For the past three decades, U.S. immigration policy has become increasingly restrictive, focused on enforcement both at the southern border and across the country. A shift in emphasis from status regularization to criminalization has had rippling effects for families and communities. While we know much about how immigration enforcement impacts the undocumented, we know less about longstanding effects on U.S. citizens. In Surviving the ICE Age, sociologist Joanna Dreby draws on interviews with young adults with foreign-born parents to better understand what it was like to grow up during a time of heightened U.S. migratory control.

Dreby shows that a restrictive approach to immigration creates problems over time and across generations. These issues occur regardless of one’s citizenship status and go beyond deportations. Despite having pride in their heritage, her interviewees did not talk much about immigration. She refers to this unwillingness—and at times, inability—to speak about immigration as silencing. Silencing in a community or family is often intended to protect children, but this can leave them with little information about their backgrounds and status, leading to fear and anxiety instead. Self-silencing often resulted from traumatic experiences tied to enforcement episodes, which sometimes took the form of memory loss or emotional withholding. Dreby finds that experiences with the immigration system that disrupted relationships in a child’s household arising from family separations, moves, or changing roles in the family had especially long-term effects, causing, at times, ongoing mental health issues. Even the risk of immigration involvement left some young adults feeling vulnerable and undermined their sense of safety and security as U.S. citizens.

Dreby also highlights stories that offer hope. Young adults developed strategies to persevere, and children who grew up in communities and families that openly talked about migration felt empowered and fared much better, especially when they had access to resources, such as adequate food and shelter, mental health services, and community support. Dreby calls for policies and practices to mitigate the harms of restrictive migratory control on children’s wellbeing, such avoiding the arrest of parents in front of children and ensuring that U.S. citizen children’s interests are considered in immigration court without their direct involvement.

Surviving the ICE Age details the generational harms caused by U.S. immigration policy and offers suggestions for a better way forward.

JOANNA DREBY is professor of sociology at the University of Albany, State University of New York

As interracial unions and multiracial people become more common in the United States, mixed-heritage people have come to be regarded by some as a bellwether of race relations in the country. Is the growth of this population a sign that we are now in a post-racial era and our racial identities no longer impact our daily lives? In Mixed Heritage in the Family, sociologists Carolyn A. Liebler and Miri Song explore how racially mixed people navigate racial boundaries as they choose spouses and raise families.

Liebler and Song break new ground by being the first to combine and integrate the study of three aspects of life for people of mixed racial heritage – identity, spouse choice, and childrearing. This integrated approach reveals how complicated racial identification can be, and how it can be expressed in one’s choice of partner or in how one raises their children. The authors draw on census data and interviews with Asian-White, Black-White, and American Indian/Alaska Native-White mixed people to better understand how their identity choices are related to their choice of spouse and how they racially identify and raise their children.

Increasingly, mixed people in the United States are identifying with multiple races. However, the authors find that mixed-race people are not a monolith and that how and why they identify varies considerably between and within each group. They found several common factors that influenced whether mixed-race people choose to identify as biracial, solely White, or solely as a racial minority. These factors include the history of the specific minority race in the U.S., the racial demographics of where they were raised, their social and cultural exposure to their White and non-White backgrounds, their attachment to their racial backgrounds, and how they are seen racially by others.

The way mixed-heritage people identify was closely tied to the race of their spouse. However, having a White spouse did not necessarily mean the mixed-race person felt disconnected from their non-White heritage. White spouses varied in their racial consciousness and their interest in the culture of their mixed-race spouse’s minority ancestry. The spouse’s race, and the nature of racial overlap between the spouses, was also key in the racial upbringing of a mixed-heritage person’s child. In families where the parents share a minority racial heritage, couples lean into their shared ‘family race’, which guides their parenting choices and family life. Many mixed heritage parents found it important to foster racial pride in their children and combat negative racial stereotypes.

Liebler and Song caution against making superficial predictions about the state of race relations in the U.S. based on an increase in the multiracial population. They show that race has not become less salient in the lives of many mixed-race people—American society is not post-racial.

