Robert Courtney Smith is the author of RSF book Dreams Achieved and Denied: Mexican Intergenerational Mobility. In Dreams Achieved and Denied, Smith examines the historic intergenerational mobility of U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City and the laws, policies, and individual and family practices that promoted—and inhibited—social mobility.

Robert Courtney Smith is professor in the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, and professor in the Sociology Department, Political Science Department, and Program in Social Welfare, Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is a contributor to RSF volume New Destinations and RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences issue “Undocumented Immigrants and Their Experience with Illegality.”

Q. What motivated you to write Dreams Achieved and Denied? Why is it important to study the social and economic mobility of children of Mexican immigrants in New York City?

I will answer the second question first. This is a huge debate in the country and in the various disciplines that study immigration: What will happen with the second, third, and subsequent generations? How will things go? And what are the factors that affect that? And there are lots of stories in the public debate. There are lots of stories told by politicians about how immigrants are ruining things and how the second generation is not assimilating and not contributing—none of which hold up under empirical scrutiny. And Mexicans, in particular, have been used as the poster group for bad assimilators—for a group that doesn't assimilate—and I don't find any evidence of that. In fact, there's an old quote by the old cartoon, Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” In fact, the biggest inhibitor of second-generation upward mobility, in my study and in many others, is that that some of the 1.5 generation can't get legal status.

People who did not have legal status, even when their families did all the right things, and they did all the right things—they kept the immigrant bargain by going to school, by finishing college, graduating, by being good people and working hard, and helping their younger siblings—still could not become as upwardly mobile because they could not enter the formal labor market. They did not qualify for health care. They couldn't get access to student loans. Before 2019, undocumented people couldn't get driver's licenses in New York State, and that caused lots of deportations, which causes lots of downward mobility in the second generation. So, the reason to study this is to counteract the pernicious myths that surround immigration, particularly Mexican immigrants, and to show that, in fact, U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City have a rate of college graduation that's three to three and a half times higher than in every study done anywhere else in the country in the last 40 years. All of those other studies have a 13% to 14% second generation graduation rate, but in my study, and in the census data, it's much higher. In the 2000 census, 42% of men and 49% of women who are U.S.-born of Mexican heritage had college degrees. That's a huge jump in one generation.

As to why I've studied it: I do long term ethnographic research. I do short term projects as well, and publish on them relatively quickly, but the keel of my career has been long-term ethnographic work. So, I follow people for a long time. I get, not only to see what happens at different points in time, but to see what the outcomes of those things are. And one of the book’s central contributions, I think, is to both identify mechanisms that cause and promote or inhibit upward mobility and to assess how much they affected the outcomes. I can't extrapolate to the whole population statistically, because it's not a random sample, but what I can do is causally trace processes within and across cases. I can ask: What are the mechanisms and factors that promoted mobility and how did they work?

Q. Can you speak more about the role legal status plays in the life chances and trajectories of NYCOMP participants?

One of the key strengths of my study is that I followed these participants from their late teens, early 20s through to their late 20s, mid-30s—or longer for some—and some of them changed legal status during the study or since they had arrived. Legal status category changers are like walking counterfactuals in my study. And what I mean by counterfactual analysis is, “What if?” analysis. What if this happened or that happened? Usually, it's historians or other social scientists who have deep knowledge of something and can set up the thought experiment well. The problem with quantitative counterfactual analysis is you never know if something you didn’t account for has influenced something. But in this kind of counterfactual proxy case analysis, it's the actual person—the same case—who went from being undocumented to documented. And they attribute their improved trajectories in life—as do I because I've seen it across the whole dataset—to getting legal status.

Some people in my study who got legal status or DACA had their incomes go up three, four, five times what they had made when they were undocumented. People are able to buy an apartment. People are able to go back and see their family that they've never met before. Undocumented young people often don't marry their long-term boyfriend or girlfriend because they're afraid of being separated. They don't have kids because they're afraid of losing them if they get deported. One respondent said to me that when you get permanent status, “You can plan now.” You can envision a future in a way that you could not. I think one of the cruelest dimensions of the current immigration system is that you've got people who've been here for 20, 30 years, who come here as undocumented babies, who are still undocumented, and can still be separated from their families at any moment for no reason at all. Intergenerational punishment is not a concept in American law and punishment should be proportional to the crime. You don't put a baby in jail if they break something in a store, right? If I robbed a liquor store, and I got sent to jail, you wouldn't punish my children, right? So, it's not a concept that makes sense in American law, but that is the reality for too many American families with undocumented members.

