Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was enacted in August 2012, allowing undocumented youth who meet eligibility criteria to live and work in the United States for a period of 2 years. In April 2013, the Governor of Colorado signed the Advancing Students for a Stronger Economy Tomorrow bill granting undocumented students reduced tuition in the state's public universities. In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, this article addresses how legal reforms affect undocumented Latina/o youth in the context of a shifting political landscape in Colorado. Specifically, I address how these reforms affect immigrant youths' access to higher education and employment opportunities. Data from qualitative interviews with 18 Latina/o undocumented youth ages 16 to 25 show that, while immigration reforms have created some opportunities, the policies' limitations leave immigrant youth in "holding patterns" that delay or impede their access to higher education and, consequently, upward mobility. I also shed light on their perceptions of these reforms.
This article examines the effects of collective action on the development of Latino ethnic solidarity among immigrant, naturalized, and U.S.-born Latinos. The article reveals how ethnic solidarity came about from the perspective and with the help of grassroots organizers who coordinated the 2006 immigrant rights mobilizations. Through 55 interviews with grassroots organizers from immigrant and Latino rights groups, elected officials, and union and religious leaders throughout Colorado, it is shown that the immigrant rights marches strengthened a sense of ethnic solidarity among immigrant and native-born Latinos as the latter came to realize that they, too, were becoming targets of anti-immigrant rhetoric that became more pervasive in the midst of the immigration debate. The interview data show that the renewed sense of ethnic solidarity served to foment support for collective action. By building on prior work addressing the determinants of ethnic solidarity and collective action, these findings reveal the potential for organizers and political leaders to emphasize common goals among Latinos rather than ethnic, political, and class-based cleavages that are often the topic of political discourse.
This study builds upon and extends prior literature on political participation by examining individual-level and city-level determinants of Latinos' protest participation in the US. Multilevel models were used on a sample of 2,810 Latinos of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban descent. Individual factors such as age, education, income, religiosity, and organizational involvement are found to impact participation in expected directions. Results also point to a significant role for contextual factors in shaping the probability of participation. On the one hand, protest participation is more likely in cities with a greater presence of Latino organizations, which points to the importance of mobilizing agents. On the other hand, protest participation is less likely in cities with relatively large Latino populations and where more Latinos hold elected office, suggesting protest is deemed less desirable or necessary when more formal channels of political participation are viable. Together these results are useful for understanding the factors that motivate Latino protest at the individual and con-textual levels, which present opportunities for further understanding their participation in unconventional politics. Adapted from the source document.
In: Sociology of race and ethnicity: the journal of the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section of the American Sociological Association, Band 4, Heft 4, S. 527-540
The racial stratification literature is rife with examples of how color-blindness has become a dominant ideology among Whites to deny the continuing significance of race at work, school, and in everyday life. Less understood are the racial ideologies deployed by people of color. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews, we examine how college-educated Latinas acknowledge or deny the significance of race and racial hierarchies in decisions about whom to date. We find Latinas who stated an openness to dating men of all racial/ethnic backgrounds both acknowledged racism and its impact on their own lives and also held clear racial preferences. Additionally, participants used negative racial tropes about Black and Asian men to exclude them as romantic partners while also self-racializing to explain White men's seeming reluctance to date them. To explain our findings, we apply the concept racial blind spots to show how participants simultaneously dismissed and drew upon color-blind ideology to justify patterns of racial exclusion. As we argue, racial blind spots explain how members of minoritized groups internalize aspects of the dominant racial ideology, involuntarily upholding the very system that oppresses them.
AbstractThis article examines the extent to which service-learning courses affect students' attitudes and opinions. Elsewhere, we used a pre/postsurvey field experiment to demonstrate that volunteering with a homeless person tends to erode the stereotypes held by the domiciled—a confirmation of the venerable contact hypothesis. Here we use the same research design to assess whether students in service-learning courses exhibit a similar type of opinion change after spending a day with a homeless person. We find that even with limited contact a significant number of service-learning students came away from their time with homeless individuals holding fewer stereotypes and with a more nuanced perspective on the causes and consequences of homelessness. Nevertheless, working with a homeless person did have a negative effect on some students and contact generally failed to change students' views on public policy.
Extensive scholarship traces the development and impacts of the U.S. immigration and deportation system on Latino immigrants and U.S. born Latinos, alike. However, relatively little quantitative research has investigated the worries that Latinos express about deportation, explored the temporal dynamics in such concerns, or identified which factors predict shifts in deportation-related concerns over time. Using two waves of data for a national sample of U.S. Latino adults, the analyses explored changes in their deportation worry between 2019 and 2021, marking the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. Descriptive results indicate that more than a third of Latinos reported reductions in deportation worry over the two year period, with even larger proportions of Latino immigrants, including naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents and undocumented immigrants, reporting declines in worry. Regression results reveal that, aside from indicators of legal vulnerability, other aspects of the current sociopolitical and racialized context meaningfully shape declines in deportation worries. Specifically, darker-skinned Latinos, and those experiencing more anti-Hispanic discrimination, expressing some co-ethnic linked fate, and who viewed the Trump administration as harmful to Latinos reported significant reductions in worry from 2019 to 2021, ceteris paribus. These results suggest a "calming effect" of some Latinos' deportation worries as the Trump administration ended and the Biden administration began. Nevertheless, the study demonstrates how the racialized immigration and deportation system shapes deportation-related worries among a wide swath of Latinos, the consequences of which racialize them and spill over into their everyday lives.
Recent years have seen a broadening of the scope of immigration enforcement. As a result, immigrants free of criminal convictions, once considered low priorities for enforcement, are increasingly subject to arrest, detention, and removal. At the same time, federal immigration authorities have sought the cooperation of states and localities in the enforcement of immigration laws. While there has been growing scholarly attention paid to the ways in which legal geographies can account for variation in local immigration policies, the long‐term effects of these policies on immigrants themselves are often overlooked. In this article, we use the case of Colorado, one of the first states to pass a "show‐me‐your‐papers" law in 2006, and data from two qualitative studies to highlight the collateral consequences of enhanced immigration enforcement on immigrants' economic opportunities, emotional health and well‐being, and academic trajectories. We situate our analysis within the crimmigration literature and discuss the implications of our findings in light of the current political climate.