Mixed Heritage in the Family breaks new ground, provides compelling insights in its examination of the lives of mixed-race people, and shows how complicated racial identification can be.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, more than two million Mexican migrants returned to Mexico from the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of people who returned to Mexico was so large that, for the first time in at least fifty years, more people entered Mexico from the United States than entered the United States from Mexico. Many of these migrants were destined for urban areas, and we know little about how they fare after they return to cities. In The Returned, sociologists Claudia Masferrer, Erin R. Hamilton, and Nicole Denier examine the experiences of returned migrants in Mexico City, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

Masferrer, Hamilton, and Denier draw on interviews with former U.S. migrants living in Mexico City to better understand the experience of return migration to urban areas. Each of the migrants they spoke with lived in the United States for long periods with noncitizen status during the last four decades. During this time, U.S. immigration policy became increasingly focused on restriction and enforcement, which made it difficult for migrants to safely move back and forth across the border for work or to visit family without documentation. The authors find that upon their return, migrants in Mexico City felt disoriented and lost and had difficulty adapting to a massive urban environment where there is little support for returnees. They struggled to translate their work experience from their time in the U.S. to find quality jobs. Additionally, many found their family lives upended as they reunited with or formed families in the U.S.. Some found themselves separated from family members still in the U.S. with no ability to legally visit them. Others brought their families back to Mexico, some of whom were U.S. citizens and had never been to Mexico before. They, too, struggled to adapt and integrate to life in Mexico City.

The authors use the experiences of return migrants to discuss policies and practices that would improve their lives and ease their reintegration. To help with the disorientation they experience, returnees proposed ongoing psychological support with mental health professionals who have knowledge and training in the social and legal issues that return migrants face. Return migrants also advocated for policies to enhance skill matching, job creation, and entrepreneurship, as many felt the occupational skills they developed in the U.S. were undervalued in Mexico. To address family separation, returnees argued for legal and policy reform to accommodate family reunification.

The Returned is an illuminating account of the difficulties faced by return migrants and their families in Mexico City.

CLAUDIA MASFERRER is an associate professor, Centre for Demographic, Urban, and Environmental Studies, El Colegio de México

ERIN R. HAMILTON is a professor of sociology, University of California, Davis

NICOLE DENIER is an associate professor, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta

“In Structured Luck, Onoso Imoagene gives us an unparalleled look into the U.S. Diversity Visa Program, revealing its far-reaching effects on the life trajectories of migrants and its role as a catalyst of the migration industry in countries of origin. Through rich interviews and careful institutional analysis in the United States, Nigeria, and Ghana, she offers us a critical assessment of the program’s reputation as a windfall lottery and shows us that luck, in this case, is painstakingly made through strategic responses to policy constraints.”
Natasha Iskander, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, New York University

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is a lottery that awards winners from underrepresented countries the chance to apply for legal permanent residence in the United States. Most lottery winners think of themselves as lucky, viewing the win as an opportunity to pursue better lives for themselves and their families. In Structured Luck, sociologist Onoso Imoagene uses immigrants’ stories to show how the program’s design often leads to their exploitation in their origin countries, the interruption of their education, and reduced potential once they are in the United States.

Combining ethnographic observation in Africa and interviews with over one hundred immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria, Imoagene demonstrates that the visa program is a process of “structured luck,” from how people hear about the lottery, who registers for it, and who participates in it to the application requirements for the visa. In Ghana and Nigeria, people often learn about the lottery through friends, colleagues, or relatives who persuade them to enter for the perceived benefits of receiving a visa: opportunities for upward mobility, permanent legal status, and the ability to bring along family members. Though anyone can enter the lottery, not everyone who wins obtains a visa. The visa application process requires proof of a high school diploma or artisan skills, a medical exam, a criminal background check, an interview with U.S. consular officers, and payment of fees. Such requirements have led to the growth of visa entrepreneurs, who often charge exorbitant fees to steer immigrants through the process. Visa recipients who were on track to obtain university degrees at home often leave in the middle of their studies for the United States but struggle to continue their education due to high U.S. tuition costs. And though their legal status allows them to escape the demoralizing situations that face the undocumented, these immigrants lack the social support that the government sometimes provides for refugees and other migrants. Ultimately, Imoagene notes, the real winner of the visa lottery is not the immigrants themselves but the United States, which benefits from their relatively higher levels of education. Consequently, she argues, the U.S. must do more to minimize the visa program’s negative consequences.