The other example I like to bring up is that we have faced a problem like this before. One of the best parallels was analyzed by Elizabeth Cohen, and that is, “What did the newly born United States of America do after the American Revolution with colonists who had sided with the English in that war, with the Tories? What do you do with people who sided with the British in the first war fought by America on American soil?” Well, if we were going by today's logic, we would have put them all in jail or deported them—or both—seized all their assets. But that's not what we did. If they were otherwise of good character, they weren't criminals, and they swore allegiance to the United States, they were allowed to become citizens. So, here's my question, if we allowed people who sided with an enemy of the United States in a war fought on our soil, if we could give those people the grace of electing to become citizens, why can't we do that for the people who were brought here as babies or as young children who had no choice in the matter? It makes no sense to me.

Q. New York City and New York State are known to be pro-mobility and immigrant friendly environments. Can you talk more about some of the policies and practices in New York that help facilitate mobility among immigrants?

Yes, I'm happy to do that. I’m going to send a huge shout out to my employer, CUNY, actually. CUNY has been a huge part of this. When I started doing this research and when I started working at CUNY, nearly 20 years ago, I think there were 752 people of Mexican descent in CUNY. This is institutional data that I got from being on a committee to promote applications from Mexican people. And, at that point, there were 30,000 or 40,000 eligible Mexican young people in the population, so, we had a massive under application problem. And CUNY responded; the Vice Chancellor at that time, Jay Hershenson, formed a commission. We created the Si Se Puede website, which means “Yes You Can,” which helps people to apply, and we involve community organizations. In 2000, most Mexicans who went to college went to private colleges, and now it's 80-something, 90% public college, which are mostly CUNY and a few SUNYs. So, CUNY has been awesome that way.

I think another thing that's been awesome is the Green Light Law. In 2019, it made it possible for established, long-term residents of New York, regardless of legal status, to get a standard driver's license if they were otherwise settled. I think the DREAM Act, which gives New York state tax money to college students who graduated from New York State high schools, has been huge.

Some of my Dominican friends have joked with me the best thing about New York is how close it is to the United States, meaning that it's so different than much of the country. We really look a lot more like Sweden than we do like Mississippi, for example. Because everybody in New York City has a right to health insurance regardless of their ability to pay. Now, it's not congressional level Cadillac health insurance plans, but no one is going to be thrown out by the hospital if they're ill without getting medical care—and not just emergency Medicaid stabilization, right? That policy enabled people to be able to get health insurance, even when they were really poor, to bring their kids without worry to the doctor.

And the fact that the police are not supposed to collaborate with ICE also meant that people didn't fear the police in the way that they do in my studies in some places in upstate New York, where children cry whenever they see a police car because they know that the police will pull Mexican looking people over and could deport their mother, who's driving them home from the doctor. So, those things are very, very different and very, very important.  And the potential impacts of local law enforcement practices are huge. U.S.-born children with an undocumented parent are about 7% of all children – over 300,000 – in New York State.

Some of this is just really good public policy that New York State and New York City have both committed to. I think CUNY gets a lot of credit for driving upward mobility. I also think that New York nonprofits are very important. There were no after school programs for Mexicans when I started this work in the late 90’s, early 2000’s. I helped to found one of those organizations. Members of the Mexican community, a lot of second generation, U.S.-born leaders who have now become grownups—30-, 40-something year olds—are now the people leading organizations that are promoting college applications, promoting school success, promoting knowledge of how to get ahead. That's a huge and positive growth in the capacity of the community to become mobile as a group. That's been amazing, and it's been fostered by CUNY. It's been fostered by good policies in New York City.

There are some other things that are different in the city compared to other places like Los Angeles, where there's been a lot of research done, and one of them is the subway. There's another book by Russell Sage, Stagnant Dreamers, by Maria Rendon, and it's a really quite good book, and I have an extended conversation with it, as well as with Eddie Telles’ and Vilma Ortiz's book, Generations of Exclusion. The subway enables people to be mobile in a way that's not as easy in a place like Los Angeles. If you have the offer of an internship in Los Angeles, most likely you’re going to need a car to get there or money to pay for a Lyft or an Uber. But if you are a New York City high school student and you have an internship, you can probably get to it for free or cheaply on the subway in less than half an hour. So, no matter what neighborhood you live in, you can get an internship in midtown or anywhere. Now, I understand internships don't fix structural problems, but they do, in fact, open lots of doors for immigrants. They help to change the way people think. They help to create networks that enable people to further develop both their own capacities and to get opportunities.

