation.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. Over six months ago, I had the opportunity and privilege to interview Stephanie Canazales about her book, Sin Padres Nepopeles, unaccompanied migrant youth coming of age in the United States. The book essentially follows what was her PhD dissertation, interviewing scores of young people who come to this country as minors, basically sent by their families for their own protection or survival,

and it found a system that provided no rights, no guarantees. They were met by often impoverished relatives who couldn't support them, exploited jobs, and without access to education, health care, etc. And it raises a host of complex issues. For example, while one may be certainly in favor of child of laws that protect children from being exploited in work as minors, if many of these children hadn't gotten illegal jobs, they literally would have not been able to survive. And so these questions that may seem cut and dry in principle in practice become more complex.

And these stories are poignant and her work incredibly informative. Due to the vicissitudes of the world's news, we ended up having to delay the release of this podcast for six months. But in a sense, it's now even more timely. because we're able to release this week following on a crisis that is emerging in the U.S. court system and in administration involving the case of Kilmar

Armando Obrigo-Garcia, who was a 29-year-old El Salvadorian who entered the country illegally as a minor at age 16 ostensibly to protect his own life and has lived here without violating any laws in the United States

or certainly without being convicted of violating him in the laws of the United States and whose deportation to El Salvador was ruled to be, was determined by a judge to not be carried out earlier because of potential threats to his life and livelihood of him and his family where he returned to El Salvador.

And he was mistakenly returned to El Salvador to a maximum security prison. And it's caused what may be a constitutional crisis. And you hear a lot of vitriol on all sides of this issue talking about illegal immigrants and how they don't deserve to be here and it skips the human aspect of these stories

in particular the human aspect of the stories of people who come here as children due to circumstances beyond their control forced to survive on the streets or elsewhere just to make it through and many of whom spend their lives here as law-abiding citizens and

in this context my discussion with Stephanie Fennazale is I think it's particularly timely and appropriate to break through the stereotypes to begin to understand in detail what we need to do really to protect young people. Because as I said recently, it's not stopping them at the border that determines what kind of country we are. It's what happens once they come and what we do with them and take care of them when they're here, treating them as human beings subject to the rule of law but also to the rule of compassion. And I hope my discussion with Stephanie.

will raise important issues that will cause you to potentially rethink the issues in the news today. In any case, I hope you can watch it ad-free on our Critical Mass Substack site or you can watch it on our YouTube channel, which I hope you subscribe to, where you can watch or listen to it on any podcast listening site. I hope you'll consider supporting the Origins Project Foundation

that produces the podcast, which gets support if you subscribe to our Critical Mass Substack site, or if you subscribe and want to, watch our videos on YouTube. But either way, no matter how you watch or to listen to it, I hope this provokes the kind of thoughtful reconsideration of world events that really is part of what this podcast and part of what the foundation is all about. In any case, with no further ado, Stephanie Canisales, thanks.

Well, Stephanie Canizales, thank you very much for taking the time to join me today. It's a pleasure to meet you virtually. Yeah, it's good to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, I've enjoyed, yeah, I guess enjoyed is the right way to do it, going through your new book, which, and in fact, I did duolingo for a year trying to learn some Spanish, but anyway, sin Padres and di Papelles. I don't know if I'm saying that right.

That is probably the best pronunciation I've heard in the past few weeks. Oh, good. Okay. What motivated this discussion we're going to have is your new book, which is, that's the title, and the subtitle is unaccompanied migrant youth coming of a very, age in the United States. And I wanted to go over this topic for a variety of reasons. One, a personal interest.

I wanted to learn about this. But also, I couldn't think of anything more timely, given the election, I guess I want to call it an election, given the election we're going through right now and all of the rhetoric we're hearing, basically vilifying immigrants on both parties. and and treating them as if they're criminals and all criminals. And of course, not the one group, as you point out, that tends to fall between the cracks are the people who come here as young people. And I think your work is fascinating.

And I hope it'll, I want to follow through this by the stories that you talk through. So I hope your memory is good because I'm going to asking you about a lot of the, a lot of the people, because I found each case particularly illuminating. But as you probably know, if you've seen this, this is an origins podcast. And I want to find out your origins, how you got. I like to find out how people got to where they're getting. In fact, I was really kind of interesting. Your book begins, has two questions that how do we get here and what to do?

That's really the philosophy behind this podcast in general, but all things human. How did we get here and what can we do? Now, I knew a little bit about you. And, you know, I read your brief bio on your site. And there's one point in the book on page 76 where you illuminate something about yourself as well in college. But anyway, this book is your PhD thesis, I assume, right? Yes, it is. and done at USC.

So you grew, what intrigued me is you grew up in L.A. And it's right that both your parents, both your parents were undocumented immigrants? Both of my parents arrived in the U.S. as undocumented immigrants, yes. From Guatemala. Is that correct? El Salvador. Yeah. El Salvador.

Okay. Sorry. In fact, I had El Salvador written here. I don't know why it was. But did they arrive separately or did they meet in the United States or? with or or yeah my mom arrived in the u.s. uh when she was nine years old um and my dad arrived when he was 17 separately they met in pico union los angeles which is where the book takes place yeah and they they both migrated as unaccompanied uh or your mom at nine was unaccompanied

she have relatives um with her but she is unaccompanied in the sense that i described in in the book in that there isn't a parent or a caregiver that is particularly invested in raising the child and she, you know, did school enrollment on her own, found a job on her own, even as there was an aunt, later a family friend, that she was living, she was living in their home, but they weren't her caregiver in the traditional sense. And I talk about how in the book, I do make that distinction. Like you can be present with people and still be alone, right? Yes, we'll talk about being alone a lot. It was moving, and throughout this I kept thinking of how many things people overcome

and the success stories you can read them are just heartwarming because of, you know, I often think I worked hard and then I read about some of these people and it just amazes me. Now you, so clearly that's what motivated you. Did it motivate? That's not what motivated me, actually. What was that? It's not what motivated me. Okay, good. Well, we'll get there. But I wanted you, before we get, I assume when you were a young, when you were in kindergarten,

you weren't motivated to think about that. But I was wondering, your parents obviously were successful at some level because of your education. And what did they end up doing? My parents? Yeah. Well, here's the tricky part. My parents met in, Kiko Union. My mom was in her early 20s. My dad is older. And my dad came to the U.S. as an undocumented, unaccompanied, in the sense of, you know, the way we all imagine it, right? Migrating entirely long, crossing the U.S. border, not having been apprehended. He was 17 years old. So he looks a lot more like the other 70 people in the book that I profile that are different from the people with family. My dad was my, I grew up in a very traditional sort of unfortunately patriarchal household where the men kind of run the show and the women fall in line. I recently, you know, in talking about the book and this exact question, what motivated me, have really reflected on the fact that my family was not one that was very much rooted in the immigrant experience. I didn't grow up knowing about my parents' immigrant background.

I didn't know that they were teenagers unaccompanied in whatever sense of the term while I grew up because I think my family's origin story is really when my dad found God and then found my mom. And then we were a Christian family. Everything before that I think is considered sin or considered outside of God. therefore we didn't talk about it. Wow. I started this work really confused about what it meant to be the daughter of immigrants. My mom, because she arrived in the U.S. at a younger age, did complete high school in the U.S.

spoke more fluent English than my dad. My dad didn't finish high school. He worked in carpeting and wallpaper and sort of immigrant jobs, right? And my mom went into banking and real estate. And, you know, because of her background and her story, by the time I was in high school, we were pretty stably middle class. They had legal status. She was the primary breadwinner in a sense then?

Yeah. Yeah. The book is dedicated to my mom. And I don't think she put four of us through, I'm the second to four. She put four of us through college single-handedly. bought our family home. It's the home that my younger brother and sister they grew up in. And my older sister and I,

we moved almost every one or two years, right? Apartment, condos, rented home. And my mom really stabilized our family. And I do, you know, when I was doing this work, and there was five of the 75 people that I really got to know really closely, who talked about, you know, a long-settled relative being present in their lives and how that changed the trajectory separate from the 70 who grew up as workers.

I saw that play out with my parents, you know, my parents. But I didn't know about them being, having experienced an unaccompanied coming of age until I started sharing my interview findings with them. So I started the work in 2012 and I'd go home and, you know, over the next two years, I think it was in 2014 at the height of the sort of the onset of the crisis of child migration at the border that I told my dad like, this is what I'm studying. These are the kids that I'm studying. And he was like, oh, that's actually exactly how I grew up. And then it sort of came to be a full circle moment.

And then it turned out I was like studying my family, exactly my family's origin story without knowing that that's what I was doing for the first few years. really you weren't until you were doing your PhD I didn't know well that's really kind of amazing well now what your mother you went to she graduated high school yeah is uh didn't go to college I assume your generation the first to go to college what I'm always intrigued by people who who become scholars in one way another what where they got that did you was there were there books in your house. What got you interested in scholarship per se? Were there books?

Was it just discussions or was it totally external? Wow, this is like such an interesting reflection. I think I have always been sort of fascinated with books. I mean like notebooks, list pads, like just paper bound things. I have always loved them.

and so much so that I would have my mom buy me these books and I'd keep them in a box and never write in them under my bed and I just would not do it. Like to this day, I don't like underlining, highlighting books. I'm sorry. What I've done. I know. I did say it looked more like an accordion than a book. Yeah, I think, again, I came to this work having a lot more questions than answers, even about my sense. I didn't grow up.

You know, like I think immigrant parents, parents generally, they want doctors, lawyers, you know. Professors, sure, but I don't think that's the thing that is immediately on a parent's mind is like a teacher, some version of a teacher. My mother was desperately disappointed when I got my first job at Harvard and that wasn't becoming a doctor. Yeah, yeah. I think my family always thought I'd be a lawyer, but they say, because I like to argue, but I think, I don't think that's the point of lawyering. But anyway, I started writing really because as I was reading more about Central American migration, Central American family, Central American children and youth, I didn't see this story, right? Sure, sure.

