Prejudice and Other Challenges Faced by Immigrants

[Danyelle] Hello everybody. Welcome to Comets Discuss, part of the UT Dallas Comet Cast network, where we provide discussions on big trending topics. For this series we’re talking about prejudice. While a lot has been happening recently in regards to prejudice, racism and police brutality, this is not a short-term issue. So we’re talking with UT Dallas experts — while practicing social distancing — to provide you with various perspectives on this topic. I’m Danyelle. Today we’re talking with Raul Hinojosa who is the community engagement director for the Office of Diversity and Community Engagement. We discuss some of the challenges immigrants and their families are facing in the United States and touch on some new information about the DACA program. Thank you so much for joining us today, Raul.

[Raul] Thanks for having me.

[Danyelle] Of course, of course. First off, can you give us a quick overview of what your role at UTD entails.

[Raul] I am the director of community engagement at UT Dallas, which is part of the Office of Diversity and Community Engagement, and the work that we do in community engagement is primarily focused on college access initiatives. So our work involves working with populations of students who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education — students from the Latino community and students from the African American community. We plan programs for middle school and high school students and for their families to help them prepare to come to college and to get ready to come to a place like UT Dallas and so a lot of our work is helping the next generation of college students get ready to come to a university like ours.

[Danyelle] With these students, what are some things that you guys are finding are often barriers to them coming to a university like UTD?

[Raul] So there are several challenges that we find students will face when they’re thinking about coming to UT Dallas. There are things like having adequate preparation. UT Dallas is a rigorous university and so we want to make sure that students, regardless of where they go to high school, have the opportunity to come and study, but we know that a great rigorous college curriculum will help set you up for success at a university like ours. Not all public schools are on a level playing field and so part of what we do is making sure that we’re providing information for students on how they can enhance what they get offered at their high school to get ready to come to college. We have an initiative in our office that’s a math preparation program, for example, that starts with middle school kids. It’s called the Future Comets program and what we do in that program is we help students get on a path to graduate with calculus-level math by the time they graduate from high school. And you can’t decide as a junior or senior that you want to do calculus in high school; you really have to start early in that process and so we start with these eighth graders in algebra one to go all the way through basically to be with us for five years to graduate with calculus. And calculus, we don’t necessarily think about it all too much but it’s a great way to help you come to a university like ours for STEM careers, for example, or business. It’s a great entry point. It helps you with your SAT score, which is another barrier that many students face, right? So the math part of the SAT is challenging. I was a journalism major in high school so I didn’t necessarily love math. If you want to be an engineer you have to be great at math. That’s one piece is the academic part. But then the other challenge that students face is financial, right? So it’s accessing financial aid programs, it’s finding scholarships, it’s learning how do all of those systems work, to be able to qualify for those programs and when do you have to do it and what form do you have to fill out and what information do you have to report about your parents and their situation, for example on the financial aid forms. So getting through some of those barriers sometimes for students, especially when they’re the first in their family or they don’t have a lot of people in their circle that they can count on that have had a college experience, offices like ours are really helpful to provide support and guidance and just to make sure that the transition process is easier and the preparation process is easier.

[Danyelle] That’s great. I’m really proud of the work that you guys are doing. Lately DACA has been in the news a lot and I was wondering if you could give us a quick overview or a brief rundown of what DACA is for anyone who’s not familiar and why it’s important for UTD students.