Structured Luck illuminates the trauma, resilience, and determination of immigrants who come to the United States through the Diversity Visa Program and calls for the United States to develop policies that will better integrate them into society.

ONOSO IMOAGENE is associate professor of social research and public policy at New York University, Abu Dhabi.

American Educational Studies Association Critic's Choice Book Award Winner

"In Meanings of Mobility, Leah Schmalzbauer carefully and in precise detail documents the costs—psychic and embodied—of children of immigrants’ class mobility through elite educational pathways. Driven by love and a desire to make good on parents’ sacrifices, poor and working-class students of color understand that academic excellence only leads to financial success when they can proficiently enact the cultural norms of privileged whiteness. Readers get to witness through these students’ own accounts how they make sense of the tough choices an elite college education presents: the spectrum runs from returning to community to contribute to social justice to leaning into racial capitalism to acquire wealth."
—LEISY J. ABREGO, professor and chair, Chicana/o and Central American Studies, UCLA

"A compassionate and detailed exploration of how young adult children of Latin American immigrants navigate a privileged college environment. Leah Schmalzbauer follows the stories of a new generation of young adults who attend a top liberal arts college, seeking an education in elite spaces while balancing family obligations and the stress of the COVID pandemic. Highly informative and deeply moving, Meanings of Mobility sheds light on how higher education works for a select group, and what needs to change to provide such access to others."
—JOANNA DREBY, professor of sociology, University at Albany

"With penetrating prose, Leah Schmalzbauer provides an intimate portrait of how poverty shapes undergraduate life at even the wealthiest institutions of higher education. Moreover, she forces us to grapple with the simple yet overlooked fact that students do not come to college alone; families come to college. Through revealing interviews with students and their families, Meanings of Mobility outlines the pitfalls and promises of pursuing higher education for the most vulnerable members of society. And with care and attention born of a dedicated scholar, Schmalzbauer provides insights into what can be done to make our institutions not just accessible, but inclusive."
—ANTHONY A. JACK, assistant professor of education, Harvard University

Over the past twenty years, elite colleges and universities enacted policies that reshaped the racial and class composition of their campuses, and over the past decade, Latinos’ college attendance notably increased. While discussions on educational mobility often focus on its perceived benefits – that it will ultimately lead to social and economic mobility – less attention is paid to the process of “making it” and the challenges low-income youth experience when navigating these elite spaces. In Meanings of Mobility, sociologist Leah C. Schmalzbauer explores the experiences of low-income Latino youth attending highly selective, elite colleges.

To better understand these experiences, Schmalzbauer draws on interviews with 60 low-income Latino youth who graduated or were set to graduate from Amherst College, one of the most selective private colleges in the United States, as well as their parents and siblings. The vast majority of these students were the first in their immigrant families to go to college in the U.S. She finds that while most of the students believed attending Amherst provided them with previously unimaginable opportunities, adjusting to life on campus came with significant challenges. Many of the students Schmalzbauer spoke with had difficulties adapting to the cultural norms at Amherst as well as with relating to their non-Latino, non-low-income peers. The challenges these students faced were not limited to life on campus. As they attempted to adapt to Amherst, many felt distanced from the family and friends they left behind who could not understand the new challenges they faced.

The students credit their elite education for access to extraordinary educational and employment opportunities. However, their experiences while in college and afterward reveal that the relationship between educational and social mobility is much more complicated and less secure than popular conversations about the “American Dream” suggest. Many students found that their educational attainment was not enough to erase the core challenges of growing up in a marginalized immigrant family: many were still poor, faced racism, and those who were undocumented or had undocumented family members still feared deportation. The challenges they faced were only intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Schmalzbauer suggests ways institutions of higher education can better support low-income Latino students and lower the emotional price of educational mobility, including the creation of immigration offices on campus to provide programming and support for undocumented students and their families. She recommends educating staff to better understand the centrality of family for these students and the challenges they face, as well as educating more privileged students about inequality and the life experiences of their marginalized peers.

Meanings of Mobility provides compelling insights into the difficulties faced and the resilience demonstrated by low-income Latinos pursuing educational and social mobility.

