Abstract
Shifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics is a meticulously researched and beautifully written book on immigrant youth from a small North Carolina town that author Alexis M. Silver calls Allen Creek. The book draws on seventy-nine in-depth interviews. Sixty-three of these are with high school students who transitioned into adulthood during the Great Recession. Of these interviews, twenty are with unauthorized immigrants, and three are with immigrants with temporary protected status (TPS). Silver also includes interviews with sixteen citizen youths born to immigrant (mixed-status) families and, for comparison, eleven black and thirteen white U.S.-born students. She also draws on interviews with sixteen adults—including parents, teachers, coaches, school staff, and community organizers—for added context and perspective. Her rich qualitative data provide a vivid and fine-grained picture of the precarious lives of immigrant youth in a right-wing and often anti-immigrant political environment.
Silver’s research began in 2007. For four years she immersed herself in the immigrant communities of Allen Creek. After 2011, she did a series of periodic follow-up interviews that extended into 2016. The interview data provide the reader with a deep look into the experiences of immigrant youth across shifting political contexts as they grew into adulthood. We get to see the impact of “secure communities” and the 287(g) program, as local police authorities synchronized efforts with ICE to carry out mass deportations. We see the demoralizing effect of multiple failed attempts to pass the DREAM Act. We witness the real but limited relief created by Obama’s DACA memo. And toward the very end of the book, we catch a glimpse of the fear of what Trump might bring. Throughout, Silver masterfully guides the reader through the anxious and bewildering experiences of these kids. I know of no other study that provides such an extended yet intimate look into the lives of undocumented youth. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the immigrant experience in the United States today.
Silver contrasts her findings with the expectations of two existing theories of immigrant youth incorporation: an older “straight-line assimilation” theory and the more recent “segmented” assimilation theory. The vicissitudes of the lives of the youth she studies do not reflect a linear “upward” pattern of incorporation or even a “segmented” or “partial” acculturation with signs of dangerous trends of downward assimilation. Instead, Silver says of the life course of those she interviewed: “[m]uch like an M.C. Escher staircase, leading both up and down in noncontiguous and disjointed pathways, the incorporation of immigrant youth in North Carolina was interruptive and confusing” (p. 141).
To explain these interruptive and multidirectional trajectories, Silver puts forth a theory of “tectonic incorporation.” She argues that the social and political ground on which these immigrant students stand is constantly moving as varied political institutions and policies shift at different levels and often in opposite directions. Institutions and policies of immigrant incorporation and enforcement shift independently at the federal, state, and local levels. North Carolina’s state-level politics turned sharply hostile to undocumented immigrants in 2008. It was one of the first states to implement the 287(g) program and commit local enforcement efforts to police unauthorized immigration. North Carolina politicians also erected financial and institutional obstacles to exclude undocumented students from public colleges and universities. And when at the federal level Obama signed the DACA memo, providing youth some relief from relentless policing, local authorities continued aggressive policies of immigration enforcement and dragged their feet on issuing driver licenses to DACA recipients. In short, over the past decade the ground on which these students stood was constantly moving and unsettling their lives.
Silver also found that schools, civic organizations, and immigrant-rights activism provided a measure of stability for these students rocked by changing politics. Local organizations within civil society provided toe holds for undocumented youth to hang on to and at times to climb upward. Silver describes how teachers and school staff helped immigrant students find and exploit niche opportunities when their economic and educational futures looked bleak, how extra-curricular clubs provided a sense of belonging even as political forces turned hostile, and how community organizations offered empowerment when local political authorities dehumanized them as “illegal.” But not all the stories in this book are uplifting ones of resilience and the creative negotiation of disjointed levels of politics. The pages are filled with tragedies: accounts of deportations, self-deportations, the break-up of families, living with the constant fear of arrest, the insults of social shaming, and the despair of a blocked future. The book leaves the reader shaken.
Silver dedicates her book to “all the youth who shared their stories.” And their stories take center stage. Silver’s theoretical analysis never overpowers these voices. The personal stories shine through, illuminating not only the book’s important theoretical contribution, but also the stark contrast of possible futures these young adults face. In these stories, the reader may be surprised to find that the interviewed almost uniformly love North Carolina. They love its natural beauty, its tempo, its sounds, its schools, and even some of its citizens. When it comes to the latter, it is sadly an unrequited and undeserved love. It could be a redeeming love, but time is running out. These kids are fast becoming wizened and hardened. What happens to a dream too long deferred? The will for membership must eventually give out if the ground for belonging continues to give way.