The violence of uncertainty: Everyday impacts of precarious immigration status

Imagine this: at age three, your family relocates to a new country. You grow up normally—school, sports teams, friends. In Grade 12, you discover you lack immigration status, preventing university applications. Suddenly, you're not like your peers, and a life of hidden struggles and uncertainty unfolds. In the final episode of the season, Maggie Perzyna explores what it means to live with precarious immigration status. Researchers unpack the idea of “the violence of uncertainty”—how shifting policies, bureaucratic delays, and the threat of deportation disrupt migrants’ lives, from DACA recipients losing jobs to children denied mental health support.

Guests: Sarah Pole, Program Director of Childhood Arrival Support & Advocacy Program (CASA) at Justice for Children and Youth Legal Clinic; Patricia Landolt, Professor of Sociology at University of Toronto; and Benjamin Roth, Associate Dean at the College of Social Work, University of South Carolina.

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Transcript

Maggie Perzyna  

Welcome to Borders & Belonging, a podcast that explores innovative migration research and connects the dots to real world impact. This series is produced by CERC Migration in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. I'm Maggie Perzyna, a researcher with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration program at Toronto Metropolitan University. Living with a precarious immigration status means more than just legal uncertainty. It's a daily reality shaped by stress, fear and struggle. It affects mental health, job opportunities and even basic human connections. The weight of not knowing if you can stay, work or belong takes a toll, not just on individuals, but on entire families and communities. Today, we'll explore how that shapes mental health, social belonging and economic well-being. We'll be joined by two researchers who study the impact of legal limbo on migrants and the systems meant to support them. But first, let's take a trip to Toronto, Canada, a city of nearly 2.8 million people, where almost half the population comes from somewhere else. It's known for its diversity, but for some young people, that story is more complicated. They've grown up here, built their lives here, yet their immigration status remains uncertain. So, what does that mean for their everyday lives? How does it shape their relationships, their access to education and work and even their sense of belonging.

Sarah Pole  

I migrated a long time ago to Canada, and my life is fairly similar here to how it was in New Zealand. And I came as a grown, educated person, so it was an easier ride than for many, but it's really hard to uproot your life. It's really hard to start all over again. It's hard to have a foot in a couple of different camps. And it's hard to build networks and feel that our migration system, you know, it determines your worth in some ways, right? 

Maggie Perzyna  

Meet Sarah Paul. She runs the childhood arrival support and advocacy program, or CASA for short, based at the Justice for Children and Youth Legal Clinic in downtown Toronto.

Sarah Pole  

I work with young people who came to Canada as children and for some reason, don't have secure immigration status. I was a lawyer back home and coming to Canada, really wanted to maybe not practice in the same way that I had done previously as a litigation lawyer, but really wanted to understand how people access justice and how they navigated their way through complex systems, such as, who gets access to rights? How do people enforce their rights? Who gets to be on the other side of the justice system,

Maggie Perzyna 

Since immigrating to Canada more than 20 years ago, Sarah has been working at the crossroads of youth education and the law. She's worn many hats along the way, advocate, researcher, policy maker, all with a focus on how these worlds connect and impact young people's lives.

Sarah Pole  

One of those jobs, we worked really closely with cohorts of young people who living in Toronto, who were students at Toronto District School Board schools. The first young person I met had lived in Canada for, since she was three, and everybody clocked her is Canadian, so nobody was talking to her about her immigration status, and she was working super hard to make sure that nobody knew that she had no status because of the fear that she felt for herself and for her family if people found out.

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah says that first experience was a real eye opener. It showed her just how complicated life can get for young people living in Canada without secure immigration status.

Sarah Pole  

Some point, she realized in grade 12 that her lack of status meant that all these plans that she'd made weren't going to happen because she couldn't access university as a young person without status in the same way that her peers could. And that was a devastating moment for her, and it took a while for me to understand what was happening and for her to share that information with me and her friends didn't know. No teachers knew. So, she was, you know, navigating her life, ostensibly, really successfully, but having this, this deep part of her that she couldn't share and wasn't accessing supports for. And the other part was, you know, you know, my first reaction was, of course. Canada's got some kind of pathway for folks like you, right? Of course, Canada's got a pathway for young people who arrived here as children, who were bought here, who probably didn't have any agency in the decision to come here. Because, you know, your parents are taking care of this, or your caregivers are. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah quickly learned that Canada doesn't actually have a clear pathway for young people without status. Instead, they're left to figure out a system that's not just complicated, but expensive and confusing, one that impacts far more of their lives than most people might imagine. 

Sarah Pole  

It can be really hard for young people who are looking to regularize their status or understand their options when they haven't been the decision makers and probably haven't got much information about what happened, when did they come, what applications were made, what's been said to immigration on my behalf, often don't have any ID.

Maggie Perzyna  

No ID means no access to healthcare and no avenues for higher education, all things which become more glaring as young people get closer to adulthood. 