That's one of the things you talk about that you never see it. And I'm going to interrupt you, which you'll find out I do a lot. but because I want to get to writing, but I'm still intrigued. Were you a good student? Did you think when you were younger? You were a great student. So did you internally always have a trajectory thinking you might want to become an academic or when did that happen?

And it was it school? Was it good teachers? Yeah. I just want to know what motivate. What got you there? I was always good at school. I, and I loved, yeah, I think when you're from, from like a poor working class background.

Research shows that you aspire to occupations that you see most closely to you. So I wanted to be a dentist. And then I want, you know, like whatever I was introduced to, I wanted to be that. But I think I was in second grade the first time I said I wanted to be a teacher. I remember my teacher's name was Mrs. Lewis.

And I just thought she was the kindest person I had met. And I wanted to be a teacher. And I think, you know, you go to middle school, I want to be a middle school teacher, and then I got to college. And I was like, I want to do this, you know?

Like, this is my version of teacher. So I still say teaching is the hardest part of my job. Like the getting up and doing the lecture and the grading and all of that is, I think, the hardest part. And the research and writing, I think, is the luxury part of the job. It is. It's what you want to do. I know, having been a professor for 40 years. Did, where do you?

One thing, I knew you did your PhD in, in, in, in, in, at, you. USC. Did you do your undergraduate work in L.A. as well? At UCLA. Yeah. At U. L.A. L.C. So you've really lived there basically your whole life. You've never really moved out. Yeah. This is my. Now you're at Berkeley. You're far as far away as you've ever been, I guess. Yeah. And I'm something like, oh, this is a little L.A. when I'm in Berkeley and Oakland, San Francisco goes different. But yeah. Okay. And did you do your undergraduate degree in sociology as well? Or did you, what was it in? Political science. I did political science, Latin American studies, and global studies where my focal points there. I took one sociology class in my third year, spring quarter of my third year,

so towards the end, and it was international migration. It was the first class I took on immigration, and it just changed the trajectory of my life. Wow. That often happens, but it's great when that happens. And then therefore you went specifically to USC do a PhD and you knew what you wanted to do at that point. It wasn't flailing around. You knew that you were going, wanted to do a thesis or work related to international migration. Yes. I wanted to do work around Central American migration and Central American youth identity. I knew I wanted to study something about how young people come to understand themselves. Okay. So you knew it was young, you knew it was youth. Yeah. But that was still before you knew about your parents.

Yes. So what got you intrigued by the youth thing? I think it was as I was learning about, as I was taking that international migration class at UCLA, it was the first time I was exposed to things like transnational families, right? Families across borders. The first time I heard about remittances or learned about stepped migration and how immigrant networks are formed. So it was a lot of exposition of. things about my family. Like, why were we so Christian? Why did we only go to church Wednesday through

Sunday? Like, it was all we did. And so to learn the role of the church in immigrant communities, all of those things that I was like, oh, I'm piecing together the facets of my life that maybe my parents didn't know to explain or they didn't really understand what was happening because they were just doing the thing to survive. So I was selfishly wanting to know more about youth identity and Central American communities because I was just leaning into the questions that helped me understand my own life. So it sort of like blew up when I ended up studying this topic that was the beginning of how my family came to be.

If you didn't know that. Now, in fact, good. Remind me about, well, I'll try and remind myself about four or five minutes before the end here. I want to come back, but I don't want to ask it now. I want to ask how it's changing. All of this has changed your view of yourself. But we'll come back just so you know what's heading here.

Yeah, good. You write it down in case I forget because I'm intrigued after this long circle. Now, one of the things that I learned right away on page, one of your book, actually, which I didn't realize that, that, you know, when one thinks about undocumented youth, one thinks of DACA. and when I lived in Arizona, I had a very poignant episode. I guess I will relate it briefly because it was my first experience. I created an institute.

We ran a big, huge event with many, many of famous scientists, six Nobel laureates and scholars. And I ran an event that when we got a thousand inner city high school students to an event from all sorts of high schools to listen to four Nobel laureates, Let's talk about, you know, most of them didn't even know what scientists were. In any case, it was for me very gratifying, but we had a lunch before that with the principal and also the president of the student's counsel. It was a fine young man.

And at the end of it, I said, where are you going to go to college? He was a senior. He said, well, I'm undocumented. And I was a shock. And he said it's the first time I've ever said it in public. And I was totally, it blew me away. And it was a learning experience for me, certainly. And I was, I hope he's doing well now, but I was shocked.

But even there, when I read about DACA, you say here, DACA left out 62% of the undocumented youth and young adults who do not meet the policies educational requirements. So DACA, which you think is kind of an umbrella and a safety net for unaccompanied youth, isn't really. You want to elaborate on that a little bit? I mean, it is a safety net for the people who qualify, right? Like, it opened up doors for, for, for,

almost a million young people in that in its first iteration and we know that people cannot apply for it now it's only a renewal process right um so the the 62 percent comes from an analysis done by the migration policy institute about the educational trajectories and outcomes of the undocumented youth population at that time and so there are several requirements to qualify for something like DACA or for DACA specifically having been in the U.S. before the age of 16. There was like a length of residency requirements, like hadn't returned to origin country, enrolled in school or completed U.S. high school enrollment in the military,

something related to like service and productivity. So there are, there's research that shows that there were students who learned of their undocumented status and that their employment opportunities would be cut short because of that, even if they finished high school. So they exited high school, right? These like early exeter category. Yeah. There's young people who they, like the young people in this book, didn't grow up with parents,

didn't grow up with people that were keeping records of their documentation, or keeping documentation of their presence in the U.S. and therefore can't prove that they had been here for the five, eight, ten years prior. And then the young people in this book also grew up as workers full time. And they are among the countless undocumented young people who just circumstance would never qualify for education. And for legal status protection because of an educational attainment. And I think what we lose there then is the reality that not all people are growing up in these protected institutions that enable this very specific coming of age trajectory, right? Like if you split people of parents and legal status across the U.S., you're not going to ever be eligible for a lot of the programs that assume that kids are this model of child or this version of childhood.

that's and in fact one of the most illuminating aspects um for me um frankly but i think for any people is that the assumption that these kids in school is not a not a good assumption it's quite the opposite in fact you basically say that you know the almost all these programs are geared on the assumption that their parents or adult figures around and that and that and that the kids are in school yeah and and for kids who come without parents or without any caring caregivers, if you want to call it that.

As we'll talk about, they're basically driven to work as they were in their original countries. And in fact, many of them don't even realize that school is kind of a requirement in this country as you talk about later. And I think one of the things we miss also is that we assume

that kids are not in school. We have this sort of deviant approach to children's behavior. youth's behaviors, right? We're always looking for the misbehavior or the deviant. So this idea that if people are not in school, it's because they don't value education. If they're disconnected from K-12 classrooms, it's because they are being deviant. I think that's one of the myths I also try to debunk is that all of these kids wanted to be in school, right?

Everyone that I met. I met hundreds of people in the six years that I did this research, all of them, wanted to be in school. But they couldn't, right? It just was a matter of survival. And I give several quotes in the book where people were making that sort of rationalization, negotiation. We're talking about 14-year-olds that were saying either I ate, I worked and I ate, or I went to school and I starved, right?

And that's the sort of thing. That's the sort of decision that's on the balance here. Yeah, no, it's, it's shocking and important to realize. I think it's something that underlines. underlies so many of the stories in the book is to overcome that that a priori assumption that kids are either are in school or they're not in school by volition. Yeah. Which is exactly not the case.

Well, you know, you talk about what I think, you know, what I think is the thesis of the book. You're wrestling what that means for scholarship and policy that there's a segment of the immigrant youth population that exists outside of the social and institutional bounds of childhood. Basically, these children are not, are never allowed to be children in a sense. For the minute, they, they, they are thrust as neither adults nor children. They're not, they're not assumed to be adults because some of them have a hard time finding work because they're so young. And they're in this, they're in this sort of no-fly zone of, like a liminal childhood, right? Or like liminal adulthood. You're neither one or the other because

you're occupying characteristics of both, right? Whether it's the social responsibilities and the social role of being a worker, therefore strips you of childhood or you are in a child's body, therefore you're not fully an adult in the work. You know, you're all of it and nothing at the same time. Yeah, and exactly. And so the context of this book is organized around kind of a variety of themes, basically, which you call it and use the Spanish as well as English.

orientation, adaptation, perdition, and something you call success. And then we'll try and get to that. And what I find interesting, of course, is on the basis of your research, what you suggest as policy recommendations, which I think are particularly interesting in light of what we're hearing in this current presidential election and will be quite relevant if we can get this out before the election. We'll see. And so, well, I guess we'll go through each of those terms in order, as you know,

as orientation and disorientation, particularly. But first, to generalize before we go to specific cases, there's a lot of data you present about how many unaccompanied children there are. I mean, between 2011 and 2014, the number apprehended, it nearly doubled. About 7,000. And I think you say somewhere that what, that is three to one basically, or is it two to one, I forget what? Three to one. Yeah.