LEAH C. SCHMALZBAUER is Karen and Brian Conway ’80, P’18 Presidential Teaching Professor of American Studies and Sociology, Amherst College 

In this booklet, Mary E. Richmond discusses the arguments for and against mothers’ pensions. She maintains that policies legislating that mothers stay home with their children may defend motherhood at the expense of mothers.

MARY E. RICHMOND was the director of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.  

“Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley have written an insightful book that documents just how fragile the American Dream is and always has been for Black workers. Anyone who wants to understand the complex, nuanced relationship between race, gender, and economic insecurity needs to pick up Work in Black and White immediately.”
—ADIA WINGFIELD, vice dean of faculty development and diversity, professor of sociology, Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts and Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

“Work in Black and White deftly weaves Black and White workers’ sense making of their labor market insecurities with clear historical and demographic analyses. ‘Stories have the power to make inequality legitimate,’ the authors write and go on to document the commonalities and divergence in stories told by educated men and women. While Black and White workers share aspirations for security, they part ways on how to understand the barriers to achieving it. Black workers recognize continuities in racism and White nepotism but also tend to believe they have some control over their own futures. Whites misperceive their precarity as a loss of racial privilege, while being blind to their advantaged reliance on White networks to get and keep jobs. Both groups embrace myths around hard work, education, and meritocracy and so are unable to imagine, much less generate, a political agenda to deal with the profound structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy. Read this book.”
— DONALD TOMASKOVIC-DEVEY, professor of sociology and director, Center for Employment Equity, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“Work in Black and White reminds us that leaving school is just the beginning of the struggle for economic security. Many workers experience recessions as new threats and recoveries as challenges to their past accomplishments. And, of course, nothing works the same for women and men or Blacks and Whites. Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley build a case for employment policy that goes beyond credentials and self-reliance; America needs to reset the imbalance between workers and employers.”
—MICHAEL HOUT, professor of sociology and director, Center for Advanced Social Science Research, New York University

The ability to achieve economic security through hard work is a central tenet of the American Dream, but significant shifts in today’s economy have fractured this connection. While economic insecurity has always been a reality for some Americans, Black Americans have historically long experienced worse economic outcomes than Whites. In Work in Black and White, sociologists Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley draw on interviews with 79 middle-aged Black and White Americans to explore how their attitudes and perceptions of success are influenced by the stories American culture has told about the American Dream – and about who should have access to it and who should not.

Branch and Hanley find that Black and White workers draw on racially distinct histories to make sense of today’s rising economic insecurity. White Americans have grown increasingly pessimistic and feel that the American Dream is now out of reach, mourning the loss of a sense of economic security which they took for granted. But Black Americans tend to negotiate their present insecurity with more optimism, since they cannot mourn something they never had. All educated workers bemoaned the fact that their credentials no longer guarantee job security, but Black workers lamented the reality that even with an education, racial inequality continues to block access to good jobs for many.

The authors interject a provocative observation into the ongoing debate over opportunity, security, and the American Dream: Among policymakers and the public alike, Americans talk too much about education. The ways people navigate insecurity, inequality, and uncertainty rests on more than educational attainment. The authors call for a public policy that ensures dignity in working conditions and pay while accounting for the legacies of historical inequality.

Americans want the game of life to be fair. While the survey respondents expressed common ground on the ideal of meritocracy, opinions about to achieve economic security for all diverge along racial lines, with the recognition – or not – of differences in current and past access to opportunity in America.

Work in Black and White is a call to action for meaningful policies to make the premise of the American Dream a reality.

ENOBONG HANNAH BRANCH is Senior Vice President for Equity and Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University

CAROLINE HANLEY is Associate Professor of Sociology, William & Mary

Extreme weather is increasing in scale and severity as global warming worsens. While poorer communities are typically most vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change, even well-resourced communities are increasingly vulnerable as climate-related storms intensify. Yet little is known about how middle-class communities are responding to these storms and the resulting damage. In Soaking the Middle Class, sociologists Anna Rhodes and Max Besbris examine how a middle-class community recovers from a climate-related disaster and how this process fosters inequality within these kinds of places.