[Raul] Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, or DACA, is an executive order that actually President Obama signed in 2012. You know if we think back, in the sort of way back machine, in 2012 there was a lot of pressure to have some kind of immigration reform or some sort of support for young people who came to this country, who were brought here to this country by their parents, to find some kind of support for them to have a path to citizenship and to find access to opportunities. And we actually were talking about this way before President Obama and in the George W. Bush administration people were talking about immigration reform. There’s a group of young people that were very active in advocating for some sort of relief for students in that situation or young people in that situation. So the Obama administration, Obama, President Obama signed an executive order creating DACA in 2012. This executive order basically did a couple of things. It helped with the students worry from deportation. So it instructed ICE to put young people who were brought here as children sort of lower on the enforcement priority list, right? So when they’re talking about deportations and immigration enforcement they put them sort of lower on the list. It also provided these persons with a work permit for two years and that they could renew as often as they wanted to but it gave them an opportunity to get a job and to work just like any other person. That was fundamentally an important shift in immigration policy for people who were brought here as young children and provided a lot of relief to those students. So at the height of the program there were 800,000 young people who had DACA status. So it’s not a small group of people. And what it did was it helped people with thinking about, if I go to college at a place like UT Dallas, for example, prior to DACA I may not even be able to get a job if I didn’t have work authorization and I didn’t have a legal status in this country. But once we had DACA these students were able to find jobs and were able to basically utilize their degree in their field and fill in really important workforce needs that we had in our country and in our state. And so I think for our students it really was important because it created an opportunity for students to be able to go into the workforce.

[Danyelle] What demographic of students are affected by DACA?

[Raul] So there are many different immigrants who benefit from the DACA program. The largest population are Mexican immigrants or students who are their country of origin was Mexico. That’s followed by Central America, but there are also large populations of South Korean persons here, people from Nigeria that are beneficiaries of DACA, and then Europe also — I mean there are people from European countries who have benefited. So often when we talk about DACA we see the face of Latino immigrants and that’s the primary beneficiary of it, but there are people who are from lots of different places around the world that came here as young children and benefit from the protections and the work permit that DACA provides.

[Danyelle] How difficult is it to navigate other resources for people who aren’t protected by DACA?

[Raul] So this is a really great question because I think it’s important for people to have a little bit of a primer about how immigration works in this country because we are continuing to see sort of a variety of people with different statuses. So there are documented immigrants, right, and so we see many, many people who study at UT Dallas, our international students who have a visa that come here and they are documented immigrants. We also have faculty members, for example, who are sponsored to come here and do research and teach so they may have some type of employment visa to come to this country. Then there are DACA or we call ‘DACA-mented’ people, right, and so there are students who have DACA. An important thing to remember is that DACA doesn’t provide a legal status to someone; they still are considered undocumented but they have those ICE deportation or enforcement protections and the work permit benefit, so that’s what is involved in being DACA-mented but then there’s also undocumented persons, right, and so undocumented persons were, are someone who came here, maybe overstayed a visa or came into the country some other way that didn’t have some type of legal documentation for immigrating to this country. And what we’ve started to see when the Trump administration announced in 2017 that they were rescinding or winding down the DACA policy, we started to see young persons who were about to become eligible to apply for DACA that were unable to apply to the program because they stopped taking new applications. So when you turn 15 then you’re eligible to apply for DACA when it was in place, kind of normally operating, and so we have a growing population of undocumented students who don’t have a legal status, who don’t have the protections around deportation and enforcement and don’t have a work permit. Those students in 2017 that started to sort of become age-eligible to be in DACA are actually students who graduated this past year from high school and so we’ll start to see them basically applying to our universities and colleges, enrolling universities and colleges this fall, and there’s an estimate that it’s something like 66,000 young people who are now eligible but haven’t been able to apply because the DACA program wind down has been working its way through the courts.

[Danyelle] Are the majority of those students who normally would be protected by DACA Latino students?

[Raul] So the majority of the students who have DACA are from Mexico and then from other Latin American countries. The majority of the people who benefit from them program are definitely from Mexico and Latin American countries.

[Danyelle] Why do you think there’s such a bias towards immigrant communities, and in the case of DACA, specifically Latino immigrant communities?