Yeah. So there's no, there's no, so I'm talking about children who are not apprehended at the border. Yeah. So there's no way to know exactly what the number of untallied of people are. But at the height of the undocumented Mexican migration era, right, which is what Dunn Massey at Migration Scholar at Princeton and several his colleagues, you know, break Mexican migration up into several eras. So in the 90s and 2000s, early 2000s, the estimation, sort of on the, you know, years later,

the retrospective estimation was that for every one person that was apprehended, up to three others were not. So without being able to, and, you know, since I've been doing this work, starting in 2011, people have been asking me, well, how many people? And I'm like, well, they're not apprehended, so I can't know. There's no way to know. But if we're considering this time, you know, Mexican migration is at net zero. There's more people leaving than coming into the U.S. from Mexico as an undocumented

immigrant. So if we are entering into what is now, you know, the start of the Central American migration, the really big, like, flow of Central American migration in the 80s because of the civil wars and civil unrest there, we can assume we're like reaching a moment now where this is maybe the height of Central American migration. Single men first, women and families, and now children, which is exactly what we saw in the case of Mexican migration. It's what we're now seeing in the case of South American migration, men, women and family. So I imagine in a few years we will see child migrants from South American countries because of the unrest they're seeing there. So I sort of extrapolate from like, if we want to put a number on it, it might look something like what was at the height of the Mexican migration case.

That is what I imagine is worst case scenario, a three to one. It might be less, which puts us in a better position politically, socially economically, and, morally, I think, as a country also, but it can be as high as a three-to-one. Now, when I read this and basically the research is basically involved with kids who weren't apprehended of the border and were not formally classified, therefore, as unaccompanied children, but experiencing childhood without, as you say, without parents or caregivers. Those are the, that's the group you're talking to. Right.

With 70 some odd kids you talk to. I, it occurred to me when reading this and later on and reading the story that, of course, the lucky ones are the ones who were apprehended then. The people, I mean, do you think basically all these children that you interviewed who were no longer children would have been better off if they'd been apprehended? I think there were a group of young people that believed that. And I do talk about it when I introduce this concept of an emergent frame of reference, right? They're experiencing poverty and deprivation and they're suffering in their everyday lives. And then they see, wait, everyone else in the U.S., you know, not true, but the idea was that all the other kids are growing up with parents. So the pivot point of disadvantage between me and them is the absence of parents or a caregiver.

What I observe as a researcher and someone who is now also studying the coming of age of children who are apprehended at the border, taken into federal custody, released to what is called a sponsor, which up I think about 36, 40 percent of sponsors, of unaccompanied children are their parents. The others are not. They're unrelated adults or non-parent family members. We're seeing cases where children, you know, relationships are fraught. There's tension.

Again, this liminal childhood of, I'm an adult. You're treating me like a child because in the U.S., that's how, you know, things need to go. Kids are in legal proceedings. What people don't know is that when you are released from federal custody into the custody of a sponsor, children are immediately put into deportation proceedings. I'm not sure that that's better, right? Because the kids that I interviewed don't, they are flying under the radar. No one knows who they are, where they are, how many. They're not actively being pursued

for removal back to the country that they were fleeing from. Which, which, yeah, which I, which gives some level of, I don't know, their security is the word, but at least emotion. I mean, if you're always worried about being deported and you left for a reason. That's another sort of chronic stress. The people I talked to deal with, like, you know, they're dealing with the chronic stress of like paying bills and my mom is sick and I need to send. So there's like different things happening, but I don't actually think, and maybe this will get me in trouble.

I don't know. I hope so. No, no, I don't know what I want that. Sorry. I don't actually think that there's a best case scenario, you know, because because for as long as the federal government. is not able to, because we are talking about undocumented kids at the end of the day, and the U.S. does not spend money on undocumented children or undocumented adults willingly, right?

As for as long as they're undocumented, they're just considered as, you know, keeps being mentioned in this election cycle, these like deviant illegals, right? And they're a threat and they're a threat. And we treat them as such. So I think that it's child labor exploitation, children living in extreme poverty on their own and dealing with the material and emotional effects of that is a heartbreaking story. It should not be happening. I also think the treatment of children who were apprehended and released as sponsors is not an appropriate treatment of children in a country where we prize childhood, right?

And we apply so much moral value to vulnerable children. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's great. I'm glad we got that early. No, no, it's because, you know, we're going to, there's so much to talk about it. And I'm sure at the end I'm going to say, oh, I wish we talked about this or that. But anyway, and I will add that I know we have a hard cutoff because you talk to a student, which means you're a dedicated professor. So I think that's good. You do, it's probably worth also mentioning before we get to specific cases. You refer to a, you, you refer to a, you, you refer to. is work primacy. Undocumented low-wage workers financial pressures create a unique condition of incorporation. And you see it throughout, what you call work primacy. Basically, these kids come. I mean, it's quite as simple. These kids come. They don't have any one to take care of them. And it's work or starve. And the options, there are no other options. So maybe you want to talk about that for a second. Yeah, I think the, so yeah, the idea of work primacy is that work,

it builds on this idea of institutional primacy. So I'm going to go back to what we were talking about earlier. We have this sort of assumption that kids are growing up in parent-led households and therefore schools. We don't walk around saying, oh, they have educational primacy. That is the primary institution that they're engaged in. That's how they develop their identities, their sense of self, sense of the future. Because we walk around with that assumption that that's what all kids are doing. When you take kids out of that context, then I argue,

you can start to understand how institutions shape immigrant and corporation and child development, right? This process of developing the self. Work primacy is this idea that work is the central organizing institution of these children's lives, and then by extension undocumented, legally precarious people's lives. And that is because they are spending between 12 to 16 hours of their day in this place. So then their other waking hours are spent where? Maybe having a meal, seeing a friend. You're not spending a lot of time in other places.

Sundays they go to church, but it's always with this idea of tomorrow is work. So I draw out in the book that even as they're not at work or thinking about or doing work, they're at school and they're thinking about the next day. They're talking to their families only on days where they have good work days and they can report good news or everything sort of revolves around work. And that's not something we imagine 14 and 15 year olds are doing in the U.S. So I really try to draw out that there's this sort of institutional starting point for an incorporation process that we have ignored because we have studied adults at work. who are occupying the adult role of worker, which we all do, right?

Like it is what is expected. And we study kids in schools. So we observe educational outcomes or friendship groups or teacher-child, teacher-student relationships. Again, all of these assumed things about the particular age group or social role. Work primacy, I argue, shapes incorporation in that it gives young people, again, organizing. their time, but also gives them access to social networks. They're children that are now surrounded by adults and like, are they getting the information they need?

Are they being treated as children or as adults? In the workplace, I find that it's, they're treated as adult workers, right? Yeah, they make screen through as you say. They're basically the roles and responsibility of adults, but they're not adults. Right, because they're still, they're also like at work managing their body. They're like people talking about their physical bodies changing, talking about their emotions being totally out of control because hormones are changed. You know, like all kinds of things are happening. In fact, yeah, that's the other thing I wanted to get out before we took cases you point out, and it's really true.

These people, these kids are coming of age physically and emotionally, independent of what the world is doing to them. And they're going through the same adolescent traumas that everyone people. And they have to, but they have to navigate that adolescence there. their own emerging, you know, sexuality, romance, everything in the midst of an environment without, without guidance in many cases, without, without even a safety net in case of any of that goes bad. And so they're having to negotiate the need to exist

and at the same time the need to grow up. Yeah. And without, and those two additional demands. are tremendous. And, well, anyway, yeah. I just, before we go, I want to,

into the individual cases, I wanted to talk about your study. It was over six years, right? 2012 to 2018? Yes. And you followed these, this more or less, many of these kids

over throughout this period. And they worked, and we should point out that, but when you talk to them, number of them were adults who had related to you, what had happened. In fact,

in fact, it was really, I think you say, you attended this group for seven months of young kids who, not young kids, but now young adults who came together. And it took seven months before anyone even reached out to you for the first time, Caleb, I think. Caleb. I remember correctly. And suddenly you say a switch is flipped. And at that point, after seven

months, which I assume was in 2012, you began to, you began to be able to reach, to explore in detail the lives of many of these young people. Yes. Yeah. I started the, work with a group of unaccompanied undocumented Guatemalan garment workers in L.A. in July of 2012. I observed the group very awkwardly for several months, and I'm an outsider, right? I'm a U.S. born in their view, probably a U.S. Americana, like I'm the white girl, right, even though in any other social space, I'm not that person. And I'm from the university down the street. I have no sort of overlapping with the experience with them. I should mention that the decision to interview and spend time with people over the age of 18 was an ethical requirement of the

study, right? So IRB would not. So the Institutional Review Board that's oversees human subjects research at USC. I had several meetings with my sort of IRB manager person who, told me there was too many levels of vulnerability. I couldn't study undocumented, non-English speaking, youth workers, you know, all, you know, recently arrived and have them be children. Yeah. So I had to interview them at over the age of 18. But that did allow me then to ask them a full spectrum of questions, right? If they had just arrived then they were still children, they wouldn't be able to reflect on, yeah, what was the meaning of childhood? When did I start to feel like an adult. You know, when did I start to feel like I was safe and I belonged?

So it was initially a disappointment for me, but long term, I think, allowed me to see things that I wouldn't have been able to see if I was still just interviewing kids. Yeah, you can see the reflections and throughout, I mean, it's very interesting because at various stages when you talk about departure and arrival, you deal with the same people, but you're dealing on their reflections and you can see your evolution. And of course, you also know, I suppose it's like some movies. At least you know that most of the people, well, almost all the people that, you know that they're still around. So it makes you feel good. At least knowing they're still around. There's one thing as a, you know, and I studied when I was younger, more than just physics.

So sociology and anthropology interested me a little bit. And I was intrigued by one thing. You said basically in the fall of 2014, a handful of use I come in and learned of the Labor Commission office in downtown Los Angeles and its emphasis on providing legal protection. Several requests of that I attend their meetings and the office act as an interpreter, and I agreed, and then you say, you prepared an English language class with met byweekly. So I'm just wondering, again, from the point of view of a, you, know where I'm heading. You went from being an observer to a participant at some level.