In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dropped record-breaking rainfall in Southeast Texas resulting in more than $125 billion in direct damages. Rhodes and Besbris followed 59 flooded households in Friendswood, Texas, for two years after the storm to better understand the recovery process in a well-resourced, majority-White, middle-class suburban community. As such, Friendswood should have been highly resilient to storms like Harvey, yet Rhodes and Besbris find that the recovery process exacerbated often-invisible economic inequality between neighbors. Two years after Harvey, some households were in better financial positions than they were before the storm, while others still had incomplete repairs, were burdened with large new debts, and possessed few resources to draw on should another disaster occur.

Rhodes and Besbris find that recovery policies were significant drivers of inequality, with flood insurance playing a key role in the divergent recovery outcomes within Friendswood. Households with flood insurance prior to Harvey tended to have higher incomes than those that did not. These households received high insurance payouts, enabling them to replace belongings, hire contractors, and purchase supplies. Households without coverage could apply for FEMA assistance, which offered considerably lower payouts, and for government loans, which would put them into debt. Households without coverage found themselves exhausting their financial resources, including retirement savings, to cover repairs, which put them in even more financially precarious positions than they were before the flood.

The vast majority of Friendswood residents chose to repair and return to their homes after Hurricane Harvey. Even this devastating flood did not alter their plans for long-term residential stability, and the structure of recovery policies only further oriented homeowners towards returning to their homes. Prior to Harvey, many Friendswood households relied on flood damage from previous storms to judge their vulnerability and considered themselves at low risk. After Harvey, many found it difficult to assess their level of risk for future flooding. Without strong guidance from federal agencies or the local government on how to best evaluate risk, many residents ended up returning to potentially unsafe places.

As climate-related disasters become more severe, Soaking the Middle Class illustrates how inequality in the United States will continue to grow if recovery policies are not fundamentally changed.

ANNA RHODES is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rice University

MAX BESBRIS is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

We recently sat down with Ann Morning & Marcello Maneri to understand how everyday people view race in Italy and the United States. You can watch an abridged video of the interview above, or read or listen to the full transcript below.

Listen to Part 1 of 2 of the interview

Listen to Part 2 of 2 of the interview

Read a transcript of the full interview here.

Scholars and politicians often assume a significant gap between the ways that Americans and Europeans think about race. According to this template, in the U.S. race is associated with physical characteristics, while in Western Europe race has disappeared, and discrimination is based on insurmountable cultural differences. However, little research has addressed how average Americans and Europeans actually think and talk about race. In An Ugly Word, sociologists Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri examine American and Italian understandings of group difference in order to determine if and how they may differ.

Morning and Maneri interviewed over 150 people across the two countries about differences among what they refer to as “descent-based groups.” Using this concept allowed them to sidestep the language of “race” and “ethnicity,” which can be unnecessarily narrow, poorly defined, or even offensive to some. Drawing on these interviews, the authors find that while ways of speaking about group difference vary considerably across the Atlantic, underlying beliefs about it do not. The similarity in American and Italian understandings of difference was particularly evident when discussing sports. Both groups relied heavily on traditional stereotypes of Black physicality to explain Black athletes’ overrepresentation in sports like U.S. football and their underrepresentation in sports like swimming – contradicting the claims that a biological notion of race is a distinctly American phenomenon.

While American and Italian concepts of difference may overlap extensively, they are not identical. Interviews in Italy were more likely to reveal beliefs about groups’ innate, unchangeable temperaments, such as friendly Senegalese and dishonest Roma. And where physical difference was seen by Italians as superficial and unimportant, cultural difference was perceived as deeply meaningful and consequential. In contrast, U.S. interviewees saw cultural difference as supremely malleable—and often ascribed the same fluidity to racial identity, which they believed stemmed from culture as well as biology. In light of their findings, Morning and Maneri propose a new approach to understanding cross-cultural beliefs about descent-based difference that includes identifying the traits people believe differentiate groups, how they believe those traits are acquired, and whether they believe these traits can change.

An Ugly Word is an illuminating, cross-national examination of the ways in which people around the world make sense of race and difference.

ANN MORNING is professor of sociology at New York University

MARCELLO MANERI is associate professor of sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca