For example, my parents are not working right now [because of the pandemic], and they can’t get unemployment. I want to make sure that I try to save up every penny as possible, because we don’t know if there’s going to be a situation within our family.” Vanessa’s income is critical to her family, which includes a younger American-born sibling who would be left alone if the family was deported. According to the Marshall Project, there are about 10.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and, nationwide, “about 908,891 households with at least one American child would fall below federal poverty levels if their undocumented breadwinners were removed.”36
In 2000, Vanessa was just four years old when her mother and father brought her and her one-year-old brother to the United States from Mexico in hopes of finding employment and educational opportunities. “It’s frustrating to hear the backlash from people [who say] ‘well, if you’d wanted to come to this country, then you should do it the legal way.’ Sometimes our families don’t have time to wait for the legal way. It’s a do or die type of thing. But people love to throw around, ‘if you want to come to this country, come here the legal way. Apply for a visa, blah blah blah.’ My family is still in the process of – ” Vanessa pauses with exasperation and draws a breath. “We applied to get citizenship through an uncle for the four of us in ‘99. It’s 2020, and we still have not heard anything back, and we look at the visa bulletin board – it’s a really slow progress. It’s very slow progress.” A legal immigration policy that takes more than two decades to process an application is actively encouraging illegal immigration.
Vanessa and her brother are among nearly 700,000 youth who have received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA is an immigration policy that protects children brought to the US without documentation from immediate deportation. It enables them to obtain a social security number and is contingent upon regular renewals. However, DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship, which leaves recipients vulnerable to changing administrations. “It’s challenging, but I think, at the end of the day, you kind of have to live day-by-day, navigate day-by-day. When people ask questions like, where do you see yourself in five years, I’m like, I don’t necessarily like that question. Who can guarantee me that I will be here? I’m talking about will I be in this country in five years? So, it’s kind of hard to think about the future when I’m trying to live day-by-day, month-by-month here.”
While the temporary protection of DACA has enabled Vanessa to obtain a professional job, both of her parents, like many in her community, are part of an informal economy of undocumented workers. Vanessa continues: “especially for the working folks, they are not compensated enough for their labor, like farm workers, construction workers. They are putting their bodies, their health on the line and at risk, and a lot of these are Latinos who are working on the fields, who are working construction. If you’re working construction and you mess up your back, you’re screwed. How are you going to continue working this job that you have? Now you have to look at other forms of working when you’ve been so used to working construction and making this much money? If you get hurt on the job and you have to take another job, that could be a pay cut essentially. Then that could be a cut within your life. You have to make ends meet and narrow things down, [which] essentially means moving out to somewhere cheaper. They would have to move out to places where there’s more poverty.”
The Pew Research Center estimates that more than 40 million people living in the United States are immigrants – 35.2 million of them (roughly 77%) are here legally and about 10.5 million (around 23%) are here without authorization.37 About 25% of all immigrants to the United States come from Mexico and, like Vanessa’s parents, they come for work. According to Pew, industries that depend on the labor of unauthorized immigrants include agriculture, food production (slaughterhouses and canneries), construction, manufacturing, and hospitality (as maids and custodial workers).38 Families like Vanessa’s live in fear of getting caught up in raids and deported without notice. The Pew Research Center reports that from 2001 to 2017, a majority (60%) of immigrants deported from the United States had not been convicted of a crime.39 Despite Oakland being a sanctuary city, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are using the city airport as a staging ground for thousands of flights. Between 2010 and 2018, the ICE air operation flew nearly 43,000 people in and out of Oakland.40 Of these, almost 27,000 were being deported; the other 16,000 were being transferred as part of a detention and relocation system that seems designed to cut people off from legal and community support that could help them stay in the country.41
While the Trump administration refocused national conversations about immigration in very hostile ways, the truth is that as a nation we have never been willing to address the fact that unauthorized workers have long been central to US business. Immigrants and their families have been caught between the pull from businesses that rely on unauthorized immigrant labor and the push of immigration policies that result in deportation. Immigrants and their families pay a steep price.
In 2019, President Trump ordered ICE agents to conduct mass roundups of immigrant families across the country. His administration also sought to rescind Obama-era protections for immigrants, including the DACA program. “I think there’s not a single time,” says Vanessa, “when I am not afraid of something happening to my father or my mom or me that we’re no longer with each other. We’re afraid of deportations or removal proceedings, so just being with my family, spending time with them, absolutely brings me joy, because we could be here and in the split of a second … then we’re not.” And of course, this means saving every penny in case the day comes when her family is torn apart by a raid. In early summer 2020, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s effort to end DACA, but the government was able to change the reporting requirement for recipients from once every two years to once a year. For Vanessa and the DACA recipients like her, the battle continues.
Vanessa isn’t the only person in Oakland with a professional job and financial struggles, although the struggles all look a little different. Puppy Love (PL) is the name chosen by an African American man living in Oakland to serve as his pseudonym. He is in his fifties and has one child, who is now an adult. PL might be more of a homebody than people expect and spends a fair amount of time at home doing chores. For relaxation he works out and tries to go fishing at least twice a week. PL has steady, full-time employment as a manager in a nonprofit providing adult education to people with developmental disabilities. He cautiously refuses to talk about his salary, but volunteers that he has no savings, retirement plan, or assets. PL is one of only two men in the entire organization, about which he says diplomatically: “It’s definitely a challenge on some days; things aren’t thought about from a man’s perspective as easily as they are in this organization from a woman’s perspective.”
As a supervisor, he spends his days troubleshooting problems and likes the variation that problem-solving brings. “I don’t control what happens to my consumers when they’re not in my care, but when they are in my care, I need to provide the best welfare, safety, and security possible. That’s important to me. I don’t think that’s important to everybody else in society when it comes to this population. They’re very neat folks. They’re loving. They’re caring. They’re intelligent.”
PL has worked incredibly hard for the success he has had. He has held the same full-time job for more than five years; it’s work that he finds rewarding and which provides basic health care and vacation time. While he appreciates that he is fortunate to have a job that provides vacation time, PL can’t afford to take a vacation: like millions of others, he lives paycheck to paycheck. Despite having steady, full-time work that he loves, PL is a long way from economic security. “You know, my worries are that, you know, am I going to have a place to lay my head at the end of each night? I’m always worried about, you know, is my truck going to make it home? The cost of living in California goes up every day. The cost of health care goes up every day. Living in the Bay Area is quite expensive. Rent is raised dramatically from year to year. I work in a nonprofit organization, so I don’t get a raise every year.” In the last three years, PL’s monthly rent has increased by $250, yet his salary has remained static. He explained: “that