Another contribution of the book is that it situates mobility in a social world with more common place diversity than reported or assumed in most prior research.  In most of the research done in the last 50 years, they assume that, empirically, there is a Black-White world or a Black-Brown world. In Los Angeles it's mostly White people, and Brown people—Mexican people, mainly Central Americans. And so, the spaces that upwardly mobile Mexican second, third generation people go, are mostly into White neighborhoods and White workplaces. In my study, that was not mainly the case. There were some people that did, but there's a lot more upwardly mobile spaces that are Black, Brown, White, and Asian. The commonplace diversity—the everyday diversity—of New York, I think, reduces the stigma and reduces the cognitive or social difficulties that might come with being in a place where you're the only one—the only Mexican. And I think that's been very, very helpful as well. So, New York comes out looking really good in this book, and supports a lot of second generation mobility.

Q. Children of Mexican immigrants also employed numerous strategies in order to achieve mobility. Can you speak more about the role of the immigrant bargain in social mobility?

I'll say this, every single family where the U.S.-born kid and the documented parents both kept the immigrant bargain, those children were upwardly mobile or very upwardly mobile. The immigrant bargain is a concept I coined in 2006. It describes how children of immigrants redeem their parents sacrifice by doing well in school, being good people, helping their younger siblings in school, and if they graduate college or when they start working, they contribute to the family budget. When I coined this concept, these kids were all late teens, early 20s, so everything was aspirational. They nearly all said they wanted to keep the immigrant bargain. This book follows up with them 10 to 15 or 20 years later, where we can see who has kept it and who has not. And what I found is that kids who are U.S.-born, every single one of them who kept the immigrant bargain and whose parents kept the immigrant bargain ended up in the “college graduate” category or the “highflyer,” the two highest outcome categories. They were very upwardly mobile. Almost all of the young people in their 20s and 30s who did not keep the immigrant bargain or did not express an interest in keeping the immigrant bargain ended up in the bottom two outcome categories of four, which are “stuck muddlers” or “shallow slopers.” Not keeping the immigrant bargain would be like moving out early and not helping your parents, not finishing high school or college, getting in trouble with the law, things like that—not contributing to the family any other way.

Because the data in the project is deep, triangulated across cases, and long-term, I can also trace how different processes relate and impact mobility. For example, if you don't have legal status, you cannot fully keep the immigrant bargain. The documented or U.S. citizen parents keep the immigrant bargain by loving their children and working hard and giving them a platform from which to launch into early adulthood. But most of the time, undocumented parents cannot give their children the legal status they need to launch into the formal economy, which is the place where your education gets converted into better income and better lifestyle. The undocumented children in their 20s can graduate from college, they can be good people, they can help their younger siblings in school, but they can't fully keep the immigrant bargain because they cannot make more money to contribute to the family or to help the younger children be upwardly mobile because they can't work legally. Even if they're college graduates or have master's degrees they don't earn commensurately with their educations. So, the lack of legal status really undermines the immigrant bargain, which is a key driver of second-generation mobility in the book.

How legal status relates to these intergenerational and intra-family processes is a good contribution of the book. When US citizen participants finished college and began working, they dramatically increased the family’s overall income, while their same age undocumented peers did not increase the family’s overall income as much. In lots of cases, families with undocumented adult children had incomes that were less than half, or even a third, of those where the adult children were US citizens. The younger siblings in the former type of family grow up  in poverty, but the younger siblings of the latter grow up in middle class families.

Q. New York City allows students to attend schools outside of their designated school zone. How does school choice impact opportunities for advancement? How did upwardly mobile NYCOMPers take advantage of this policy?

I think the case in most places, for example, in Los Angeles, most of the time you have to go to your zoned high school, which is going to be in your neighborhood; it's geographically bounded. So, if you live in a neighborhood that does not have a strong school system, that there's a lot of crime, you're going to have to go to not a great school. One of the key mechanisms for upward mobility, and it was multiplicative or generative over time, was choosing better high schools, and sometimes middle schools. Many of my informants would say, “I lived in a bad neighborhood. I didn't want to go to my local zoned high school because it was like all gangs and kids didn't want to study. So, I went to high school in Manhattan.” They got out of the social circle of kids that they knew weren't going to do well in middle school, they went to a different place, and it enabled them to hit the reset button. And they could do this easily on the subway. It didn't cost them money.

