A recently published study from the University of Oregon found that the fear of deportation declines with age among immigrants without protected status. The research is based on interviews with Mexican immigrants over the age of 50 in the California communities of Oakland, Fremont and Berkeley. The interviews were mostly conducted in 2019 and some in 2022, before the second Trump presidency.
The study found several factors that affected the fear of deportation. For example, older undocumented immigrants tend to have children who are now adults, and so family separation was less of a concern than for an immigrant with minor children. The study also found that “life course mechanisms,” such as leaving the workforce because of retirement, and the older immigrants’ own perception that their age made them less visible targets, also shaped their fear of deportation.
Joining us to discuss the implications of these findings is the study’s author, Isabel García Valdivia, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The fear of deportation among immigrants without protected status declines as they get older. That’s one of the major findings from new research out of the University of Oregon. Isabel García Valdivia is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. She interviewed Mexican immigrants over the age of 50 in Berkeley, Oakland and Fremont, California. She joins us now to talk about what she heard. Welcome to the show.
Isabel García Valdivia: Thank you for having me.
Miller: What was the main impetus for this new study?
García Valdivia: It’s actually something that I found surprising. I was not going into the study thinking I was going to be studying fear or that that would be one of the findings. But one of the reasons I added questions about fear generally for this study was that I had done interviews with adult children and their parents in a previous study. And when I interviewed adult children, they would often discuss being afraid, but what would happen to their parents when they were no longer able to work if they remained undocumented. And when I interviewed their parents, they often discussed being afraid of becoming burdens for their adult children if they remain undocumented when they were no longer able to work.
Miller: You said you didn’t set out to study fear. How is it that fear ended up becoming one of the big focuses of this study?
García Valdivia: So in the larger study, I asked about fear generally, about health outcomes, immigration of course, material or work, or what kind of fears older immigrants had about aging. Because I was really interested in what changes as immigrants get older and what are their concerns. And I started to ask about fear, and particularly about immigration, many started to say like “oh, I’m not afraid about deportation.” Which seemed surprising to me, given to past research that focuses on how the fear of deportation is a critical example of the consequence of illegality.
Miller: Is there good data about the age ranges of undocumented people in the U.S., or age demographics broadly?
García Valdivia: Any data undocumented populations has flaws and strengths, and the reason is because no survey outright asks “are you undocumented” or asks someone’s immigration status. There are great demographers at the Migration Policy Institute and the Center for Migration studies that do use demographic methods to calculate the number of undocumented people in the United States. And then they look at age ranges. So there are good estimates, but they’re not perfect.
Miller: And what do those estimates tell us?
García Valdivia: They tell us that, as expected, the largest group is working age adults, usually between 25 and 50 – the largest group generally. But once you look at older immigrants, 50+, we’ve seen in the last couple of years that that number is growing. And many researchers expect that it’s because immigrants are aging in place. They came here when they were younger, and they have stayed in the U.S. with the hope of hopefully adjusting their status in the future.
Miller: Why did you focus on immigrants from Mexico living in California’s East Bay?
García Valdivia: For two reasons. One, there’s only two states that have the largest migration and would have older immigrants. They all have older immigrants, but particularly potentially undocumented immigrants. It would be Texas and California, just because they have a long history of migration and they have a long history of Mexican migration, specifically. Other groups of immigrants, like other Latin American groups, other Asian or other parts of the world, there are immigrants, but the immigrants tend to be younger. And it’d be unlikely that some of these would be undocumented at this age, it probably would be working age.
So I needed a location where there would be sufficient immigrants of all different immigration statuses, which could include undocumented, legal permanent residents who are often colloquially called “green card holders,” and also those who have naturalized and become U.S. citizens.
Miller: That’s an important piece here, that you talked to all those different three categories of immigration status. How did you find people to talk to?
García Valdivia: It’s really exciting. When you do research with vulnerable population, which can include older adults by themselves or immigrants, and especially when you look at undocumented immigrants, you have to really create trust. So one of the ways I did that was I participated, volunteered, in different community organizations, churches, events, where I began to learn about the community. Because again, I don’t outright ask people their immigration status when I meet them. They know I’m doing a study about older immigrants and I want to understand their immigration history, their experience living in the U.S., acculturating, and also their experience as they continue to age and what their expectations of their aging experience will be. So I spent months doing that kind of work before I did my first interview.
Miller: Where were you?
García Valdivia: I was, at that time, in Berkeley.
Miller: And where would you find people to talk to?
García Valdivia: I found them at churches, at community organizations and different events.
Miller: So just going day after day, week after week to these same places, always showing up and saying “I’m a sociologist and I’d like to talk with you.”
García Valdivia: It was that, it was “I want to talk to you, but I also want to help you.” So sometimes I volunteered, I filled out applications for them. I translated for them, I helped them with technology. I also called out bingo some nights, to be around so that they knew who I was.
Miller: At what point do you say to yourself “I feel like I know this person well enough that I can ask the questions that I most want to ask.”
García Valdivia: Well, usually, I spend like three to six months … Because my first interview, I was able to do a little bit earlier with someone that knew I was doing a study and they’re like “oh, I wanna answer your questions.” So then I started to talk to them and they helped me pilot my initial questions of me asking them different questions, seeing what they felt comfortable or not comfortable answering. And oftentimes, once I’ve created that trust, they often self-disclosed whatever their current immigration status was.
Miller: Did you ask the same questions of people who were undocumented, people with permanent legal status and people who are naturalized citizens?
García Valdivia: Yes, I did.
Miller: What most stood out to you in terms of differences or similarities among those three very different populations under the eyes of the U.S. government?
García Valdivia: I think in particular, something that’s more recent, and it’s also found in other studies, is that even when I asked, for example, about fear to naturalized U.S. citizens … These are immigrants who already are U.S. citizens, they had permanent residency, and have applied and successfully completed their application for naturalization. Many of them still talked about fears of immigration or the government taking away their citizenship status.
I think part of the answer is because I did these interviews between 2019 and 2022, and that was during the first Trump administration. And during that time, there was talks about denaturalization. That had never really happened in the past, where a government administration was saying we can denaturalize people.
Miller: And in other words, you could see those conversations being filtered into the fears of naturalized citizens that you were talking to?
García Valdivia: Correct. And it was mixed because sometimes they say, “with citizenship, I’m more protected than maybe my friend who’s undocumented or my friend who is a permanent resident.” But then at the same time, they said, “but now it seems like the government wants to take that away.”
Miller: That is a finding about existing fears or fears that remain even after somebody has become a naturalized citizen. But as I noted in my intro, one of the big findings from your work from this recent study is that deportation fears, or some kind of immigration crackdown fears, in general, lessen over time among people who are undocumented. How do you explain that?
García Valdivia: So in part of this study, some of the more theoretical or scholarly attempts was to understand why we have so many studies that say different factors matter more or less for fear? So some studies say it depends on your gender, it depends on the situation, it depends on your age, it depends on if you have a legal status or you don’t have a legal status. Or it depends who you’re around, which state you live in, which city you live in. So there’s all these studies that focus on social or individual characteristics to try and explain this fear.
Because things change. People grow older, people have different fears at different life stages. There’s research … You have different concerns when you’re like a young student applying to college: fear of not getting in, fear of not being accepted by your peers. Versus someone that’s older might have fear of “how I’m going to pay my bills” or “how am I going to raise my kids,” “how am I going to retire,” etc. I really wanted to think about how do fears change and what are those mechanisms? Or why would one person who’s undocumented be more or less fearful than someone else and what were those reasons that one person may be more fearful of deportation or not?
So then what I did, when I was talking to respondents and reading what other researchers have found in the past, I am like “OK, so there are things that shift and change in people’s lives.” And part of it it’s because people’s lives change, their relationships change, their responsibilities change and the broader environment that they live in change. And as they age, this changes. So one thing that I found is, for example, they have different transitions that matter or have different consequences. A lot of them described that one of the important changes was their familial responsibilities, that before they were more afraid when they had minor children to take care of and there was a possibility of family separation, because the children were minors and children could be put in foster care indefinitely, etc. Now, many of their children are full grown adults and many are citizens. So the older immigrants I spoke to discuss if something happens to me, my child is now an adult and they can take care of themselves. And maybe if they’re citizens, they can go visit me if I’m deported to Mexico.
Miller: Your interviews, as you noted for this study, spanned the last couple years of President Trump’s first administration and the first couple years of President Biden’s. Now in the second Trump administration, with even more ramped up immigration enforcement in the last eight months, I’m wondering if you think that the results would hold steady or if you would see a change? In other words, I guess I’m wondering if older undocumented people, if you talk to them today and ask them the same questions, if they would express more personal fear right now about their own futures?
García Valdivia: I will speculate, because this is not from the data. But given what I know and the conversations I’ve had, still with community members, etc., I think the findings would still hold, but at different levels. Because the social environment has changed. So importantly, I want to highlight that the government has ramped up immigration enforcement, as we’ve seen. And there’s been changes to how presidents for the last more than two decades have looked at immigration enforcement. So for example, they’ve taken away special protections for vulnerable places like churches, schools, hospitals, where immigration enforcement was said should not happen given the sensitivity of these locations, etc. And also, given the recent budget bill, there’s been a mass increase in the money enforcement has to do enforcement practices.
So I think that that social environment definitely has changed and it has heightened tensions. But I think older immigrants still might lessen, maybe they’re not as low, their fears, as they were before. But I think it still exists, because some of the biggest fears that they addressed were like, “will I be stopped at work when I’m on my way to work?” If they are no longer working because they’re leaving the workforce or some of them own their own businesses so they’re actually just managing other workers … If they’re no longer out and about and doing their day to day lives, they still feel some protections. Their adult children, that hasn’t changed if their children are already adults or not. So that also is something I think that still alleviates some of that fear and the consequence.
Miller: Isabel García Valdivia, thanks very much.
García Valdivia: Thank you.
Miller: Isabel García Valdivia is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
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