[Raul] We kind of see what happens a sort of environment today around immigration and some of the violence that immigrants are facing or discrimination and xenophobia that exists and it’s pretty troubling and it’s pretty hard to look at it and say like, wow things are really bad. But i want to borrow something from my colleague Dr. Selena Brody who was one of your previous guests in this series. She talks in her psychology of prejudice course about the history and understanding historical events in the context of things that are happening today, especially in the case of her course, prejudicial activities, and the same thing happens with immigration. When we think about the history of immigration laws in this country xenophobia isn’t something that’s particularly new, right? The very first immigration law in this country was the Naturalization Act of 1790 and it limited citizenship or residency basically to free white persons of good moral character and that left behind a lot of people. That left behind obviously slaves from Africa that were in this country were not going to be eligible for citizenship. It left behind lots of people from Asian countries and Southeast Asian countries that were living here and I totally didn’t even think about Native Americans who already were in this country that were not eligible for citizenship based on the Naturalization Act of 1790. After that we had the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882 that banned Chinese laborers from coming to this country and it barred people who were already here from even having the opportunity to become naturalized. Race as a factor of immigration didn’t get removed from our laws until 1952. So the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was the first law that removed race as a criterion for applying for citizenship. My dad was born in 1952. Like that wasn’t even all that long ago. And so I think it’s important to see what Dr. Brody calls the through lines between sort of history and how people have been treated as immigrants in this country through where we are today and the experiences of violence and discrimination and xenophobia that some immigrants face today sort of based on our climate.

[Danyelle] Why do you think everything shifted to having a negative perception of Latino immigrants?

[Raul] I think there’s a lot of things that are sort of threatening to some communities, that motivate sometimes why people treat people differently. Commonly you’ll hear refrains about immigrants — you’ll hear things like, immigrants are taking away jobs from Americans or immigrants are taking advantage of benefits that Americans should be able to qualify for. But we know in data that those things are not true. We had in Texas 213,000 people who qualified for DACA and 93% of them had jobs. Like there were plenty of jobs for people and we know there’s been this thing called the “Texas miracle,” right? So prior to the pandemic, the Texas economy was booming. It was going great, there was lots of jobs, there were people coming from all over the country to come here. There’s just is not data to support that immigrants were taking away jobs from Americans. In the same way with benefits, immigrants pay benefits. In Texas we don’t have an income tax, we pay property taxes. So if you live in a home you pay property tax and plenty of immigrants own homes. But even if you rent an apartment you pay to a landlord who pays taxes on their property through that revenue from their rentals. There are sales tax, so every time we go shopping somewhere we got charged a sales tax and all people, including immigrants, pay sales taxes. So they’re contributing to the tax revenue that’s generated in the country and oftentimes they don’t qualify for some of these programs. Like DACA students, for example, don’t qualify for the Pell Grant but they do pay federal income taxes as part of their work permit, right? So they’ll never be able to reap the benefit of paying into that system. They’ll never get social security or medicare if there isn’t a permanent path to citizenship. That money is taken out of their paycheck but they’ll probably never be able to access that unless there’s a change. And so I think those are the kinds of things where people sort of feel threatened and have misperceptions about immigrants and their sort of contributions or things they’re taking away from the community that just, the data don’t bear it out.

[Danyelle] What are some of the barriers to actually receiving citizenship or residency for our country that may lead some folks to become undocumented?

[Raul] Yeah so this is something we often hear from people is, you know, like ,why do these young people or really anybody, because the reality is many of these young people live in mixed status families so by the very nature that they were childhood arrivals probably their parents or their legal guardian that brought them here does not have a status, right? So people often will say, well, why do these persons not apply for citizenship or why don’t they just, you know, kind of send in their application. And if only it were that easy, right? So the reality is there really isn’t a line to get into. The process is super complicated. To qualify for residency you have to be able to meet certain criteria; primarily you have to be sponsored by someone. So if you come here and your parents don’t have a status and a student doesn’t have a status then it’s nearly impossible to be able to do that. Sometimes someone who’s maybe a U.S. citizen will be born here the process for sponsoring a family member takes oftentimes decades. I think the last time I checked they were processing applications like from the 1990s through immigration, something like that. Like there is a decades-long backlog and certain countries have major limitations on the number of people that can actually receive citizenship or visas or any kind of approval to come here and so from those countries it’s even smaller the number of people that can come here and kind of be eligible for applying for citizenship or even residency.

[Danyelle] I think that was a great explanation because we do often times think it’s like signing up for your driver’s license or registering to vote and it is a convoluted process so thank you so much.