The better schools often had mentoring programs. They had internship programs. They had more teachers who had more than five years of experience compared to the other schools. One of the schools where I followed high school kids around had four principals in a very short time. Most of them lasted a year or less. One year, I had two principals in the same school because it just wasn't a great school. One of them was shut down twice during the course of the study and then reopened. So, if you have to go to a school that's not good, it's not going to add as much value and there were fewer opportunities, fewer doors opened.

The in-class learning was also very different. I actually followed some of my participants in their senior years of high school around their classes. I remember I'd gone to this one high school—and I literally timed it—in one of the classes, the teacher taught for five to six minutes to the three or four students right in front of her, and the rest of the class was pandemonium. This teacher looked like she had just graduated from college. Some of the other classes had teachers that were more experienced than this, but the other classes were also disrupted. I went to a different school that was more high functioning, and there was a sub who said, “I need to do an oral exam.” It was a language class and I thought, “Oh gosh, this is going to be pandemonium.” And the next thing I heard was all of all the books opening and all the kids just studying silently because it was a very high functioning New York City public high school. And I thought, “Wow, this is really different.”

Knowing to choose better schools was not the parents’ social capital. The parents didn't know this. And at that point, the parents and the kids were not getting this through organizations that do after school stuff, because there were none. They were getting this from their older cousins and their older friends who had succeeded and had gone to these schools and so it was a family strategy. I actually have a chapter that didn't make it into the book about how families where the older siblings did well or poorly, how that affected their subsequent strategies for picking high schools for their children. In most cases, the bad outcomes of the oldest not finishing high school or getting in trouble were not replicated for the next oldest child, because the parents put them in a different high school, or let the kids pick a different high school.

Now, having to get into a “better school” instead of going in the local “bad school” is an indictment of the New York City school system. Nobody should have to go to the local bad school. There shouldn't be any local bad schools. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water and just go with this pernicious image that nothing works in the New York City public schools, right? Yes, there's inequality, and yes, some schools are not offering the education they should. But other schools are really working, and students are thriving, and in fact, with regards to mentoring, the most common long-term mentors were former New York City public school teachers who mentored these kids for 10, 15, even 20 years. One of them actually introduced the person to their future spouse and went to the wedding. These are teachers who really care and are really committed. A lot of them were immigrants themselves. It's a really beautiful story about the New York City public schools and the Mexican community.

Q. The impact of mentors is understudied in immigration research. How does mentorship impact social mobility?

There was a pervasive story that all of these teenagers and young people in their early 20s told me, “I'm the only Mexican who's going to college, who’s not pregnant, who’s not going to jail, not in a gang.” “I'm the only one.” “I'm the only one.” And I think this myth reflected the fact that around the year 2000—when I was collecting the first round of data—there were three times more Mexican-born teenagers than U.S.-born teenagers in NYC. After the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the parents got legal status and then a few years later got permanent residency, and then they got citizenship and they reunited their families. So, you had this huge influx of 10- to 14-year-olds. It takes five years to learn a new language, but it's quicker when you're younger. But if you came as an undocumented middle schooler or an undocumented 14- or 15-year-old kid who then goes to a New York City high school, it's extremely difficult to adapt at that age in a new system, and there was a huge number of dropouts among these young Mexican newcomers. So, there was some truth to the fact that there was a high dropout rate.

But I also would say to people, “But I know that you are not the only Mexican who's going to college, because your brother went to college,” or “Your cousin is in college now, and he's the one that told you to go and how to apply.” So, I've actually talked to some of the people in my study about this. And they're like, “Yeah, we believe that. But you're right, it's not true.” And when I spoke to them about it again in their late 20s or even their 30s, they realized that they were not the only ones, but that that was the dominant story about Mexicans at the time. But by now, a lot of the community is very upwardly mobile, and I think what has emerged is a Mexican culture of mobility. Going to college is now a Mexican thing to do. A Mexican parent would say, “We do this, we go to college.” And that's very different than the story of Mexicans as problematic assimilators, right? People who don't integrate fully. It's not true from my study and the data in the census for New York City.

One of the things mentors can do is to change the way people think. They enable people to reimagine what their possible futures could be. So, if you are a kid who's going to a decent high school in Brooklyn who has a mentor who then brings you to a college and says, “You could go here, I will help you write your application and try to open some doors for you,” it's suddenly possible to go there when you didn't even know that that college existed.

