“The 1.2 million US deportations from 2014 to 2024 are more than a statistic. They are a compendium of 1.2 million tragedies. In Surviving the ICE Age, Joanna Dreby harnesses her formidable ethnographic skills to vividly depict the pain, suffering, and trauma inflicted on the children of New York’s immigrants, most of whom are US citizens. It offers a sobering chronicle of the damage being done to the next generation of Americans that should be read by all.”
—DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

“Joanna Dreby and her team powerfully illuminate the profound generational burdens of immigration enforcement. Surviving the ICE Age reveals how silencing, disruption of childhood relationships, and challenges to belonging shape development long after enforcement episodes occur. As we face increasingly virulent anti-immigrant policies, this compassionate and urgent book reveals what is truly at stake for the next generation when we prioritize deportation over humane immigration reform.”
—CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO, professor in residence and director, Immigration Initiative, Harvard Graduate School of Education

“Joanna Dreby’s Surviving the ICE Age is a compelling and deeply textured exploration of the profound and often overlooked effects of immigration enforcement on immigrant children’s lives and futures. Timely and essential, this book offers a powerful account of a critical issue, making a major contribution to our understanding of its human cost—and to the migration literature. An important work from a distinguished social scientist.”
—MICHAEL FIX, senior fellow and former president, Migration Policy Institute

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

“Mixed Heritage in the Family takes mixed-race studies to the next generation. Carolyn Liebler and Miri Song break new ground by pushing multiraciality beyond the individual and considering how it influences individuals’ choice of spouse, their child-rearing, and the transmission of racial identity to their children. In its mixed methods, its multiple group comparisons, and its careful analysis of place and context, this book is a major advance for the field.”
—WENDY D. ROTH, professor of sociology, University of Pennsylvania

“Through the skillfully blended analysis of census data and in-depth interviews, Carolyn Liebler and Miri Song expand our understanding of mixed-heritage racial self-reporting, especially as it is entwined with the racial identification of spouses and children. Equally importantly, they also advance our knowledge of how local social contexts shape racial identity options.”
—ANN MORNING, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Sociology and divisional dean for the social sciences, New York University

“Mixed Heritage in the Family is a signature achievement. Using interview accounts and decades of national data, this book provides the most comprehensive assessment of mixed-race adults to date. Carolyn Liebler and Miri Song offer a window into the many ways identification, relationship formation, and child-rearing all factor into how mixing can alter the lines between groups. Additionally, these authors reveal how critical it is to consider the role of geography. Liebler and Song provide a sophisticated and accessible narrative to reshape how sociologists understand the role of racial mixture in drawing and redrawing boundaries around racial groups.”
—JENIFER BRATTER, professor of sociology and associate chair, Rice University

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 Powerless: The People’s Struggle for Energy, Diana Hernández and Jennifer Laird provide a deeply researched and urgent account of energy insecurity, a pervasive yet overlooked crisis that forces millions of Americans to choose between basic needs like heating their homes or feeding their families. Through rigorous analysis and poignant personal narratives, they highlight the far-reaching impacts of energy insecurity and offer practical, equitable solutions to provide affordable, reliable energy in a rapidly changing world.”
—JASON BORDOFF, professor of professional practice in international and public affairs, and founding director, Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs

“‘Energy security’ is not merely a problem for nation states. In Powerless, Diana Hernández and Jennifer Laird show how the high cost of core utilities makes everyday life more difficult and dangerous in poor communities across the United States. This book is an important contribution to the emerging field of energy studies and to larger debates about inequality as well.”
—ERIC KLINENBERG, professor of sociology, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in Social Science, Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University

Energy serves as the lifeblood of our daily experiences. It permeates virtually every aspect of our existence, facilitating nourishment, safety, and productivity. When affordability threatens energy’s availability, a family’s living situation can become untenable—too cold, too hot, too dark, and too often, unhealthy and unsafe. In Powerless, sociologists Diana Hernández and Jennifer Laird reveal the hidden hardship of “energy insecurity” – the inability to adequately meet household energy needs.

Approximately one in ten households in the U.S. are energy insecure and four in ten are at risk for energy insecurity. These statistics alone do not convey the acute pain of utility shutoffs, or the relentless toll of chronic energy hardships marked by difficult choices and harsh living conditions. Drawing on survey data and interviews with one hundred energy-insecure individuals and families, Hernández and Laird detail the experience of energy insecurity. Individuals and families suffering from energy insecurity endure economic hardships, such as difficulty paying utility bills, utility debt, and disconnection from utility services. They also struggle with physical challenges, such as poor housing conditions and poor or dysfunctional heating and cooling systems. They are often forced to make difficult choices about what bills to pay. These decisions are sometimes referred to as “heat or eat?” choices, as families cannot afford to pay for heating and food at the same time. Energy insecure individuals and families employ a variety of strategies to keep energy costs down to avoid having to make these hard choices. This includes deliberate underconsumption of energy, enduring physical discomfort, and using dangerous alternatives such as open flames, ovens, or space heaters to try to maintain a comfortable temperature in their home. To be energy insecure is to suffer. Despite the heavy toll of energy insecurity, most people confront these difficulties behind closed doors, believing it is a private matter. Thus, the enormous social crisis of energy insecurity goes unnoticed.

Hernández and Laird argue that household energy is a basic human right and detail policies and practices that would expand access to consistent, safe, clean, and affordable energy. Their proposals include improving the current energy safety net, which is limited and often does not serve the most energy insecure due to stringent program requirements and administrative burdens. They also suggest redesigning rates to accommodate income, promoting enrollment and expansion of discount programs, reforming utility disconnection policies, improving energy literacy, and ensuring an equitable shift to renewable energy resources.

Powerless creates a comprehensive picture of the complex social and environmental issue of energy insecurity and shows how energy equity is not just an aspiration but an achievable reality.

“Written with a strong theoretical background and based in in-depth interviews, The Returned explores the complex and often contradictory experiences of return migration to Mexico. It reveals the mixed emotions of individuals who find themselves trapped between two worlds—one left behind with lost economic opportunities and the other not fully embraced. The authors illuminate the challenges and transformations that shape the lives of returnees, providing a nuanced perspective on the forces that drive and define migration within a complex policy framework.”
—MARÍA DOLORES PARÍS POMBO, profesora-investigadora, Departamento de Estudios Culturales, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, B.C.

“The Returned makes an important contribution to research on migration, both by focusing on the less researched reality of return migration, which has grown dramatically in recent decades, and by illuminating the struggles returnees face—the sense of being norteado (‘disoriented’ is one translation) when they go to live in Mexico City. Claudia Masferrer, Erin R. Hamilton, and Nicole Denier expertly analyze the experience of deportees and de facto deportees (those who return to Mexico with a deported spouse or family member) and trace how return migration fits into the life course. An important book.”
—ROBERT COURTNEY SMITH, professor of sociology, CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College

“The Returned tells the story of a historic turning point in which more Mexicans come back from the United States than emigrate. Lively interviews reveal how families cope with binational separation, finding work, and starting over in Mexico City. This is a highly readable contribution to understanding return migration.”
—DAVID FITZGERALD, Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations and professor of sociology, University of California San Diego

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