Sarah Pole  

It's hard to navigate school and not explain to somebody why you're not going on field trips because you don't have OHIP or not explaining to someone why you're not taking academic classes because you've figured out you can't go to university. So, why would you or not trying to explain to someone you know why? You know why you don't really want to explain why you're not applying for that job program. This is playing out, I think, for a lot of our young people, in pretty much every decision they make in a day. So, when I make my friend with you know, friend, a new friend, are their parents going to ask me about my status? If they are, I'm just going to stop being friends with this person. Am I going to trust this teacher. If I share some information with this teacher, will they share it with other people at school? And will my family no longer be safe? So, all of those sorts of lenses of big pieces coming down to these micro decisions that young people are having to make every day is, I think it's super exhausting. 

Maggie Perzyna  

And to complicate matters further, many young people without status are told by their families to stay under the radar, avoid asking for help and avoid services, all out of fear that reaching out could put them at risk of being detected by authorities.

Sarah Pole  

Our clients are the young people, so we don't generally work with young people who are trying to recognize their status with their family, usually, for whatever reason, our young people need to do that by themselves. So, immigration isn't, you know, that good at sort of trying to understand young people's individual legal rights or individual legal needs, or, you know, need, often, for whatever their personal circumstances are, to sort the stuff out by themselves. So, you know, we, you know, constantly trying to sort of think about, how can our immigration system better understand children and children's interests and children's rights?

Maggie Perzyna  

And even if a child's parents disagree with their choice to proceed with an immigration status application, Sarah says that child still has a right to legal representation.

Sarah Pole  

There's no parent signing this because this is a young person's circumstance. But you know, certainly one of the things that we do when a young person comes in is trying to understand, where is this place within a family, and you know, what else is happening? Have other applications been made? Is there a way that this makes more sense to regularize with your family? Like, is there a way we can get the family support? Does that feel good? But you know, the young people are a client, so we take our instructions from them in terms of what they want to do and what feels safe for them.

Maggie Perzyna  

To help bridge the gap further, part of Sarah's role at CASA is to help create and foster relationships between young people and lawyers. 

Sarah Pole  

Lawyers are a particular, you know, kind of person, and there can be sometimes a bit of a gap, I think, between a young person and a lawyer. So, even when I connected this young person with a great lawyer, it was a hard connection, right? So, sort of realizing, oh, maybe we need some supports here to help not just match young people with information and ensure they're getting good legal representation and good legal advice, but that they have enough support to get themselves through what might be a really long immigration journey and a journey that feels and is, you know, insecure and traumatic, even in itself.

Maggie Perzyna  

There are no accurate numbers for how many children in Canada are currently without immigration status, but Sarah says that's exactly why services like CASA's are so important. They give young people the information and support they need to understand their rights and figure out their options. 

Sarah Pole  

You know, we really didn't know. Will this be useful? How many young people might need this? And we've been how the program started in 2016 sort of off the corner of a desk. Since 2020 it's had funding from the Law Foundation of Ontario, and we've been embedded within Justice for Children and Youth Legal Clinic, which is a fantastic provincially based legal clinic that provides services across all kinds of law. Immigration being only one and we are really, really busy. We're really, really busy. There's many, many young people who need to understand the immigration system and help you, sort of trying to traverse and get to where they need to be.

Maggie Perzyna  

And even though Sarah has been working with undocumented young people in Canada for almost 10 years, she says there still isn't a permanent framework within the immigration system to help young people achieve status. 

Sarah Pole  

There's currently two temporary policies. One creates a pathway to a temporary residence permit, and another creates a pathway, a temporary pathway to permanent residence for young people who have been in the care of the state. In the care of a children's aid or some kind of similar, analogous sort of association across Canada. Which really is saying, you know, in this situation, Canada was, in some ways, the parent right in Canada should have regularized your status. Those are temporary policies. I think they have two more years to run. It would be fantastic if they were permanent that, you know, there's always going to be, I think, unfortunately, young people who are in the care of the state, right who are going to need a tool to regularize their status? 

Maggie Perzyna  

She believes that this gap in legal infrastructure exists partly because most Canadians, even those who work with children, don't realize how often young people have to navigate the immigration system alone.

Sarah Pole  

The answer is, generally, I didn't know that was a thing here. I hear that from teachers, where I know their students in their school with their immigration status, and I'm not suggesting they find out the immigration status of their students, but that they just don't clock this as an issue for young people at all. One of the things we do do is sort of outreach to young people with precarious immigration status. You know, we're trying to get information to them in a safe and secure way or so that they clock that maybe there's some help here. Maybe there's some options for them. Maybe I can get some help from lawyers.

Maggie Perzyna  

While Sarah and her team at the Justice for Children and Youth Legal Clinic wait for a permanent policy in Canada, they're not waiting to take action. They're creating safe spaces where young people without status can advocate for systemic change, using art, storytelling and community organizing to make their voices heard.