I did research for CUNY about 20 years ago, and Mexican community respondents who answered the survey (over 700 people) thought that you couldn't go to college if you were undocumented. They thought you had to go full time and that it cost $10,000 or $20,000 a year, when, at that point, it was like $2,500 a semester or something like that. These were the myths. And, so, I think one of the things mentors can do is help concretize what you can actually do. And they can concretely open doors for you.

Now, one of the things that's interesting here is that legal status, again, can create a wall. So, you could be a really high achieving student who picked a really good high school and has a great mentor, but that mentor cannot open doors for you in internships. For example, I had a student who had a teacher in grade school who was her hero, who she has stayed in touch with forever, still now in her adult life. She was good at cultivating mentors. And when she was in college she had a professor who tried to get her placed in a particular internship. She wanted to be an early elementary school teacher like her hero, but she couldn't do the student teaching because she didn't have a social security number. Now, I get that you don't want people that you can't do a background check working with children—I have no objection to that policy—but I do think what a horrible shame it is that you've got people who are so motivated to work in early childhood education—it was her dream —and they can’t. All they want to do is help kids. We need more people like that. We don't need to block their path. It’s such a horrible, cruel policy to keep people for 20-30 years or indefinitely in undocumented status. It's not consistent with America's best values.

Q. What was the relationship between having Black friends and mobility?

I wrote an article about 10 years ago about Black Mexicans—Mexican youth who identified in high school as Black, but then in their 20s, identified, again, as Mexican. But the reason they identified as Black as teenagers was because, at that point, in the early 2000s there were not a lot of Mexican students who were going to college and were high profile and had been successful and gotten jobs that made decent money and could then help other people, but there were lots of Black students in the schools who did that. One of these high flying Black Mexican high schoolers told me, “I wanted to be a smart Black girl because that was the model that I could see because there were no White students in the school.” When I followed people into classrooms, I was one of one, two, or three White people in the room. It was me, the teacher, and one or two White students, maximum. So, it was really a Black-Brown, sometimes Black-Brown-Asian student world. But the smart Black kids in the calculus class were the kids that she wanted to be like, so she made friends with them, and did homework with them.

There's a statistically significant correlation over the length of the study that if you have Black friends in your first two years of high school, you are 36% more likely to end up in the two highest outcome categories. Of course, you can't extrapolate that, because it's a very nonrandom, very small—huge ethnographically, but small—sample, but it is important that it's that huge of a correlation—that your chances of ending up in the high outcome categories go up quite dramatically if you had Black friends in your first years of high school.

All of these students who became upwardly mobile by identifying with or making friends with those smart Black students, who are now in their 20s and 30s or older, do not see themselves as Black anymore. But they cultivated the social capital for upward mobility when identifying as Black, and are now helping to create that Mexican culture of mobility. So, in a certain sense, the Mexican culture of mobility is an outgrowth of a Black culture of mobility in the middle class, and not just in the middle class, but in the New York City public schools.

Q. What are “Mexican mobility masculinity” and “gang masculinity”? How did they relate to adult outcomes for NYCOMPers? 

I called mobility masculinity Mexican because it was the dominant form of masculinity among my study participants. Part of the “bad assimilators” story in public life in America about Mexicans is that not only do they not assimilate, but the men are macho and don't value school, and all kinds of pernicious stereotypes that turned out not to be true in my study. But the stereotypes are more consistent with gang masculinity. Gang masculinity means that you are always on the lookout for any kind of offense and being aggrieved. And you're keeping an account, and you’re obligated to attack somebody, physically or verbally, who offends you. You're supposed to get even with them, and you're supposed to have other gang members’ backs.  Some research says these traits describe Black or Brown masculinity as a whole, a unitary masculinity. In a lot of social science, people say this is hyper masculinity and it's Black and Brown masculinity. But empirically, this was not true in my study.  Only a small percentage of people, and mostly in their adolescence, maybe into their early 20s, enacted gang masculinity more than Mexican mobility masculinity. By their mid- to late 20s, I had very few people enacting any of the elements of gang masculinity. Mexican mobility masculinity was keeping the immigrant bargain by being a good person, not getting in trouble, helping your younger siblings, contributing to the family economy, walking away or avoiding fights, treating women as equals instead of treating them as subordinate to you.  It was the dominant form of masculinity, and predominant by the mid-20s. There was not a single case of parents teaching gang masculinity to their children as a map of how to grow into adulthood, but nearly all parents taught and enacted mobility masculinity (fathers at least) as a proper way to move into adulthood.