Was that a conscious decision? Do you think that was problematic in any way or or helped you? Just wondering. Yeah. Well, when I started the research again, it was with that support group. And I think I always knew it was conscious in that I knew I didn't want to be just a extractive and not have like connection with the people I was doing research with. So in that support group, what they would do is just go around in a circle. It was informal. There was no, it just met on a Starbucks patio. Like it was not anything organized very seriously or formally.

But when it came to my turn, I shared what I needed to share. I answered the question. How was my week? And it was, I will be honest. honest, awkward as hell, because it was like I took an exam. You know, like I was talking about such a different reality than the people that I was surrounded by, right? But I made a decision very early on that I would participate in the space as other people

were. And I wasn't going to sort of assume any sort of superior to whatever activity was happening. So that meant when I was observing church spaces, I would do there. You know, there was like one activity where you had to like hold a balloon between your legs and like run in a surf. And it was like before the youth group started the lesson. And I was, I'm such an introvert. I am easily embarrassed, like very easily embarrassed. So I would have to like defy myself in order to participate in these things.

But it was part of like my equalizing effort. and like I yeah I just felt like that was really important to show that I am just as 22 23 24 years old as you are and I I actually grew up doing a lot of these things in my family or in my community you know so that was that when it came to you know the request to go to the labor commissioner's office I'm not a trained certified interpreter and I was very transparent about like I don't actually know how to do this. I think it was more of a I the young people didn't want to go to those things alone. Yeah.

And I would and I think it was more of that. And they ended up advocating for themselves a lot of the time. And I would just take notes in the back. You know, I would sit in the chair behind the person that was making their case in these meetings and I would just share like this is what I this is what I gathered from what happened right this is what it's just to clarify but I talk in the book about how these whether it was that attempt to have an interpreter with them or the English language class that they asked me to organize for a few months and again very transparent of like I'm not actually an English language

instructor I speak English but I don't really know how it happened I just do it yeah it was part of I think their adaptation strategies, right, where you are so low-resourced, everything around you can become a resource. And that's something I write about in the book, right? That people were texting me throughout the day. Someone just said something that sounded like this. What does that mean, right? And I became a cultural broker, a language broker.

I became useful to them. as I think an adaptation strategy. That to me was just revelatory of like how how in need of social ties, like social capital these young people were. And like also just how like innovative like just they were in accumulating resources. Like oh, I can get this from you. I can do that. And it just moves them forward in this very strategic way, right?

Sure. They've got to become professionals of that. I mean, take advantage to everything that happens. And just couldn't me, you were about the same age as many of those people. Yeah, I was. Yeah. Yes. And me either. I thought of you was older than them. And then I realized, yeah, you were doing your PhD and your early 20s. And they were that same age too, which is an interesting, a very interesting dynamic that I hadn't appreciated. Anyway, let's go to, let's go to the, and, you know, we've got it, according to my calculations, about an hour left. I might try and push you to an hour in five minutes. We'll see. And I want to go through what are now six parts of the book in that 60 minutes. And so we'll see where we can go.

But a lot of these, for me, I want to follow the arguments you're making, not theoretically, but by talking about the people himself. I think one of the things I want to do in this podcast, and I'm happy to look, is give these people a voice because they don't have a voice. And so I'd like to help use this podcast for these individuals as you do in the book. So the first part is departures. You talk about what drives the different things that drive different stories for these kids to do something, which is almost unthinkable for me, given my childhood, is to say, okay, I'm a child and I'm going to brave,

not just leaving my family, but brave what I'm sure is a dangerous route there for a world which I have, which I'm told is better, but which I know nothing about and which I continuously hope that I'll have someone to look after him when I get there. And it's just, it's a kind of bravery or desperation, which in different cases is different. And you talk, and I listed, I think, 12 or 13 different people and their departures. Maybe we'll go over all of them. But the first one is Caleb, the one who first really, opened the world up for you in that regard.

And you start and you say, you know, Caleb's mother confessed her concerns for his future in Guatemala when he was 14. There's no money here, he remembered or saying, there's no way for you to get ahead to become a better person and build your house. You grew up in nine children.

He grew up as one of nine children. And so after four years of primary education, he dedicated himself to paid and unpaid work there and then he left. Do you want to talk about Caleb a little bit? And I'm going to, as I say, I'm going to ask you, this is fresher in my mind because I've just read your book. Yeah, and I did these interviews a decade ago.

I know. It's hard when people say, oh, this is in your book? Well, really? Did I write that? Anyway. And also, these are all pseudonyms. So I have to remember like, oh, yeah, which one? Yes, okay.

I assume. I didn't realize that they're all pseudonyms. None of the names are. Yeah. So Caleb, yeah, when you say like, Esmeralda, I'm like, Esmeralda will be, which one again? Yeah. While you're looking up, you know, he talked with his parents and he felt confident migration

held some promise to achieving his metas, which I guess are goals. Yes. And then I forget how old he was when he finally, he contacted his uncle asking if he could get passage. Yeah. I try to, in the book I try to track, and I mentioned this in the acknowledgments. Caleb is the first person who in January 2013 accepted an invitation to be interviewed

and he was the youngest person in the group that I observed. He had just turned 18 at the time. And I think he, his vouching for me really opened up the rest of this world to me because otherwise I would have just stayed observing this group on, you know, the sidelines. And I probably would have left at some point because you really need to talk to people. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, he would have found a different thesis topic.

Yeah. Yeah. So Caleb's story, I try to honor the role that he played in the work by it sort of explaining his life story across all chapters. Caleb was 14, as you mentioned, when his mom confessed to him, I just don't see a future for you here. and he came to Los Angeles. I say came to Los Angeles because I'm here now. But he arrived in Los Angeles, expecting that the uncle that pitched in some money to fund the migration journey would receive him.

And his uncle originally did, but what the family in Guatemala didn't know was that his uncle was going through a separation. And that in the separation, they would be moving to separate apartment. and neither one would of the uncle or his partner were going to stay in that original apartment. So when his uncle was leaving, he told Caleb, you can't come with me. You have to figure it out. And this is just two weeks into his arrival. Caleb was very-

Yes, at 14. So I talk, again, I'm trying to expose this sort of interconnected story of both migration, the transition of being a, a newcomer to long-settled, right, as an immigrant, but also from adolescent to young adult and that sort of development of self. In Caleb's case, I think it becomes really clear across the trajectory of the book that there is both the material sort of shock

of thinking that your uncle is going to take you in. Caleb did have an older half-brother that lived in Los Angeles, but the way that his dad, Caleb's dad, or the brother's dad moved in and out of the relationships in Guatemala, and made it so that one set of siblings did not want anything to do with the other set of siblings. So Caleb's half-brother was completely estranged and wanted nothing to do with him. So I talk about how there's this sort of displacement because young people don't see a future, people like Caleb.

And in this case, Caleb's mom was the one to call it out. There is no future for you here. Yeah. And that is both as a human and also as an adolescent thinking about adulthood. And Caleb had already been working. You know, that's the point. You'd already been working there. Again, in realizing that for many of these kids, the notion that they, I mean, the school,

even though they may like, as you say, many of them love the idea of school because it's, you know, school is in the rearview mirror for several years. Yeah, but they grew up realizing even in their home country that it's, work. It's work or die, basically. Yeah. And I think also something to think about is that in these families where you have nine siblings, there is no world in which parents are resourced enough where more than one sibling can be in school at a time. Right. So if there's a three-year gap, Caleb went to school for four years and then the next sibling had to go to school for maybe two or three years before the next sibling had to go because it isn't, you know, they're buying shoes and

clothes and notebooks and all kinds of things. So that's something that people are phased out of education in a systematic way. So when I talk in the book about older siblings migrating and having years go by where they're funding their younger siblings education, it is actually to avoid that person on a company child migration, right? It is a very intentional move on behalf of someone like Caleb to send money back so his siblings don't follow him, right? And again, in fact, if we don't get there, that's one of the more moving parts of the last

part of the book, where these young people view their success, regardless of what the success is that they have been able to, a number of them, that they have been able to ensure that their siblings either don't have to migrate or at least that the family has resources. And so in spite of their living hand to mouth and barely able to live themselves, they save money and send it back, and that's a sign of success and pride. And it's a remarkable moving, moving thing. I hope we'll get there. But I just want to mention it now. And that's not in a DACA eligibility. That's not a bullet point anywhere, right? That you, maybe you aren't the one to have achieved educational success, but you sacrificed your life to fund, you know, and where is that

story and a policy? Yeah. In fact, it will remind me that I talk about Gail, who I found the person you call, Gail. Well, I found just story to be just, yeah, let's talk about him again. Yeah, but no, because it's just really, you know, makes people made me feel like, well, what have I done compared to what he's done? Anyway, you preface this also, and I'm not, I don't want to belabor this, that the United, you know, that there are conditions in Central America, the United States isn't exactly not culpable. But, you know, if you know anything, you know, I've, done a number of dialogues with my good friend, Noam Chomsky, so I think we don't have to belabor in the U.S. role in this. But I think there's some numbers here that are worth quoting.