Sarah Pole  

So, one of the projects we did was pretty great. It was with an artist called Cindy Blazevic, and she, with our clients who were interested in participating, took the most beautiful photographs, so portraits of them, their faces are obscured with beautiful flowers, and she also interviewed them. So, some of the questions were super simple, what's your, you know, your favorite breakfast cereal, but also, you know, what's your life like, and what would Canada miss by not having you here? So, and I think a lot of the information that the photos are stunningly beautiful, and these really insightful answers from young people about what they wish the Canadian government would understand about them, and how their day to day life works, and how much they liked being able to feel like they were agents of change systemically, right, because their status or their lack of it made them had oftentimes, you know, made them weary of advocating. Right? I've got something to say. I feel unsafe saying it. So, yeah, that's pretty great. You know, being a small vehicle to, you know, letting young people have their voice and have their agencies. That feels lucky.

Maggie Perzyna  

Sarah Paul is the program director of the Childhood Arrivals Support and Advocacy program at the Justice for Children and Youth Legal Clinic. Many thanks to her for sharing her insights on supporting newcomer youth, the challenges they face in the legal system and the importance of advocacy in ensuring their rights are protected.  Precarious immigration status affects every aspect of daily life. Joining me today to delve into the many ways that status and migrant well-being collide are Dr Patricia Landolt and Dr Benjamin Roth. Patricia is a professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her work explores how immigration status shapes the everyday experiences of work, belonging and social mobility. She co-leads the Citizenship and Employment Precarity research project. Benjamin is the Associate Dean for curriculum at the College of Social Work, University of South Carolina. His research focuses on the intersection of immigration, economic wellbeing and social equity. Benjamin is part of the project, Mapping Systems of Care for Unaccompanied Immigrant Children, which illuminates how unaccompanied migrant children navigate uncertainty and how the people and organizations around them shape their futures. Thank you both for joining me. 

Benjamin Roth  

It's great to be here.

Patricia Landolt  

Thank you. 

Maggie Perzyna  

Hi. Let's start with a big picture question, what does it mean to have precarious immigration status, and how does it impact everyday life?

Patricia Landolt  

In the Canadian context, we've used this idea of precarious legal status is, I would say, around 20 years now to really mark that it involves any legal status that isn't permanent residence or citizenship, that can be authorized or unauthorized, and that basically involves having conditional or limited rights to be in the country, to access work and to access entitlements like the healthcare system, public education and always the experience of deportability, which basically means that the state can take you and expose you or kick you out of the country at any point in time. So, it's that eroded sense of rights that is central to the framework that we've used in the Canadian context.

Maggie Perzyna  

How does this uncertainty impact people's mental health and sense of belonging? Ben?  

Benjamin Roth  

I think in our work, we've noticed, I really appreciate this point by Patricia about the erosion of rights and living on this, the knife's edge, there's a real temporal aspect to this precarity, where from one day to the next, you just don't know. And a lot of migration scholars have talked about how that temporality of living with this precarious or provisional status can really have negative impacts in multiple ways, on everyday life, and this has led us to explore a concept that we call the violence of uncertainty, which is the real ways that health, mental health, relationships, a sense of belonging and groundedness are consistently challenged from one day to the next. We, in the case of unaccompanied kids, especially, we see how children who are being often reunified with a family member in the United States after fleeing their country of origin and traveling through transit country to apprehension at the US Mexico border. In most cases, these various traumas that are experienced by children on that path are often exacerbated in the period of time when they're held in government custody before for most of them, being placed with and reunified with family members in the United States, and we see that for children who are therefore at the crossroads of the way that policymakers have constructed a system that aims to attend to their best interest and facilitate what policymakers call reunification with family members, ultimately leaves children, unaccompanied children in a place of both this a sense of security because they're with a parent, often a family member, after having been separated from them for many years, While also living through an immigration court process of deportation proceedings, where, when they reach their 18th birthday, unless they're able to find some form of legal relief, are facing the reality that they will be sent back to country of origin. And so precarity in that way, it just, it is a double signal that says you can stay here, but only for a little while, and only provided that you don't make a mistake, and all of this is subject to bureaucratic review. So, living with that kind of suspended sense of belonging, it impacts relationships negatively. It makes you wonder, okay, is this the kind of relationship that's going to endure beyond my 18th birthday because of the threat of deportation and mental health. All of this is, as I'm sure we're going to get into the midst of in our conversation today, is crisscrossed with whether they even have access to mental health supports in their primary language or in the geography where they happen to be placed. The impact is both difficult to quantify and it is overwhelming.