There are two or three ways that enacting these types of masculinity affected adult outcomes. The end version is that if you enacted gang masculinity as a teenager versus mobility masculinity, you had three years less of education at age 28 and you made $17,000 less a year. That's a huge impact at age 28, right? How did that happen? The practices that go along with Mexican mobility masculinity are that you stay in school, you don’t hang out on the street, and you use that time to study or work or help with your family. Whereas gang masculinity requires you to hang out and defend territory, requires you to defend others in conflicts, often it involves drinking and going to parties or public places where you could find conflict. And, so, I think a key piece of this is that it's not even just the model of masculinity, it's that the enactment of gang masculinity eats up the time that could be used otherwise to be productive, and puts one into more high-risk contexts and situations. That's a key mechanism by which this $17,000 a year and three years less of education happens. 

Q. What policies and practices would you recommend to help replicate the success of Mexican families in NYC elsewhere in the United States? 

Ah, so now we're moving into the realm of king for a day or queen for a day, right? What would you do, regardless of the almost the near impossibility of federal policies making anything better in the current impasse? What would you do?

So, on the federal level, I would obviously do a very broad and relatively quick legalization program. I would ensure that we screened out people who were violent or had committed serious crimes. I don't understand this story that everyone that supports legalization wants to let all the criminals go. I don't. If you've been violent and committed crimes, I'm as happy to see you deported as anybody else. But what I don't want to see anymore is mother's getting pulled over by a cop driving home from school, and then the kids get taken into foster care and she gets deported. Or the dad getting deported while stopped when driving home to his family, and the family loses 70% of their income. That's not consistent with American values, that's morally wrong, so, I would do a legalization program.

One of the key things that has helped promote mobility in my study is cheap public transit. The lack of cheap public transit or the lack of programs impedes mobility. In places like Los Angeles, you could create programs where every kid with an internship could take an Uber to and from their homes that would help. It’s not like you need to build a subway, which is mostly impossible. You could take measures. But if we could have a transit system that actually got people effectively from one place to the other that would decrease the harm of geographic isolation.

More funding for mentorship programs could have a big positive impact. I think policies that resulted in better schools and schools that taught the kind of skills that mentors help to teach people and the skills students learned in the stronger schools would be good. In stronger schools they learn different kinds of skills that made them able to launch into college better. Some people who ended up in the two higher outcome categories did not go to college, but they instead went to, for example, the police academy. Or they worked in a restaurant, then they opened their own business. I think there's an important and underdeveloped mobility route and mechanism in training people in trades and other kinds of work that do not require college. I think these routes would be really important things to invest in.

I think, also, New York City's policies of noncooperation with ICE have definitely helped people. When you live with the toxic stress of being undocumented or being a U.S. citizen child with an undocumented parent, it makes it harder for the children to sleep, and it makes it harder for them to do well in school. Other studies have shown it harms brain development. None of these things are good for children, and they're terrible for mobility, and they're terrible for the long-term economic contributions that those kids are going to make to American society. Also, if the children do not trust the police, because they're afraid you're going to deport their mom, and if the cops keep stopping you because your mom is Mexican looking, they're going to grow up not to trust the police as adults, right? The police cannot protect a community that does not trust them, because they won't share things with the police, won’t help them in their work. So, I would support policies that promote trust in the police. Moreover, these policies should also help the police themselves, not just in doing their jobs, but in going home to their own kids after having helped people, rather than having separated a mother from her kids after a traffic stop.

I think that CUNY has a lot to offer other public college systems. You know, there's a book, a very important book, by Paul Atwell, Michael Lavin, Thurston Domina, and Tania Levey, also by Russell Sage, Passing the Torch, examining whether open admissions—from the 70’s when it began—produced better outcomes for people. And, in fact, it did. Because even though it took many CUNY students a long time to graduate it wasn't because they were “lazy.” It was because, for example, they had to work full time, or some of them had children, right? And so, they would end up taking a semester or a year or two off and then going back and finish. It might have taken them seven or eight years, but getting the degree helped them, and it also even changed parenting practices for some. Many of them talked about that. I think that having more than one avenue into college, even for people who've graduated high school without good grades, is a good thing. CUNY is a social mobility machine. While there are things at CUNY that don't work well, there are of things—key on-mission things—that work really quite well, and open admissions is one of them. I really am quite proud to contribute to that mission, being a CUNY professor.