Ford School hosts panel discussion on immigration policy

The Ford School of Public Policy’s Center for Racial Justice hosted a panel discussion on the current landscape of United States immigration policy and its implications for the upcoming election Monday afternoon. The event, titled “Immigration on the Ballot,” featured speakers from CRJ, the School of Public Health and the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. 

Mara Ostfeld, CRJ research director and panel moderator, said an often overlooked trend in poll data is many respondents’ lack of knowledge on immigration.

“Immigration is affected by what we call ‘don’t-know’ responses,” Ostfeld said. “When we did a poll in Michigan a couple months ago, about one in five Michiganders said they didn’t know what they thought about immigration, or they didn’t know if they thought it was easier or harder for foreigners to immigrate to the U.S. legally. That type of data is often excluded from a lot of the polling and news coverage, but ‘don’t-know’ responses are really revealing.”

Kristina Rico, postdoctoral fellow at the CRJ, spoke about stereotypes of immigrants in the U.S. and how those perceptions can impact policy.

“There is a broadly held stereotype in the United States that immigrants are young, probably because we have a strong connection between immigrants and work, and when we think about workers, we tend to think about young people,” Rico said. “But while the United States is aging rapidly, so are immigrants, and that’s an important thing to keep in mind when we’re talking about potential policy shifts, and having a sense of who the people are that will be impacted by them.”

William Lopez, assistant professor at the Public Health School, said immigration enforcement can vary by location.

“There’s also less salient types of enforcement,” Lopez said. “Coming from Texas, what we tended to know more about was border patrol. Coming into Michigan, my perception of how immigration enforcement looks in the Midwest is very different. … it’s very sneaky, surreptitious and often (part of) these intimate moments of people’s lives.” 

Throughout the event, the panelists discussed the intersection between immigration policy and challenges for undocumented people in the U.S. Lopez spoke about how collaboration between different governmental agencies can lead to barriers for undocumented migrants who travel across the U.S., citing the example of the police’s ability to collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“As long as the police are collaborating with ICE, and they can take you to jail and push you into that deportation pipeline, they’re inherently controlling where folks are willing to travel in their communities,” Lopez said. “Consider that undocumented people can’t get driver’s licenses in certain states. That means every time they’re driving, they’re putting themselves at that risk, giving (the police) that much more power in these places.”

Angela García, assistant professor in the Crown Family School, said she believes any immigration policy reform must address long waits for undocumented immigrants to obtain visas.

“If I had the important people in the room, what I would say is that we need to factor in how long undocumented people have already been waiting when we think about a reform,” García said. “The idea around a pathway to citizenship, in my opinion, is a problem because that pathway involves more waiting and more obstacles. Right after Biden’s inauguration, he announced proposed immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship that had an eight-year gauntlet for the average undocumented person to navigate in order to get to full legal recognition.”

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, García said she believes it is important to incorporate different perspectives into discussions about immigration policy.

“The richness of the discussion, I think, came from some of the different disciplinary backgrounds that we have,” García said. “That makes me think about just how useful it is to have more perspectives in the room when we think about a policy shift. In particular … the people who are most impacted by the policy should be represented.”

Daily Staff Reporter Thomas Gala-Garza can be reached at tmgala@umich.edu.

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