Patricia Landolt  

I think this concept that Ben has suggested the violence of uncertainty is really apt. It's a powerful way to understand what people with precarious legal status are facing. And I would add that this question of the uncertainty of outcomes, the indefinite waiting, the inability to plan, whether it's unaccompanied minors or adults, what I think all of this points to is that what seems and is experienced, like the violence of chaos, of not knowing, is produced systemically by the immigration management system. So, in the Canadian context, the constant changing of policies that all of a sudden upend the path that a person was on, whether it's an international student or a refugee claimant. And the constant changes in the paperwork that needs to be submitted, the backlogs you know, you change address and papers don't follow you. So, all of these things are produced that by the current chaos of the immigration management framework, some would say, quite intentionally to create chaos and others just by, you know, sharing competence, you either way, at the level of individuals and families and kids, the notion that this violence is triggered by the not knowing is key. And I, you know, we can think back to over the last, I would say, five to 10 years, the Lancet, so the most prestigious journal in medicine is consistently talking about the impacts of waiting on refugee mental health, on global migrant mental health, right? So, doctors are pointing to this as having, like, really corrosive effects on people's sense of well-being.

Benjamin Roth  

Patricia's pointing out this idea of chaos and unpredictability just brings to mind a story of a DACA recipient here in the United States who has been a part of our project and for a number of years, and he recently contacted me because when he was reapplying for DACA, you know, to have his DACA renewed. There was a bureaucratic delay, and he had a job where he was a manager in an established company and had been there for a number of years. And because of that delay over which he had no control, right? That sort of it's unclear what happened. It's like you send this DACA renewal forum into the bureaucratic nether world and hope that it comes back to you in the affirmative, in time for your work authorization, before that expiration moment. And in his case, it didn't get back in time. And so, the years of effort that he had put into building a career and supporting his own parents, who are undocumented here in South Carolina, went away immediately because his employer said we can no longer keep you on staff because your work authorization has expired. And so, I think always living with that, the kind of, again, the chaos of it, but you are removed from it. And I know that we'll get to a conversation about agency and the ability of immigrants, regardless of the precarity of their situation. But to Patricia's point about how you're beholden to this, this immigration system, which can shift and change and operate in ways that you can't see, that you have no control over, and that seem to have this bureaucratic whim that has significant implications for, in his case, his ability to work to support his family.

Maggie Perzyna  

I was at a workshop lately, and your colleague, Luin Goldring, was talking about the concept of the work of status, which seems very relevant here.

Patricia Landolt  

This is a really helpful concept to get at this question of all of the money and resources and time that people with precarious legal status have to dedicate to trying to move towards a more secure status, whether it's TPS right in the US or in Canada, you know, towards permanent residents. And what our research has found is that it is first of all, when we look at people who have had to dedicate considerable time and resources to the work of legal status, versus those who had a pretty clear route from temporary to permanent, that that work has long term effects on health and unemployment outcomes. Because you're starting, I'm using my bunny fingers here. You're starting your life in Canada, for instance, as a permanent resident with social and emotional exhaustion, a sense of distrust of the system, but also significant debt, because doing the work takes money, the permits, the work permit, the criminal checks, the application over applications, the multiple applications. So, all of this puts you at a disadvantage at the point where you're now a permanent resident, right? So the work of thought is, is, is a valuable way to think about and I would say it's not only capturing how the state downloads all of these costs of its immigration management system onto very vulnerable individuals, but it also really reflects the agency of the people who are seriously hustling and trying to interpret an immigration system that is kind of this massive bureaucracy, and you don't quite know where to enter it, right? So that agency of learning the system, seeing what will work for you, what won't, you know, figuring out how to do online forms, is the other part of using this term of the work of status.  What's the biggest misconception that people have about migrants living in legal limbo?

Benjamin Roth  

Linda Bosniak talks about how the boundaries defining membership can be bright and clearly discernible, like these binaries, such as that are often used, legal, illegal or documented, undocumented, regular, irregular, but that, I think Patricia's work and some of what we've been working on to underscore just how fuzzy these boundaries are, often in practice and I think in our work with DACA beneficiaries, for example, we lean heavily into Cecilia Menjívar's term of liminal legality, this idea of that group of and the United States, at least a very large swath of immigrants who occupy this precarious position that Patricia laid out for us, that's in that in between. And I think that the misconception is that that we're all we're kind of hitting on in this conversation, is that living in this legal limbo is static and unchanging but but in fact, as we see and as has already been discussed, I think that legal limbo, there's a lot of fluidity and an evolving sort of dimensionality to that experience of what it means to live in this space of liminal legality. So, with unaccompanied youth, for example, there is an mounting pressure to find legal relief before their 18th birthday. And we've talked with dozens of case managers in this system that is overseen by ORR (Office of Refugee Resettlement), who explained to us how the intensity of liminal legality, that is where you're allowed to stay, but only temporarily and with conditions. How this changes the experiences of living with precarity? And I think the second misconception is that living with legal limbo, it looks a little bit different, depending on in the United States, at least what state you live in. So, there is the primacy of the immigration deportation regime that is fueled, of course, by a central authority in the United States, but it is also the case that everyday lives are lived in neighborhoods and on roads and en route to school, while having a precarious status is bad no matter where you live in the United States, the intensity or sort of the contours of what it means to live each day with this status can be accentuated in some places more than others. And there's just so many examples, at least in the 11 years that I've been in South Carolina, of how we've seen this in our work here, where it depends on which local sheriff's officer is actually on duty on a given day. One DACA beneficiary, I remember, told us in our research that after he got DACA, he was quote, unquote, deputized by other undocumented immigrants in his apartment complex, and he'd be the first to leave the complex in the morning and text back to the group whether the local sheriff had set up a checkpoint at the entrance, right? And so it's the way that living in lingo legal limbo, it looks different to different places. It's constantly changing. And it is not just one that this sole individual who experiences it, that there are like these ripple effects and positive and negative ways that as people shift within that gray space of liminal legality that have implications for a much larger swath of individuals. This isn't just the story about however many precarious immigrants there are in the United States. This is also the story of precarious immigrants living in mixed status families where the decisions of anyone have implications for the lived experiences of the others.

Patricia Landolt  

I think part of what Ben is getting at when we think about the misconceptions about people living in legal limbo, is people with precarious legal status or living in legal liminality, are part of our communities. They are everywhere. They are in all of the neighborhoods, all of the cities and all of the rural areas of Canada and the United States, they hold up key sectors of the economy. They're going to school with your kids, and that has been the Canadian case. There's this misconception that precarious legal status is a new phenomenon. I think this country has had temporary migrants present and vulnerable from the formation of the country, from the, you know, construction of the railway, right? We feel like, you know, you go to school, you get taught about the railway. Okay? So, from there, there's a long, kind of denied but present history of temporariness in the immigration story of Canada. Yeah, and I would suspect that in the United States as well. So, I think that's an important thing to understand. I think that we can break this down in terms of, you know, they are your neighbors. They are my neighbors. They are, you know, part of our communities. But also, that people with legal liminality or precarious legal status are kind of essential to every sector of the economy that is currently functioning and making a profit for somebody, right? So, at one point, I did this exercise where I pulled up where had work permits been granted by geography across Canada. And it did these little maps from like, you know, the 1990s to the present, and basically, Fort Macks [Mackenzie] so Fort McMurray, like the tar sands, the ag [agriculture] industry, the healthcare sector, Iqaluit, you know, which Ben, if you don't know what callow, it is like the northern most city in Canada, Yellowknife everywhere, service sector, you know, primary extractive industry. All of it, right? And so, to stop thinking about this as these concentrated urban phenomena in particular neighbourhoods that we already have messed up ideas about, but to say, oh, crap, temporary migration is like kind of baked into every decision that's being made about citizenship and non-citizenship, about the economy, about the labour market. And so from there, you begin to think very differently about who are these people? What should the policies be? How should we think about access and entitlements, right? So just before we lose this question around the misconceptions.

Benjamin Roth  

I really appreciate that. I just really appreciate that point. And maybe one other thing to tag on, which is, in my opinion, true in the United, in the case of the United States, which is to say that the production of this precarity, this is not because of the Republican Party, and that the Democratic Party is the pro immigrant one. But you make the point that this kind of precarity of the immigrant experience, it's nothing new, and neither is that as we think of like a quote, unquote "friendly" political party, at least in the US context. It is not because one party has been in power and the other hasn't. This is the production of this precarious and temporary and growing number of immigrants in the United States has long been produced by both political parties, and with little check what it is that they're actually producing. Like very little appreciation for how this is working and how like having maybe an immigration policy standard that is, quote, unquote, more "friendly" to allowing more asylum seekers in, for example, if it's not accompanied by a set of federally funded efforts to ensure that we're also supporting newcomers and their families, really is short sighted and kind of points to like, all right? Well, if we're going to imagine a different receiving context and a bigger, it's going to require a radical re-articulation of the politics of migration management.

Maggie Perzyna  

Patricia, your research looks at how legal status affects access to employment. What are the biggest risks and vulnerabilities migrants face in the labour market when their status is uncertain? 