[Raul] And I’ll just add, too, like the young people who have DACA – and even those who are undocumented that don’t qualify to apply for DACA at this point — they came here as young children. They don’t really know another country, right? So oftentimes people will say, well, they should just go back to their country but the reality is they’ve spent more time here than their country of origin so even if they were deported they may or may not have family there, they may be going to a place they don’t even remember when they were a young child. There’s lots of complications about sort of being an immigrant in the United States and these are some of the paradoxes that people face being in a country where they don’t know anything different but people wanting to send them somewhere that they just don’t know where it is or what it’s like or have spent much time there.

[Danyelle] Can you tell us a little bit about some of the struggles that immigrants face and why they want to come to the United States in the first place?

[Raul] You know there are a lot of great opportunities here in the United States. The United States is the beacon for a lot of people — the American dream, the opportunity to get educated, to have a job, to have a place have a great life. In my privilege of being born here oftentimes um have to remind myself that, you know, I’m really lucky. Like I didn’t choose to be born in this country but I benefit from so many great things that are offered to me because I was born here and I have to be reflective about that. I think that’s one of the driving reasons prior to the 2008 economic downturn many of the people who were coming to the United States were coming to work and coming to find money to be able to send back to their home country to support family, to help people build a house, whatever they could do to help improve the economic situation in their home country. You know living in Texas and a border state, our economy and so much of our life is tied to Mexico and tied to the border and so immigrants make tremendous contributions to this country and they come here seeking those opportunities for advancement and, and to just improve conditions for the people that they leave behind in their home countries.

[Danyelle] Where do you think we should go from DACA? DACA specifically for childhood arrivals but if the immigration process is convoluted and confusing and frustrating and can take decades, where should our immigration move forward in the next round of immigration reform that we hopefully see in this country?

[Raul] It will be nearly impossible for the congress that comes next to ignore immigration — I think that regardless of the outcome of the presidential election there will be a lot of pressure to find some sort of path to citizenship for DACA students and to find really all kinds of immigration relief because I mean that’s just one small part — the DACA students and helping them is just one small part of the immigration challenge that this country faces.

[Danyelle] So since DACA is a federal law, are there any state laws or protections in place to help immigrant students within our state that UT Dallas is able to take advantage of?

[Raul] One of the things that a lot of people may or may not know about but certainly undocumented students know about or should know about is that there are 19 states in the country that offer in-state tuition to undocumented students. I want to make sure and unravel that a little bit in the sense that DACA is a federal program but students, like I said earlier, don’t have legal status under DACA so they remain undocumented as well, right? Or DACA-mented, we call them. In Texas we were the very first ones in 2001 to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students so that was way before DACA even existed and so students basically who graduated from high school here or who obtained their GED here and had lived here at least three years were eligible to pay in-state tuition. In Texas we went even further and said we could allow these students to also receive state financial aid programs. So the biggest program is the Texas Grant Program. There are some other ones but the largest one is the Texas Grant Program, which is the need-based grant program. So that really was a game changer in 2001 for students who were undocumented because before then they would have to apply as non-resident students and oftentimes since they didn’t qualify for any kind of tuition support they probably wouldn’t have been able to enroll on basically paying non-resident tuition. So in 2001 we were at, the state of Texas was able to offer that and many students have been able to get educated as a result of that. There are three states in the country, and I think it’s worth mentioning, that prohibit undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition and two of them — Alabama and South Carolina — prohibit undocumented students from even just enrolling at any public institution. So it’s interesting because the patchwork of rules are very different depending on what state you go to, where you live, what opportunity you may or may not have to study. One of the things that we were monitoring with the DACA supreme court decision was if DACA was indeed wound down we wanted to make sure students understood that the state law regarding in-state tuition for them and state financial aid eligibility was not going away because it was a state law that wasn’t connected at all to DACA or to the DACA executive order.

[Danyelle] Do we have any specific programs at UTD specifically for DACA recipients or other immigrant students to help them find this information and locate these resources and take advantage of them?