In Latin America, 201 million people living in the region experience poverty. 82 million live in extreme poverty, and the majority of those living in poverty are children. So when we talk about these people, I mean, there's wanting to migrate. There's a lot. There's a of motivation. There's an extreme motivation. Cable talked about it. The next person you talk about is Andres. Again, and if I'm hoping that I'm not yet, you're prepared to remember the

individual. Oh, I'm flipping pages with you now. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm here with you. Yeah. Okay. Andres is another one. So I want to you talk about Andres. He left school during the fifth grade. And he started working he started working with his father because,

and I'm not going to say it in Spanish, you cannot earn a day's bread with one's work does not produce a living wage. So basically you have to combine the wages of a whole family in order to hope to support any one individual. Yeah, the phrase he said is, there no can't gain the pan de cada day. The pan of cada day is like your daily bread,

which is a sort of religious, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, each day we did the Lord's Prayer, I think used to say that. Yeah. Or forced to say it in school when I was growing up. Yeah. So Andres is, so Caleb was the first in his family to migrate. What I try to show in the rest of this section is how families make these sequential

decisions, how children make sequential decisions to migrate within a family network. So Caleb, or Andres, I mean, I forget what I named his brother. He had an older brother who had migrated to Los Angeles years before. His brother ended up- You called him Jason, by the way. Okay, okay, there you go. He fell into addiction. And no one in the family knew this,

but he fell into addiction in Los Angeles and stopped sending money back home. But when he was originally calling home, he would say that everything's fine. Everything's great here. I'm doing well. So there's a lot of face saving in those original. first years, right? So Andres arrived in Los Angeles and then him and his brother were strange because he realized, oh, that was never, that was never true. And there's no, there were no

resources for the brother to then receive the younger brother, which we see in the next case, right? Where sibling after sibling migrates to compensate for the lost wages, the privatization of resources, all kinds of financial troubles structurally produced. historically produced in Central America and Mexico. So there were several negotiations that Andres made with his family. He worked alongside his dad. His dad went to work in agriculture. And his dad told him agriculture is no place for a child.

Go find another job. Andres ended up working, sewing, I think it was track jackets, Adidas track jackets at home. by hand, right? So when he got to L.A. and he was a factory, a garment worker in a factory where they were machines that were sewing with, like, multiple needles, that was like, whoa, I'm, you know, I've achieved mobility, which is another thing I talk about in the book of how if you are so deprived of resources and so deprived of opportunities for mobility, there are these smaller markers of mobility that appear for young people, including moving from a hand sower in your living room to someone that can sew 600 T-shirts in one day, right? Like, that's a big deal. But Andres was someone

who then considered, you know, his family context. I don't want my dad to keep working. I don't want to see my mom suffering. I don't want my younger siblings to follow this pathway, right? And he intervened through migration. I believe at the age of 15. Yeah. In fact, I was going to quote it, but you basically said it. Basically, he talked about migrating to basically help his family. Yeah. Not not his own future, but to help his family. Yes. And one of the things that you just mentioned resonates throughout, which is rather interesting,

a lot of the probably because, actually probably because of the selection criteria of the people you met, many of them end up working in the garment industry in Los Angeles. And it's intriguing to me, and this explains it because he had experience, but you find many of these kids have the same experience. They try and find work,

and they have to try and find work for day one. I mean, I just amazed. Right. They're trying to find work from day one. They're in a new place. Don't speak the language. And they're wandering the streets or whatever, trying to find work. And often the employers say, you're a child.

I can't, you know, you can't hire you. But they all get hired. They all get hired. Yeah. And, you know, so they're told they can't, they're too young, but they all get hired. It's kind of an interesting the economy, don't you think? Yeah. Yeah.

And I don't, I wasn't able to interview employers as much as I tried. I mean, understandably, they're not going to sit there and talk to me of child labor practices. Yeah. Yeah. But one of the things I learned from the sort of retelling of the hiring interaction from young people is that they, in interviews and in just everyday conversations, people would say, when I first got here, no one wanted to help me. No one wanted to help me. But then so and so helped me, right?

So the hiring is not seen as a violation of child labor rights. It's seen as, oh, this person gave me an opportunity to survive. And it made me wonder through the years of this research and still to this day, I'm sure, I actually met someone a few months ago who said that she had hired a child to work in her restaurant kitchen in the Central Valley of California. And she understood the option was either she said no and maybe they fell into a worse position. Right? Or this child is homeless and they're starving and she wasn't going to be the one that didn't give that opportunity. So I think there's something about the perception of doing something helpful or altruistic, even as it harms the child in the immediate and in the long term.

It's really, it's not black and white. It's really an interesting, this notion that, yeah, when you think about it abstractly, oh, child labor, it's awful. But on the other hand, it allows none of these kids to live. It's, you know, I guess I was talking to someone and it shocked me. They've done very, very well now. They're very wealthy, but they were homeless. And this person said they were not in favor of minimum wages because when they were homeless,

minimum wage meant there was a threshold before they could get a job and they couldn't. But if they could get a job and if they could do something for 25 or 50 cents, they knew where to get a bagel for 25 cents. And so it allowed her to basically say, if I can get 50 cents today, I, can make it through the day. Right. And so it's these notions, you know, I always used to, you know, I was always in favor of the idea of a minimum wage.

I grew up in Canada and I served. But, but it's not so black and white. Right. You're right. You don't want these children to be forced to work. But in their hand, given the reality of the world, if they didn't, they wouldn't survive. So it's a, this, this brings up lots of issues. I think we all have to come to grips with in our own way.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think also this idea that like kids, I know. in the U.S. context, we are in a society that we pour into children. Children are the receptacles of the care and the resources and aspirations for the future. We're talking about children. 14-year-old Caleb, 16-year-old Andres came to the U.S., and they feel the weight of care for their families. And I think one of the things I try to draw out is the final memory youth carry with them in migration and in the years following their arrival in the U.S., they remember their family's suffering.

They remember hungry siblings. They remember their mothers crying. They remember fathers that resorted to alcohol abuse to cope with the stress and the sort of blows to their masculinity every day because they couldn't work enough to make ends meet. That is the memory young people have, right? So even as they're remitting money, they're not imagining. lives that are getting better. They have that cemented image in their mind of their mother counting how many pieces of fruit this person gets versus that person. And I think that's so important to remember that these young people, they are enduring the violence of child labor

exploitation, not only on their own behalf as individuals. So the solution so far have been, take kids out of work and put them in foster care. But then you miss the entire universe of that child that they're attempting to fill the needs for all the people that they've left behind or people within their networks, right? Yeah, exactly. I think all of this, and it's good. I think we're covering these things in a kind of random order because I know there's so much we won't get through at all.

But no, no, but I think there are certain themes. And the notion is that abstract notions of what's good, of what's good are simply that. They're abstract. Yeah. You know, oh, we'll take them a foot of frostrum. that's a great thing. But if the kids, you know, if their whole view of themselves and their future is to provide for the family,

it's not so good. And so I think we have to recognize that the realities are much more complex and often sadder. And we need to do with it. And I do want to spend time at the end talking about what to do next. So, but let's talk. We talk about two young men. Let's talk about Camilla and maybe Esmeralda.

And let me just say, yeah, let's talk about Camilla. And the names I have down are Andres Camilla, Esmeralda, Patrick, Elias, Usher, Jordan, Alvro, Valentina, Thomas, Serapina, and Joel. We're not going to clearly go through all those. No. So let's talk about Esmeralda.

And then I don't know if there's any others in the list that come to your mind that if you think you, you know, each one of them to me, we could spend that 20 minutes on. But anyway. I think if we want to do a gender comparison, I would love to talk about Esmeralda in Valentina.

Okay, well, let's do that. Yes. Okay. Yeah, so Esmeralda was one of four siblings total that migrated in her family. I forget how many, I think there were eight of them in Guatemala. She was the third, she was the third sibling in age order to migrate. Patrick, who I also describe in the book, was the fourth sibling. There was an older brother, an older sister, Esmeralda, then Patrick.

she migrated after her siblings had failed to meet the promise of lifting the family out of poverty. So what happened was the brother migrated. He met someone starting a family, and his financial obligation shifted from the family he left behind to now the family he was forming in the U.S. The sister, older sister, migrated. She also partnered with someone, had children, and she became, again, in like this sort of patriarchal. order of a family life became financially dependent if not

financially accountable to the husband, right? So maybe she worked and still the finances were determined by her husband. So she was no longer, the older sister was no longer remitting to their family in Guatemala.

Ismerada then as a young person and she's sort of the first person that said, selfishly or not, I started working because I wanted things. I wanted to participate in the festivals. I wanted to participate in the community thing. My parents couldn't buy me the traditional traje, this outfit, you know, to wear to this festival. So her dad told her if you want things, you got to get them yourself.

Yeah. And then she again saw that her family wasn't doing well. She felt a greater social responsibility to take care of her family. and then migrated to Los Angeles. One of the sort of heartbreaking things is that she did not marry and have children, but because of, again, work primacy and the conditions of exploitation, I track her story throughout the book, and she isn't able to meet those promises,

and her family relationships really fall apart. And it's because in those first two years of her migration, she wasn't able to remit a significant amount of money as a garment worker. She'd have a lot of work experience, so wasn't quick to make clothes, wasn't quick to earn her $0.5 per t-shirt rate, right? Yeah. So she wasn't able to send money back home, lost her with their family. So Patrick migrated. And then he had a little bit more success in the U.S. by his standards because he did have work experience and was able to work much quicker and support his family.

So he sort of took on this idea of, if I work, I'll be the last. last of our siblings to migrate, right? So that was his sense of responsibility to them. Go ahead. No, no. Okay. I mean, I think this notion

of success being defined by being able to provide money back is an interesting one. And at the same time, well, you know, we're talking about departure still, not the experience and arrival that much. But

You know, the point is that there are a wide variety of circumstances which kids drive kids either to be the first, second, third, or fourth. And most of them, as you say, many of them, their goal is to make sure that their younger siblings aren't migrating. Right. And I think one of the things I really hope readers take away from the book is in the media, since 2014, we've heard this narrative of like parents sending, parents send, and these like neglectful parents that don't understand. understand the circumstances of migration are sending or that people know immigration policy in the U.S. and they want to take advantage of DACA.