Patricia Landolt  

Yeah, so in broad terms, so referring specifically to some of the more recent research that we've done with Lewin Goldring, my colleague at York University. You know, we conducted a survey just before we which we ended mercifully, just before the pandemic began, where we now have data on close to 1300 individuals who came into Canada with precarious legal status. And we find that first of all, the greater precarity, the more likelihood that you are entering into high work that is considered highly precarious, so low pay, high danger, lack of regulations, cash jobs, right? And that the more precarious your job while you're living in this legal uncertainty. Once people achieved permanent residence, and 70% of our sample had by the time we interviewed them, it was very difficult for people to exit the labour markets and the shit jobs, excuse my language into which they had gotten stuck during this period of precarious legal status. But I also want to talk a little more specifically about, you know. So we interviewed 30 people who were non-status, so no work permit, no authorization to be in Canada in 2020/21 during periods of significant lockdowns during the pandemic, and what I think we learned, because we asked them about work, not just during that period of the lockdowns, but beforehand and kind of exiting afterwards, we learn about the insecurities of working with precarious legal status, and some of them had had work permits. Some of them, they fell out of status, didn't have work permits anymore. But this, the experience of COVID, non-status was kind of like they didn't see it as being very different from when they had had work permits. And that's really emblematic of what are the kinds of impacts that living with precarious legal status has on securing work. So, you know, first of all, it's a question of entering the new job site not knowing who your employer is and how low the floor is on workplace safety when you enter that job, right? And how much your employer will pressure you to do things that are unsafe, or the experience of, 'will my employer pay me at the end of the week'? So, those kinds of basic vulnerabilities that someone without status enters into a job in the pandemic, when they lost jobs, one of the big issues was, I'm going to have to go out again and expose myself and not know what kind of an employer am I going to hit on? Right? So that's one. The other things that people were experiencing were obviously in the context of COVID, people at work sites were getting sick. They were still required to work. They weren't being provided with protective like all of the masking, all of that stuff. But also, that when they did get sick, their employers pressured them not to report to public health, because then they would shut down the worksite, because then there'd be contact tracing, right? So, and those things which were specific to COVID but were not, because they're kind of emblematic of the power that your employer has over you when you are non-status, when you can't really negotiate, right? So, I think they were really kind of pulled back the curtain on the extent to which employers are willing to take advantage of the vulnerabilities that people who are deportable. Uh huh, right? So, that's a very basic kind of impact going out there looking for a job on being in a worksite when you are not a citizen, when you have a precarious legal status.

Maggie Perzyna  

Turning to your work Ben, your research focuses on unaccompanied migrant children, what makes their experience of precarious status particularly unique and challenging? 

Benjamin Roth  

So, together with a group of colleagues, we've been looking carefully at the system of care in place for unaccompanied children. My colleague Brianne Grace and John Doering-White, Jessica Darrow, we've spent some time looking at these various stages of where precarity shows up for unaccompanied children. And I mentioned earlier that one place that precarity presents itself is if you can think of the arc of the migration journey for many unaccompanied children, the majority of whom, at present, are from a couple of Central American countries, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. It's often as they approach the age of 14, 15, 16, which is the bulk of unaccompanied children. This is when we know globally, kids are often most at risk of being recruited into gangs, and this is what a lot of unaccompanied children report as being the primary reason why they are fleeing their country of origin, and so that is one precursor to the precarity that they experience upon arrival. Is for many, not all. It is the experience of violence and insecurity in their country of origin, combined with all kinds of human rights abuses that they experience along the way to the US Mexico border, where they're traveling without a parent or guardian. And then we have spent some time talking to people who work in the network of 240 plus shelters and programs that are operated by the federal government's Office of Refugee Resettlement within DHHS [Department of Health and Human Services], this is a pretty big network across 27-some states, and they're tasked with meeting the best interest of children and moving them in as efficient of a way possible into these least restrictive environments, usually, like I said earlier, with a family in the United States while they undergo deportation proceedings, and there's been, since we got into this work in 2014 during the Obama administration, a lot of high profile attention on the experiences of unaccompanied children who are in these facilities, some of which are influx facilities, when there happen to be more children who are apprehended by border patrol, traveling unaccompanied. These influx facilities can be pop up facilities in us, military bases. They can be modified convention centers in San Diego. And a lot of work has gone into documenting what that experience is like and why that can further exacerbate the kinds of insecurities that many children experience even prior to then. But what I think to add to this conversation, it's experiences also of what happens once they are released from government custody. And what's interesting is, the visibility of unaccompanied children is arguably greatest between the point that they're apprehended by border patrol and when they are released to a sponsor in the United States, because that's when you we can access data on how many kids, where they're from, what their ages are. I mean, empirically, we can know not what their individual stories are, but we can get a sense of who they are. And even though that's a closed system that, as researchers, proves to be very difficult, a very difficult nut to crack and to get inside of, what happens within those facilities, we know even less about what happens once they are placed with sponsors in the years, for many, between when they are placed there and when they are in immigration court asking for legal relief. Work by Kiara Galli at U Chicago and Stephanie Canizales at Berkeley has really helped to elucidate what happens in that space. But just as an example of what precarity looks like for them, there was a case of a young adolescent who had left Honduras when she was threatened by a gang that was looking to recruit her and her parents, who mom and stepfather, who were living in suburban Atlanta, realized that it had been six years and she was being raised by her grandmother in Honduras, and they were sending money, remittances back, to help ensure that she was getting the best quality education and was safe. But they recognized that that moment when, they're helping to fund that was reaching its limit, and they so they sent for her. She came, she arrived, and when she came, it's  a mom and stepfather, in a sense, after so many years meeting an adolescent for the first time. And learning how to parent an adolescent who they haven't physically been in close proximity within years, because of the nature of precarious legal status, they were unable to travel back to see her on a regular basis, as may have happened in previous eras of immigration policy in the United States. And so, when they were becoming reacquainted, or acquainted for the first time, with this now adolescent daughter, she was presenting with mental health needs, and so they looked to connect her to a mental health provider. And they're in suburban Atlanta, but there was a huge wait list, and it required considerable driving, and neither parent had a driver's license, and they were afraid to transport her for fear of getting pulled over, so the dad who was more confident driving would primarily be responsible for taking her the further distance to a mental health counseling center that was further away from their home, that didn't have a waiting list, but had services in Spanish, and he needed to make sure that she was meeting all of her Immigration Court appointments which were which were mounting. And as a result, he lost his job. So, now you have a family who has lost their income in an effort to reunite with a daughter about whom they were very worried. Now an entire family system, while reunified and meeting some of those goals of our federal policy to support those families and keep that, that value of family unity has now in effect, put that family in a state of economic precarity that has immediate and long-term implications for their ability to to achieve their own goals and to have a level of well-being and stability.

