Fear of deportation among people in the United States without permanent legal status declines with age, according to a study recently published by a University of Oregon researcher.
The project is the first to examine how those concerns diminish after age 50 because relationships, families, work and communities change with time.
“Over the past two decades, research of undocumented immigrants younger than 50 indicates widespread, prominent fear of deportation,” assistant professor of sociology Isabel García Valdivia said. “This fear has tangible economic, social and health consequences.”
But that fear declines among those older than 50, the fastest-growing subset of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and the focus of her recently published research.
Prior to García Valdivia’s study, the differences in how this group experiences illegality and fear of being deported had largely been ignored. But she explained how deportation fears decline in late adulthood in her recent article in Social Forces.
Established in 1922, Social Forces is a quarterly journal of peer-reviewed research and one of the top publications for sociology.
Her project focused on undocumented Mexican immigrants in California’s East Bay area, a region that includes the cities of Oakland, Berkeley and Fremont.
Fear of deportation is neither a given nor immutable, García Valdivia concluded based on her research. It changes throughout different stages of life.
To gain the trust of potential interviewees, she spent months attending church services, festivals and community events.
García Valdivia also volunteered for the community in various capacities, including, she recalled, serving as emcee for bingo night. Once a few subjects agreed to share their stories and perspectives, she said it was easy to find more trusting participants by word of mouth.
Their confidential interviews helped García Valdivia break new trail for understanding how undocumented immigrants experience illegality.
An extensive body of research has already addressed many factors that affect fear of deportation for individuals and groups. But those all represent momentary snapshots in time, García Valdivia said.
People, along with their families, friends and communities, transform over the years. García Valdivia said her research approach resembles a video more than a photograph. Her article was the first to create a moving picture of how fear of deportation evolves as part of a complex, dynamic and interconnected system.
The subjects in García Valdivia’s study revealed many reasons for their waning fears.
For example, as their children become more independent, parents worry less about how being deported would affect their dependents. They also drive less. Research indicates traffic stops represent the most common interaction between law enforcement and immigrants.
García Valdivia introduced three key aspects of aging to organize the different reasons why immigrants fear of deportation changes. She calls them “life course mechanisms.”
She calls the three the embodiment of illegality, life transitions and temporal morality.
First, she discovered that immigrants older than 50 embody illegality differently. The subjects she interviewed believed, from experience, that their aging appearance made them less visible and obscured their immigration status.
Physical stereotypes related to age overshadow stereotypes of illegality, she said. Also, the subjects had become more acculturated over the years, which made them stand out less.
The respondents were also influenced by location as well as their social networks. Living and working among many other older Latinos in the East Bay, they generally felt like they blended in and would not be perceived as an enforcement priority.
Life transitions compose the second factor. Respondents over 50 drive less, work less and are less responsible for other family members in the U.S. or in other countries who they help support financially.
They’re also more likely to work the same job they’ve held for many years or own their own businesses. Unlike younger immigrants, they’re less likely to participate in new employee verification processes.
Third, García Valdivia observed a common shift in deportation fears due to what she called the “good immigrant narrative” perpetuated by the media and politicians.
Respondents acquire what she calls temporal morality from years of following the rules and expectations of their communities, interacting with their communities, and successfully navigating U.S. bureaucracies. Because they’ve worked hard, paid taxes and obeyed laws for so long, they feel protected.
Like the changing lives of those immigrants, that sense of security could shift back to fear as politics and policies change, García Valdivia said.
She hopes her research illuminates how immigrants experience the same transitions and dilemmas as other adults over 50.
“These immigrants are integral to our communities,” she said. “You see them every day, but you don’t know their status. They’re asking the same questions as others their age. What will I do with my time? Will I be a burden to my children? How will I afford the care I need?”
— By Ed Dorsch, University Communications
—Top photo: Isabel García Valdivia
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University, which receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.