They want to take advantage of asylum policy. And where in any of these stories do you hear people saying things about like, oh, I heard DACA was introduced in 2012 and therefore I was on my way? It was always something that was rooted in, again, the inability to imagine a future where they would live well, both as individuals and as families and rooted in these metas, these goals that young people either alone or alongside families, whether it was I have the goal of one day being able to buy as many trajes as I want to, so I can participate in all of the festivals. Or, you know, you mentioned Camelia. She remembers very explicitly how much money her mom would give her to go to the market and

how many oranges and how much sugar and how much soap explicitly. a moment where she realized, yes. It's not enough to be the family. Yeah, as a 15-year-old and saying, like, no, this is absolutely not acceptable. And the only thing she saw as an opportunity to lift her family out of that social suffering was to migrate. So it wasn't like, I'm going to go there and I'm going to take advantage of health care. And I'm, you know, like, it wasn't any of that. Well, okay.

I'm going to jump ahead. Well, I mean, I think it is, it is, often you give statistics that are in general before we talk about specific cases that I think are worth mentioning for people that nearly half of Mexican and Central American immigrants in the United States are undocumented. Two-thirds of undocumented immigrants have been in there for 10 years or longer and have formed families within this context of illegality. I know it. I know personally a number of such people. and one of the things that that that I think becomes clear when I want to move to arrivals and your whole point part of this is the dramatic dichotomy between people who arrive and have some caring family whether it's what whether it's a family or an individual and those who arrive with nothing and their subsequent role you know adaptation versus perdition basically their their future it's not inscribed, but it's strongly influenced by whether they arrive with someone or something to take care of them. And that the level of whether, and it's, it's heartening to see that a few of

these people actually are able to go to school. And I was really happy to see, you know, one who was now, I mean, there's one of the people you talk about it, just warm my heart, actually went to college. Yeah, Marvin, I think. Yes. Yeah. So let's talk about arrivals and the dichotomy. And again, I have names like Thomas as your first person you talk about. But again, I think you present the dichotomy between, I think, Marcos and Valentina, who I think had a support network and many of the others, Ashered Doha Keene and Isabella, etc. So why don't we, I'm going to leave it again up to you because.

Yes. You're not enough time to go to reach case. Yeah, I forgot that I did want to talk about Valentina's departure from El Salvador. she ended up leaving in Salvador at the age of 15, I think on her third attempt or third consideration of whether she would migrate. Her parents were both struggling with alcohol addiction and they would take out their aggression on each other

and also on her. And she decided for herself, I don't see a future for myself here. And she knew she had an uncle living in Los Angeles. He helped her migrate. she thought that kind of the opposite of Caleb, right? Like she thought this person is helping me leave, but because she never had an adult that was really taking care of her,

she imagined the situation would be the same in Los Angeles. So she was surprised to find that her uncle actually took her in and welcomed her and received her. Her uncle was the only one of the long-settled relatives that I came to learn about that had some kind of protection. protected legal status. So he was earning better wages. He had two kids that were in high school about Valentina's age. His partner was undocumented Tia Marta that I introduced in the book. Tia Marta was at the table listening to the interview. She wouldn't leave Valentina out of her

sight like she was a vigilant mother figure. Yeah, I was just going to say you say that the the uncle was a, was a care, but the aunt clearly, when I read this, the aunt is at least as important. I mean, as a mother figure, and the aunt pushed your, I think, to go to some schooling, too, I think, as I remember. So because they had experience enrolling the other two kids in school, they were easily able to enroll Valentina in school. They were looking, because they had experience getting legal protection for the uncle, I forget what I named him. He, they were able to usher in this like, okay, we need legal representation for Valentina.

What do we need to do? So there were some sort of, they were inroads that were already made and being able to welcome her in this way. It helped that she was a young girl. It helped that she came from an abusive background. And this family came around her and really tried to envelope her with care.

One of the things that was really important is that Tia Marta referenced the potential traumatizing effect. There was someone in the room that knew this child was carrying around deep trauma, right? And was working with that very intentionally. So all of those factors created a warm household arrival for Valentina. Unfortunately, this is what we imagine all children experience. Yeah, exactly.

Whether apprehended or not, right? Inception rather than the rule. Yes. And I mentioned earlier, the sort of apprehension and release to a sponsor model assumes that people like Tia Marta are there, right? And they're going to provide that care. But what I find is that only five young people,

including Marcos who was able, whose aunt and grandma sort of worked together to create a system of care. It's two women that really had to advance together to work so that he could go to school. He did benefit from DACA. He was able to go to college. He followed that sort of normative

immigrant youth trajectory in the way that Valentina and just three other young people did. The other 70 people. I thought it was a 75. Yeah. So yeah, an exception, not the rule, at least in the case of this research. And I could have kept interviewing people that fell into that category that of well received. But then I found like, oh, this is the typical story that we hear already in research and in the news, right? So I left it alone and started to.

really pay more attention to the role of that household moment of arrival, which especially with Latinos, but I think immigrant families generally, we assume they're familistic. Oh, they love, all these people love family. The family takes care of each other. I think in some cases it enables the government to be more hands off because you think family networks, right? These people will take care of each other. And that's not how it works. But I try to couch that, that sort of split the fragmentation of family, not in intention, the values, or the culture of the people,

but in the structural dynamics that have disabled family from fulfilling its role of care. And in that, as you mentioned, this context of illegality, a series of policies that have illegalized communities for generations so that when young people are arriving at their door,

families have, their hands tied in terms of being able to welcome people. In the case of Thomas, who you mentioned, he had a sister who migrated years before him as an unaccompanied young person and had a U.S.-born child in the years following her migration. Her partner, the sister was still undocumented, partner was undocumented, but they had a U.S.-born child at that time. So when Thomas arrived at her door, originally she said, yeah, sure, you're my brother.

I will take you in. Their mom had abandoned them in Guatemala. So it was just the two of them. Yeah, yes. But because of that U.S. born child, it sort of set in that like, wait a minute, what if CPS, Child Protective Services comes around and realizes I have this undocumented teenager

that works in a garment factory and then they take my child away and I get deported, right? all of these very big family moments can sort of have a cascading effect. So the only decision she was left to make was, sorry, Thomas, you got to go. And that was the self-preservation act. And that was her protecting her U.S. born biological child, right? It's not because she didn't understand the implications, but what it meant was that Thomas, again, was materially alone in the way Caleb was.

And then emotionally betrayed, right? Like he never spoke to his sister again. And that is as a 14 year old, a 15 year old, your self-concept is just in the dumps after that, right? Your sense of family, your sense of security, your emotional stability. Caleb and Thomas were probably the two people that talked most openly about just uncontrollable depression, sadness, loneliness, and like not being able to, like, they didn't know where to. put themselves physically, right? Like, I didn't, I don't know where to go. And the emotion's feeling so big that that sort of compounded that disorienting arrival. Well, I was, you know, you just, you just anticipate me. I was going to say, you know, you call it disorienting.

The whole chapter is disorientation. The experience of different things that can disorient these young people. And you just gave a great example. So we don't have to do a lot more. But there's another thing that I think it's worth mentioning that I hadn't appreciated was the, the, you know, you think of language as a barrier, but I didn't realize there's a hierarchy of language barriers. Yeah. People spoke Spanish, at least spoke Spanish, but then there's a whole indigenous population that speaks Kichet, I don't know how to pronounce. Yeah, Kichet, yeah.

And they have an additional barrier in the hierarchy. They're sort of one step lower. Maybe it's worth mentioning that briefly. Yeah, I talk about it when I introduced this at talks as like the Russian nested dolls, right? Like there's like these layers. So you're an indigenous young person who has to then learn this, the Spanish language either in transit, in migration or at the point of a rival. So even then the Latino immigrant community sort of disparages you, marginalizes you. So it isn't just you're an immigrant that has to somehow adjust to the mainstream.

You're an immigrant that has to adjust to the immigrant community. So it's stepped and it takes much longer. And that is a level of disorientation. that indigenous young people experience, right? Just like gender becomes a disorienting, like gender inequality is persisted here. It's not something that's just origin country. And that becomes disorienting, right?

Yes, yeah. And there's another, so there's one other thing when we talk about disorientation. Well, there's two things. I want to, anyway, we'll go over them now. But one thing that intrigued me, and especially since you come from a Catholic family, you talk about a number of these kids turn to Catholicism and turn to the church, which you think, oh, and when I first read this, I thought, oh, that's a good thing.

And you may or may not know that I'm a very vocal atheist. And I think, oh, well, that's great. There's a good reason the church is going to do good things. But the sense one gets out of this is that, in fact, it isn't. It's telling them that they're, you know, it's okay, we're well-buking in, but you're basically sinful. And it ends up not providing them the tools. I don't know. I would like to find out your perspective on that. And then and and and and it's worthwhile talking about it. I guess it would be who's me to mention? Ask if you're if you're still, you know, practicing Catholic in that regard. But. So I, I first introduced this idea of the role of the church in a paper I wrote in 2019. It's called support and setback. So I talk about, you know, parents have very little in terms of advice that they, can offer their children. When children call back home and they start to explain like, oh,

it turns out life is not that great here. The parents, what they usually say, either the advice they send their children off with or the advice they give over a phone call is something like go to church, right? People there, they will take care of you. They will help you. I think it's important to note the colonial legacies of the church in Latin America, right? And that the church, has always been unoppressive colonizing power across Latin America. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say here, but I get the sense that I could say it all.

You can say absolutely. The whole point, you can absolutely anything. And if you don't, I will. Yeah, yeah. And I think also recognizing that particularly indigenous people, indigenous communities, there is a violent relationship between the church

and indigenous communities. So people, you know, it's 20, what, 15 at the time that I'm doing this research. There's a, you know, a difference orientation to the church. People arrive at the church. And young people do say, I was so relieved. It was the first time someone hugged me in months. Yeah. Right?

The first time someone recognized my face and they said my name out loud. And it wasn't just, again, because of work primacy, this is the first time. They're getting social affirmation and affection. And I think that is really valuable. It's the first space where young people are able to maybe just cry and cry and cry, right? There is sort of downloading messages about hope for the future. And all of those things offer support, right? Yeah, exactly.