Maggie Perzyna  

Despite the challenges, people find ways to cope, resist and support one another. What are some examples of community solidarity that stand out from your research? Patricia?

Patricia Landolt  

I've lived in Toronto a long, long, long time, and this is a city with a long history of supporting newcomers with uncertain legal status. Kind of co-ethnic solidarity. But I want to focus on one organization in particular, FCJ Refugee House [Centre], which was founded by Loli and Francisco Rico Martinez in the 1990s, I would say. They had come, they themselves came as refugees from El Salvador and worked with nuns and priests and whatnot, they usually have money. To form this amazing organization that has been really at the forefront of understanding the uncertainties and the vulnerabilities of people with precarious legal status, and they have worked... so, during the pandemic, they were the first ones to advocate to the city to make sure that all of the kinds of emergency reliefs that were being offered to city workers were extended to people without legal status. They were able to organize in vaccination clinics that were open without questions, without the need for an OHIP card, and what they found was no kidding, that everyone wants to be safe and so that the uptake on vaccines from precarious legal status members of the community, was really high. You know, they have also, over the years, organized an undocumented youth support network, right? So, I think Loli and Francisco and the others who work with them have really understood from their own experience and from just I think, the kindness and open heartedness that they have and their political savvy as well, how to work the system the state funding structures to advocate. To open up spaces where people with precarious legal status could find mutual support and also access some entitlements that citizens have, all right. So, for me, they are really like a beacon of how people on the ground respond to just mobilizing across this artificial boundary between citizen and non-citizen.

Maggie Perzyna  

Looking at policy, there's often a temptation to reduce complex problems to simple fixes. If immigration precarity is a wicked problem, what kinds of long-term strategies should we be thinking about? Ben?

Benjamin Roth  

Uh, that's a big question [laughs]. And I mean, it's hard not to first make a comment about what seems to be, at least in the case of the United States, a pipe dream at the moment, which is comprehensive immigration reform. I mean, that's something that was on the table in the early 2000s here, and it was  not a perfect fix, but it was the conversations that were happening, the mobilizations that we saw in LA, Chicago and elsewhere, of tens of thousands of people were in support of a, like a and here I'm struggling even like, what's the right word here? A responsible immigration policy, a humanizing immigration policy system? So, it seems just politically infeasible to think about that kind of long-term goal. I think in our current moment in the United States, at least under the Trump administration, when it you know, I feel like we're caught on the back foot again, and we are defending through the courts and through really important work that's happening by immigrant serving organizations and immigrant led entities to raise awareness about people's rights and to provide, even like the Mexican consulate in Raleigh and elsewhere around the country is looking to help people put together a legal plan for, say, the guardianship of their citizen children in the event that they are forcibly removed from the country. So, there's so much work happening, but I feel like, short of imagining a big fix policy wise, we've got to change the narrative on immigration. We've been in crisis mode for too long. We've been ignoring the contributions of immigrants and their historical impact. And I think in that pursuit, we've got to be clear on what values we hold in common, regardless of political position or opinion here in this country. And I mean, some of the things that come to mind, I guess, are like valuing the importance of family and prioritizing the best interest of children, respecting the courts and due process. I mean, the average immigration courts right now are completely overwhelmed. The average caseload is something like 5000 per Judge, and there are efforts to like, double the number of current immigration judges from 700 to 1400 and groups here, like the Vera Institute, are trying to ensure that immigrants with precarious status have legal representation, which makes, obviously, a huge difference, and it certainly does for children. And yet we have immigration judges that are on the record saying that they have no problem allowing a four- or five-year-old unaccompanied child defend herself or himself in immigration court, you know. So, I think we need to be thinking about changing that narrative, while simultaneously expanding structures that are supposedly in place to protect rights, to ensure that they are, in fact, protected, and always moving towards a collaborative re envisioning of what a comprehensive policy change would look like. Because I am hopeful, maybe this is completely naive. It feels a little tone deaf at the moment to say, but sometimes these moments present themselves when you wouldn't expect. I mean, those marches in 2006 were five years after 9/11 happened in the United States. And in the wake of 9/11, there was, it was like a horrific roundup. And an us-them national conversation that seemed to like, there was no dreaming of comprehensive immigration reform in the wake of of that event. And yet, five years later, there was a groundswell. So, anyway, those are just some thoughts. I'm curious to hear what Patricia would say to that. 