[Raul] So I think that that’s one of the great things about UT Dallas is that we are a university that’s so diverse and includes people from so many different countries. I think we have generally a really welcoming environment for people like students feel comfortable, they can share their experience and share from that and we don’t have necessarily a DACA center or a place that students can connect but there are a lot of resources. So within the Office of Diversity and Community Engagement, for example, we have the Multicultural Center. That provides a place for students to congregate and connect. They do a lot of work with the Latino student organizations since we know that many of the DACA students are Latino. There’s also in the Gender Center a lot of support work around gender equality and our LGBT+ population. One of the things that’s really important to remember is that country of origin is just one identity of multiple intersections people may face. So oftentimes when we talk about challenges that students face or undocumented young people face, there are often lots of challenges that we find in the intersections of being an immigrant and also trans or immigrant and a woman that sort of compound what kind of oppression you may face and those kinds of things. So our offices, those two centers are ones where we make sure that we are welcoming, that all students feel like they can access and get support. The Student Government Association offers a lawyer up for all students and one of the areas where they provide support is immigration law, so that’s a free service that SG provides. So there are those kinds of places on campus that students can connect with certain resources. And then we’re really lucky in North Texas to have tons of off-campus resources. So there’s a really active Mexican consulate here in North Texas that provides a lot of support for Mexican nationals including those who have DACA status or who are undocumented. There’s the North Texas Dream Team, which was one of the very first national activist groups to advocate for some kind of reform in 2012 for immigration and they provide a lot of community resources and support for students who are trying to figure out how to fill out their immigration paperwork or how to request DACA status or do renewals or those kinds of things. They do a lot of community work. So there are tons of resources on and off campus that we try to make sure students are aware of.

[Danyelle] I’m glad that UTD students, even though all students across the country may not have the access to these opportunities and resources, I’m very glad that my fellow Comets do have those resources. Did you have one final thought you’d like to leave our audience with?

[Raul] You know one of the things we probably need to sort of think about when we think about the vulnerability and challenges that immigrant communities face is just to put into mind a little bit of the sort of privileges that some of us who were born here that we receive that we don’t necessarily even think about that are major challenges for undocumented or DACA students. You know things as simple as getting a driver’s license you have to be able to prove your residency and have a birth certificate or have been here. There’s so many ways that we use our driver’s license like to travel, to prove our identity, like all those kinds of things. There’s a big conversation right now and you all have talked about this in the podcast series around um policing and violence. Immigrants face a particular set of worries around policing, especially around the partnerships that police departments have with immigration. So if you get stopped for running a stop sign or not wearing your seatbelt or whatever, whatever kind of infraction, potentially you could get asked about your citizenship status. If you’re arrested potentially you, that arrest could be reported to immigration and you could get deported from that. And so there’s obviously a fear about policing in the community. I mentioned this before but just things around paying for certain benefits that you may not even qualify for. So I hope that one day I’ll have access to social security and Medicare but there are people who have DACA that are paying into these programs that, unless there’s permanent relief, won’t be able to benefit from those and so I think it’s just really important especially when we think about the series around prejudice is thinking about our own privilege and what are the experiences of immigrants that maybe we don’t center and to think about that experience and how it informs what it means for me to be someone here and someone who’s born in another place.

[Danyelle] That was great. Thank you so much for that. I love your call to action of viewing our own privilege and using that to be more compassionate and understanding and empathetic towards immigrant folks. Thank you so, so much, again for taking the time out to talk to us, doing the emotional labor of discussing these difficult topics with us. We really appreciate it so, so much.

[Raul] No problem, thanks for having me.

[Danyelle] Thanks again to Raul for speaking with us. Check out our show notes for links to some of the resources he mentioned and if y’all could do your fellow Comets a favor by rating and reviewing our show on whatever podcasting platform you use, it would be so, so appreciated. Thanks for joining us. Comets Discuss is brought to you by the UT Dallas Office of Communications. A special thanks to senior lecturer Roxanne Minnish for our music. Be sure to check out our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. For the most up-to-date news at UT Dallas visit the university’s News Center page at utdallas.edu/news. Take care of yourselves, Comets.