But again, if we put this in the context of the traditional sources of support missing, the traditional sources of socialization and child rearing and child development are missing, the church is not the stop gap between the immigrant youth experience and their positive outcomes. No one at church is saying, asking, are you enrolled in school? Are you saving money? Yeah, they're not saying what they're saying, we love you, but we love you. We love you. Yes.

Yes. So the sort of the actual tangible support young people need is stuff like where the Labor Commissioner's office is, where. to enroll in adult English and school. What clinic offers the best rates for whatever health needs they have? The church isn't set up to do that work because, again, they're probably assuming also that parents and schools and everyone else is doing that. And they're just faith-based.

And that isn't to their fault, but I think also we need to then adjust our organizations because churches, like everything else, is a social organization that needs to adjust itself to meet the community need. but particularly indigenous young people talked about how their first encounters, some of their first encounters of organized anti-indigenous racism was at church, where they were assigned tasks like guard the parking lot in the blazing sun in Los Angeles or man the ticket table in the front and they saw other people that were assigned the job of the usher or the person that collects the ties or the person that does the greeting.

and that wasn't indigenous young people. So that was a sort of blow to the indigenous youth experience and a sort of disorientation. But as you mentioned earlier, when the church is a place that really is about faith and being saved versus sin and the actions that do not get you saved, when you are a child that is developing and things are changing daily

and your desires are changing and your attractions are changing. And you don't have, friends at school or you don't have parents and siblings that are sort of guiding you in that, young people would say things about their bodies or their sexual orientations or their desires and it was immediately cast as sin. And then you are not only dealing with the distress of work and the distress of indefinite family separation, but now you're a sinner whose body's betraying you. You know, it's just sin, sin, sin. And that's a sin. And that's a, is not something that is helpful to child development, if it's not also offset by other lessons

about what is typical or an average coming of age experience. So again, that affects support, yes, but then set back in all of these other ways that can affect young people. Double-life sword. It really, I mean, I think it was really fascinating to read that because it is a double-edged sword. I mean, it's not universally evil, not universally good. Yeah. But it doesn't, I think the end result I get from this is ultimately, while, it gave them something they desperately needed at the beginning, some affirmation of them as human beings. It didn't give them what they really needed to succeed. That is like a type of orientation, right?

It's through that process that young people can refine, okay, what are my needs, right? I need to learn how to do this. So then they start looking strategically for organizations or groups that do offer those resources. So that's the sort of movement from disorientation to orientation that I really try to lay out. It's only in those confrontations that young people can really get to know what they should be looking for. Absolutely. Well, before, I would like to move on, but it would be criminal, not to mention someone who is somewhat of a hero of this story, Wilfredo. And I think it's probably, we owe it to him to have a little chat about him. So he seems to be the person who in some ways is a, is a savior to, or at least not a savior so much as a, interesting

God. Well, why don't you... Yeah, I'll introduce him. Wilfredo, he was in his late 40s, early 50s as I was doing this work. He was a Salvadoran refugee. Came to Los Angeles. Like everyone else did, 70s and 80s during the civil unrest. He was a catechist instructor in one of the churches that I observed for this study. And he came to know, and he sort of

briefed me in a very long interview and several conversations about this idea of the sin the sort of implication of the sinner youth right um in that he realized oh these catechism classes these lessons they're not enough to support indigenous unaccompanied and documented youth so he started um talking one on one with young people he met in his catechism classes and then he once you know the word got out it was two or three people that wanted to meet, and then he just started setting a day where they would meet. He was the one that coordinated that support group that I started with in 2012. He wasn't trained in anything.

Anything like child psychology, he wasn't trained in anything. But he created a space where young people would just go around the room and for two hours talk about their weeks, right? And it was a place where the group was never the same from week to week. and it was really based on whatever people wanted to get off their chest. And this is when I really started to learn the importance of the concept of desaogo, unburdening that I talk about in the book. I had to look that up.

You don't define it in the book as far as I could see. Oh, really? Maybe you do, but I looked all over and I just looked up online and so it meant. Anyway, go on. Maybe I missed it. It's this, you know, desaogo, in Spanish is to drown. So desa sogo is directly undrowning, right? So when you think about these overwhelming emotions,

this group became the only space where people could put their head up out of the water, catch a breath, and then go on with the rest of their weeks. So Wilfredo was for me an example of how an adult figure can intervene as a guide and as a meaningful social tie as someone who can create a space of undrowning, Even as though he never offered housing, he never offered food, he never paid a single bill, but he created a space of undrowning. And that was the difference between adaptation, adaptation, and perdition, this perdition, where young people who didn't have meaningful social, who were constantly just drowning, would resort to things like drug use.

Yeah, we're going to get there. Yeah, okay. You know, one of the things that impressed me on him, and I just had to say it was that he had a wisdom and in their wisdom that many parents don't have, he didn't ever as far as I could see, at least in your recounting, tell kids what to do. No, not a single time. Yeah, he would just say, you know, here's, you know, you have these choices and, and it was never, and, you know, you have to decide what you're going to do for yourself. And I, I thought of a very impressive and inspiring. It was a remarkable, remarkable man. He never once. And there were times where people would ask him, what should I do?

And he said, I cannot tell you. All I can tell you is you have a choice. No one is forcing you to do these things. And that was, you know, when we talk about kids that feel this deep sense of obligation to care for other people, that he was the one person that said, you can opt out of that, right? Like, you can choose. And people did start to do that over the course of the six years. Okay, now you just point in adaptation and perdition, and we're going to just zip through those in a minute or two because I want to get to the future.

But the point, I think you point out that people adapt many different ways. Yeah. And some of the ways are actually going remarkably working all day long and then going English language school in the evening. some of them do job jumping around as you might expect to try and improve their lot or change things people are I mean they're driven to do this and it's and and of course how they have to adapt depends upon the circumstances they find themselves in when they get there and their mobility so I don't know if you want to just sort of have a sentence or two about that adruptation before we we we we I at least want to mention the different ways people can fall by the wayside

Yeah, I think with adaptation, the thing I'd want to point out is, as you're saying, the people are adapting to their particular circumstance. So we often think of immigrant and corporation as this monolithic experience and everyone's sort of headed in the same direction. So as I talk about orientation and adaptation, it is very much orientation and adaptation to one's life, right? To adjustment to the circumstance, not adjustment to some ideal, mainstream and suddenly they're included in society, right? So that's the thing I wanted to point out there. No, I think it's really, really important. And there's so many different stories. And it's amazing to read. Some people create, for others, book clubs, reading classes for other people, it's really, it's really interesting. Music classes. Sometimes it was like, I don't need to learn the

language. I want to learn an instrument, right? It's just adaptation to one's life. But I found it lovely to see not only they were they adapt themselves, but something created these classes for other, for their friends and so that they can adapt together. That again is heartwarming. That's the heartwarming part of it. And then there's the, then there's the three ways that, you know, they're not surprising that kids, the perdition part, or you would say it better in Spanish. I guess you might say predicione, but I don't know.

Yeah, predicione. But anyway, substance abuse, getting into bad relationships. I mean, let's, I mean, none of these things are unique. by the way, to these kids, but they don't have a, they don't have guides to help them, you know, traverse that adolescent to young adults, dangerous time and, well, a challenging time. Let me put it right. And then suicide. I mean, you see this in young people all over the place, but these kids have to face

these realities and turn if things are going bad to substance abuse and some of them do to romantic relationships that turn, that are bad. and of course they're different for males and females and the experience they have. And then some of them that at least consider suicide. Yeah. And again, I would love to, I would love to spend more time, you know, doing justice to some of these things. But maybe you want to elaborate on some of those challenges. Yeah, I think what I.

Maybe we could talk about Moises. Do you remember this, what you call, who's sort of teetering on the, on the brink. of adaptation or perdition. Oh, Moises. Yes. Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt. No, the one thing I want to say about peridision

at a higher level is, again, returning to this idea that if young people are disconnected from institutions or engaged in certain behaviors, it's some kind of moral failing on their part. And I think we like to use that framework, especially in relation to undocumented immigrants, right? Like this deviant, like counterculture, undocumented person.

So what I try to highlight in this book is that, you know, I start the chapter with saying, this is a teenage experience, exploration of drugs, entering into romantic relationships, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation. These are things that the average American teenager, an average teenager in any late-stage capitalist society is dealing with, right? In this case, it's sort of compounded and magnified in that they are also, engaging in, they're in survival mode materially, individually and for their families, right? So the cycle of if people are ending up in a downward incorporation or they're not incorporating in the way that we hope or would imagine, it's because there's a disconnect between the material and an emotional self, right? Even if they are going to work in the morning and doing

the thing and they're an autopilot, if they go home and they're alone for the rest of the day, or they don't have any meaningful relationships. The void, and they do talk about it as a void. You try to fill the void, whether it's the void of silence or the void of loneliness, young people engage in behaviors to fill the void. And those behaviors then reinforce the material scarcity, right, which then reinforces the depth of the void, and then they end up in the cycle of veridcion.

And I define it not as not only as loss of a thing, a loss of a goal, but a loss of the self, right? A loss of a sense of self. And Moises was someone that I came to know, sort of, I mentioned in the book, he didn't speak Spanish very well, indigenous language speaker. He always had other young people around him

sort of interpreting, and he spoke with a stutter because he experienced extreme domestic abuse in Guatemala still. So he came to the U.S. And the group, Voces de Esperanza and Wilfredo, intervened when they saw that he was on this potential trajectory of perdition, he wasn't able to pay rent for a monk, disappeared for 10 days and had spent his rent money on alcohol and was drunk on the street. And they saw him one day just covered in dirt from being on the street for 10 days. and Wilfredo and this group of young people sort of banded together to intervene to make sure he didn't end up in a long-term state of Bavision. So to me that was an example of how a meaningful social tie can catch it, right?