Patricia Landolt  

Yeah, so in the Canadian context, I would say that we know the policy, the immigration policy changes, that we have to really push for, first of all, significant expansion opportunities for permanent residence on arrival. Currently, we've set up the system that the government likes to call the two track, two-step system. So, you transition from temporary to permanent. I think, honestly, that whole system is such in such chaos and needs to be abolished. But also ending the reliance on temporary migrants to fill permanent labour demands. A robust funding for higher education so that you end the reliance on temporary migrants to ensure the financial stability of university and college systems, right? So, those are basic things that have to do with regulating the labour market and employers and funding public higher education, right, which the governments claim to do, but don't, and I think in terms of our research agenda, which I think is important to think about. I think we need to have a serious conversation about the extent to which white supremacy is really driving a xenophobic immigration agenda right in Canada and in the United States. So, 20 years ago, I think that when we did immigration research, we were thinking in terms of, oh, let's just convince people that we're a country of immigrants and that drawing on people's own experiences of immigration, whether it was recent or more historical, would resonate with a sense of, there is no us, and then they're kind of like the new version of us, right? I think at this point, our agenda is no longer feasible from that starting point but really having a critical conversation about the ways in which the fear of whoever the hell is considered not white is driving the xenophobia at the borders, the hysteria at the borders. Because when we, when I see the news coverage of a child in a cage, or a person in the detention center in Toronto, I'm seeing a human being. Most of the people in immigration policy and a lot of the policy think tanks, they're seeing brown bodies that they do not want in their country, right? And so, we are not talking - we are beginning to talk about that, but the questions around race and white supremacy, I think we need to push to the front and change a little bit the way we're thinking about reimagining policy beyond a narrative around well, 'we're a country of immigrants. Cause I don't think that's going to take us very far at this point.

Benjamin Roth  

I just really appreciate that point. And we are in such a moment in the United States right now where, yeah, it's just hard to say. Like the path forward towards that conversation is unclear, and I think that we are just kind of, really, we're struggling down here, and but appreciate that, that reminder, and I think that's, I think there's a lot to be said to that claim of like, where is the starting point, and if it has historically or like, in the past, recent past. Patricia said, in the last 20 years, focused on finding this common ground on immigrant histories. What I think, I mean, from what I understand, Canada's work on just Indigeneity and recognizing First Nations, this is, you know, like a work that has been revisited in the United States recently, but all of it just feels like it's on ice right now, no pun intended. And yeah, we've got a lot of work to do.

Patricia Landolt  

I think the questions around the racial contracts that are kind of driving, if not the policies then certainly the narratives and the panic, the hysteria, is not unique to the United States. We're more polite about it, but it is very much part of what is happening. If we remember. Were, I would say, was it the first Trump administration. At one point, there was a threat to TPS [Temporary Protected Status ], and all of a sudden, there were people showing up at the Quebec Canada border. There was an unpoliced, or an uncontrolled border, and the news coverage was of African migrants right at the border. That's not a coincidence. So, could the fear of the non-white body crossing borders, right, and polluting again, I'm using my bunny fingers, right - "the nation" - is present in Europe. It is present in Canada. It is present in the US. And I think it's good that we start talking about it from these different points of there's a long history, there's research on this, and it's funny that I've kind of derailed our own kind of, like, precarious legal status. I mean, the race agenda needs to be brought into migration scholarship. It is being brought into the migration scholarship, you know. So, I think that's one thing that we need to think about. I'm not hopeless. I'm never hopeless. I think that, you know, there's this effort presently, whether it's the chaos of, you know, in Canada, what does chaos look like in Canada? It's kind of like, oh, they changed the policy. Oh, no, they've changed the policy again. What's happening? You know, 20 like, they changed the numbers, they changed the pathways. In the US. It's much more violent, right? But we cannot get lost in the chaos generated by the state, right? Because we do understand the system. We know these are patterned responses. There's systemic production of vulnerability, right? So, like as sociologists, or a social scientist, we need to go back to, okay, it looks kind of crazy, but it's not. So, let's go back to basics and understand how is this vulnerability being produced, right? How can we center the agency of migrants and people who work with migrants to show that that there's possibility for change.

Maggie Perzyna  

On that somewhat hopeful note, I want to thank you for an incredibly rich conversation. I also want to highlight what Ben said about the possibility for a collective reimagining, which is something to strive for in these difficult times.

Benjamin Roth  

Thank you.

Patricia Landolt  

Take care.

Maggie Perzyna  

Thanks to Patricia Landolt and Ben Roth for joining me today and thank you for listening. This is a CERC Migration podcast produced in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe to Borders & Belonging on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the effects of status, precarity and wellbeing, please visit the show notes. Before we wrap up. Do you have an idea for an episode? Something we haven't covered yet but should. Season Four is all about your requests. DM us on LinkedIn or email bordersandbelonging@gmail.com we'll feature the most compelling ideas in our next season. I'm Maggie Perzyna. Thanks for listening.