At the point of way, right? Yeah, to fall one way or another and how an individual or a small act of kindness can change someone's life in a big way. Look, I want to, again, I want to get to the future. And I'm going to try and convince you to have your student wait for five minutes, but which I used to do Alzheimer's. That's right. We'll say. But anyway, before we get to the recommendations, I wanted to mention Gail.

I told you what I. Yeah. This success story of, to me, his version of success is remarkable. And so maybe you could give, you know, just a couple of minutes to homage to this young person. Yeah. Gail, he was a, is a Guatemalan Mayan young adult that I met. I interviewed him twice. I knew him for the duration of the six years that I was doing this research.

And I'm still in contact with him today, actually. And it is, as you said, a remarkable story. He migrated at 16. His dad passed when he was very young. So Gail had to leave school to start working. He's the oldest son to start working to support his family. He came to the U.S. He really wanted to be an entrepreneur, like have a career.

He's, I want to have a career. He said over and over. He wanted to have a career. And he had experience in the garment industry. He worked at a restaurant and experienced deep exploitation there where his employer asked him basically, how much is your rent? And that was what guy earned every month was just the amounts

that he reported his rent was. So it was like just no opportunity for mobility. He worked in the flower district as a florist, a floral designer for some time. And that sort of opened mind to creative work. And he had new dreams of owning a floral shop. Guy supported his family. He was very explicit about conversations he would have with his mom about why he ended up being an unaccompanied child migrant and how they can work together to make sure his siblings didn't also experience that.

He would do things like send money, extra money on birthday so she could buy birthday cakes so that they wouldn't. Things like this would stop them from migrating. Birthday cakes, right? He would tell his mom, you should hug them more, make sure they feel affection, right? Like all of these things that he thought were corrective so that his siblings wouldn't migrate. When I interviewed him the first time, I can't remember. what year it was, but he told me, you know, I have this goal. I want to go to school. I want to become, I want to have my own floral shop. When I interviewed him again, two years later, we were at a

boba shop in Curia Town in Los Angeles. I remember he told me the quote, the conversation I detail in that last chapter, after all that says, where he says, you know, it's been years since I left my family. And people might look at me and say, I have accomplished nothing. And for sure, he did, had not gone to school. He hadn't opened his floral shop. He had to accomplish much by our sort of metrics of success. And he said, but look, the thing I'm most proud of is that none of my siblings migrated. That's what's amazing.

All of them finished school. One of his brothers got married and started a family. His mom had a strong relationship. She was involved in her community. He had sort of preserved the ideal family in Guatemala when everyone else. at left, when all of his friends were unaccompanied young people also, his version of success was, my family is proud of me, my family is happy. And that, again, is not something you see in policy.

But actually, you know, he got his siblings through school and then he started focusing on himself. And now he does have a floral shop in Los Angeles, not in the book. Yeah, it was after data collection, I ended, you know, years went by and he he has a floral shop and it was with the help of the people from voices and a little corner store and I went to the ribbon cutting and he just like was crying all day, all day. His face was swollen. I'm throwing up thinking about it. I did it, right? And he said like, I remember when I told you that I wanted to do this and like look at my shop and it

balloons and flowers and, you know, gift boxes. It's beautiful. It's wonderful. Well, you know, up to that point when I, when, you know, you end the book, or not end the book, but end his story at this point, he hasn't accomplished any of the things he wanted to do for himself, but he's done the stuff for his family. It really actually reminded me as I actually, when I was thinking about asking this question, it suddenly came the movie, it's a wonderful life, reminded me tremendously of the Jimmy Stewart character. I assume you've seen that movie. Yeah, yeah. of someone who thinks of his life as a failure and only comes to realize that his life has so positively affected so many people around them. And he happily didn't think of himself.

Gile didn't think himself as a failure. He was proud of the things. And I'm happy in the end that this came out. Well, look, we have two minutes left. And before you have to tell your student that they have to wait a minute. And I want to just give your recommendations in the context of what's going on now because they're striking. you talk about what you recommend. And first is the right to not migrate.

The fact, a really important fact that as the U.S. bemoans this incredible, what's sending people say, an invasion, they have to realize that we have some culpability. But more importantly, that perhaps dollars spent on improving the law of the people in those countries so that they don't have to migrate would be a really important thing to do. And I can't see, as never discussed in the political framework today. That's one. Two, that we need to allow people to, there should be large-scale legalization. Again, something flies in the face of everything you tend to hear in the current climate of this election.

That's how important that is. And finally, the need to provide education that these kids are not being educated and they have a right to education. Three things that are just never discussed in the modern climate. And I wanted to give you at least a minute to, to, those are dramatic recommendations that, as you say, if you mentioned them now, you would never be elected if you're running. And so, so I want to turn the floor over to you there. And then one last question. Yeah. I approached my recommendations in the way that the book is structured, right? Like, if we're going to track from the point of departure to this loss, the success. making. I think it's important to account for the fact that a lot of these kids didn't want to

migrate. Yeah. Right? They did as a mechanism of survival for themselves and their families. What I think we do in terms of addressing root causes and stopping migration flows at a federal level is we think investing in corporations and creating jobs that will then implement a trickle-down economics model. That is not functioning, right? So the idea of the right not to migrate, the right to stay is really upheld by this sort of ground-up research approach that I've taken. If we ask people on the ground, not at a federal national level, but if we have conversations with community members on the ground, what would it take for you to stay?

And can we invest in community-based efforts rather than corporations that we hope will have trickle effects on these children? can we invest in community-based efforts to create futures on the ground that young people can see themselves living through, right? When Gail did that independently, and he allowed his family to imagine a future of cohesiveness and siblings finishing education, they all stayed. So can we sort of replicate Gai's model with a robust resource? the idea of a context of illegality, these generations in the U.S. that are now undocumented and under threat of deportation,

this idea that people want to support recently arrived children, but they can't because of their own resource constraint. How can we honor the work that generations of undocumented immigrants have done through a legalization effort? If we don't want to provide legal status to these children, can we then look at legalizing the long-searched? people, the 80-something percent of people who've been here for over 15 years, right? Like, can we do that?

And then the sort of the last recommendation is really based on, we need to start asking children the same way we saw for DACA and the DREAM Act, which was a youth-based effort. It was a model that was their immigration policies and models that are really built around what youth were advocating for at the time. So can we ask, as the book starts with Christian, What is it that you would have wanted when you got here? What is it that would have made a difference for you? And that Christian said, well, I had to make the decision between going to work and going to school.

How do we mind the gap of care so that we lift the burden, this obligation to take care of themselves, the obligation to take care of their families, which is the opposite of the punitive, criminalizing, vilifying approach that we have to date, right? Like, can we actually approach this with a framework of care so that children can live this child? childhood that we punish them for not living, right? Like it so and, and I think that really means taking youths, voices and experiences and perspectives into context. And I've tried to do that.

The framework we talked about, the disorganitation, adaptation, perdition, those are the words young people used. They, I didn't make it up, right? I noticed that and then you, and they, and then this, they use the same, different individuals, use the same words over over again. In different conversations, yes.

It was very impressive to me that, yeah, they came out of that. Well, look, I think they're moving and important, and they should be the basis for a dialogue that we never hear. I'm going to read the last three sentences of your book and then ask you this question and then let you do your job as a professor. Undocumented young adults who grew up as an unaccompanied adolescents, see their fates and assess their successes across the life course as intimately connected with their local and transnational communities. I hope this research inspires its readers to see our fate and successes as a nation as intimately connected with the treatment of newcomers, especially children and youth among us. And I hope our conversation and your

book and our conversation will cause many people to have that kind of reflection. And I want to ask you about your reflection, as I promised you I would at the beginning. Yeah, I haven't written down. So how did it change your view of yourself and your background and your origins? Yeah, I think I came away with this work really thinking about how exceptional my trajectory has been, right? Like, what are the odds that the child of two Salvadoran immigrants who grew up as unaccompanied teenagers in Los Angeles would be a sociology professor at Berkeley? Like, that's just like such a big gap and such a big jump in just one generation. And I really think when I approached the recommendations and when I approached this,

research, it's really to find like what were those pivot points and how can we intervene so that I'm not an exception, right? So that this is something that is a common experience. So I came away with it. I came away changed in that I sort of had a reckoning with my own trajectory, right? That like I can't take this for granted because the outcome could have been anything. Yes. A whole slew of things. And it really has actually. activated my, I mean, I've done work now with the Health and Human Services and the Office of Refugee Resettlement that runs the unaccompanied children's program and trying to say like, what do we need to do, right? I've done work with UNICEF on things related to child labor

because again, there are things we can do so that more people in the second or third generation end up in my place. And I think I came away with like, okay, there have been moments where people and situations have been intervening in my life. And how, like, I just want to do that more, right? And not just write books, but live a life that actually... Well, you know, it's good to see you're living that life. And I commend you for it. I have to say, you know, I came into this with a little bit of trepidation.

You know, I was hesitant to follow a book that I knew was a PhD thesis because I... Uh-oh. And, but it, it, it, I hope, I mean, in the process, it's all, I will say personally, it had the similar effect on me as thinking about my own trajectory and in many ways how fortunate I am. And of course to try to do what I try and do, which is to talk with this podcast and in general, to raise the questions that aren't raised and point to people that the boilerplate that you hear may not be what is really worth thinking about, to think critically about what's really happening. And these stories and the discussion we've had, I think

is inspiring and I hope I hope you felt I did justice to we did justice to the to your work and I want to thank you it was a real pleasure unexpected thank you very very much for for taking the time and agreeing to be a little bit late for your students so thank you of course thanks thanks for having me you're right it did feel like 15 minutes so good on you good my work is done thank you thank you thank you thank you hi it's Lawrence again the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas that are changing

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