The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants. The population of immigrants is also very diverse, with just about every country in the world represented among U.S. immigrants.
Pew Research Center regularly publishes statistical portraits of the nation’s foreign-born population, which include historical trends since 1960. Based on these portraits, here are answers to some key questions about the U.S. immigrant population.
How many people in the U.S. are immigrants?
The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018. Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Immigrants today account for 13.7% of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share (4.8%) in 1970. However, today’s immigrant share remains below the record 14.8% share in 1890, when 9.2 million immigrants lived in the U.S.
What is the legal status of immigrants in the U.S.?
Some 27% of immigrants were permanent residents and 5% were temporary residents in 2017. Another 23% of all immigrants were unauthorized immigrants. From 1990 to 2007, the unauthorized immigrant population more than tripled in size – from 3.5 million to a record high of 12.2 million in 2007. By 2017, that number had declined by 1.7 million, or 14%. There were 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2017, accounting for 3.2% of the nation’s population.
The decline in the unauthorized immigrant population is due largely to a fall in the number from Mexico – the single largest group of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Between 2007 and 2017, this group decreased by 2 million. Meanwhile, there was a rise in the number from Central America and Asia.
Do all lawful immigrants choose to become U.S. citizens?
Not all lawful permanent residents choose to pursue U.S. citizenship. Those who wish to do so may apply after meeting certain requirements, including having lived in the U.S. for five years. In fiscal year 2019, about 800,000 immigrants applied for naturalization. The number of naturalization applications has climbed in recent years, though the annual totals remain below the 1.4 million applications filed in 2007.
Generally, most immigrants eligible for naturalization apply to become citizens. However, Mexican lawful immigrants have the lowest naturalization rate overall. Language and personal barriers, lack of interest and financial barriers are among the top reasons for choosing not to naturalize cited by Mexican-born green card holders, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey.
Where do immigrants come from?
Mexico is the top origin country of the U.S. immigrant population. In 2018, roughly 11.2 million immigrants living in the U.S. were from there, accounting for 25% of all U.S. immigrants. The next largest origin groups were those from China (6%), India (6%), the Philippines (4%) and El Salvador (3%).
By region of birth, immigrants from Asia combined accounted for 28% of all immigrants, close to the share of immigrants from Mexico (25%). Other regions make up smaller shares: Europe, Canada and other North America (13%), the Caribbean (10%), Central America (8%), South America (7%), the Middle East and North Africa (4%) and sub-Saharan Africa (5%).
Who is arriving today?
More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexico (120,000) and the Philippines (46,000).
By race and ethnicity, more Asian immigrants than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in most years since 2010. Immigration from Latin America slowed following the Great Recession, particularly for Mexico, which has seen both decreasing flows into the United States and large flows back to Mexico in recent years.
Asians are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055, surpassing Hispanics. Pew Research Center estimates indicate that in 2065, those who identify as Asian will make up some 38% of all immigrants; as Hispanic, 31%; White, 20%; and Black, 9%.
Is the immigrant population growing?
New immigrant arrivals have fallen, mainly due to a decrease in the number of unauthorized immigrants coming to the U.S. The drop in the unauthorized immigrant population can primarily be attributed to more Mexican immigrants leaving the U.S. than coming in.
Looking forward, immigrants and their descendants are projected to account for 88% of U.S. population growth through 2065, assuming current immigration trends continue. In addition to new arrivals, U.S. births to immigrant parents will be important to future growth in the country’s population. In 2018, the percentage of women giving birth in the past year was higher among immigrants (7.5%) than among the U.S. born (5.7%). While U.S.-born women gave birth to more than 3 million children that year, immigrant women gave birth to about 760,000.
How many immigrants have come to the U.S. as refugees?
In fiscal 2019, a total of 30,000 refugees were resettled in the U.S. The largest origin group of refugees was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, followed by Burma (Myanmar), Ukraine, Eritrea and Afghanistan. Among all refugees admitted in fiscal year 2019, 4,900 are Muslims (16%) and 23,800 are Christians (79%). Texas, Washington, New York and California resettled more than a quarter of all refugees admitted in fiscal 2018.
Where do most U.S. immigrants live?
Nearly half (45%) of the nation’s 44.4 million immigrants live in just three states: California (24%), Texas (11%) and Florida (10%). California had the largest immigrant population of any state in 2018, at 10.6 million. Texas, Florida and New York had more than 4 million immigrants each.
In terms of regions, about two-thirds of immigrants lived in the West (34%) and South (34%). Roughly one-fifth lived in the Northeast (21%) and 11% were in the Midwest.
In 2018, most immigrants lived in just 20 major metropolitan areas, with the largest populations in the New York, Los Angeles and Miami metro areas. These top 20 metro areas were home to 28.7 million immigrants, or 64% of the nation’s total foreign-born population. Most of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population lived in these top metro areas as well.
How do immigrants compare with the U.S. population overall in education?
Immigrants in the U.S. as a whole have lower levels of education than the U.S.-born population. In 2018, immigrants were over three times as likely as the U.S. born to have not completed high school (27% vs. 8%). However, immigrants were just as likely as the U.S. born to have a bachelor’s degree or more (32% and 33%, respectively).
Educational attainment varies among the nation’s immigrant groups, particularly across immigrants from different regions of the world. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are less likely to be high school graduates than the U.S. born (54% and 47%, respectively, do not have a high school diploma, vs. 8% of U.S. born). On the other hand, immigrants from every region except Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America were as likely as or more likely than U.S.-born residents to have a bachelor’s or advanced degree.
Among all immigrants, those from South Asia (71%) were the most likely to have a bachelor’s degree or more. Immigrants from Mexico (7%) and Central America (11%) were the least likely to have a bachelor’s or higher.
How many immigrants are working in the U.S.?
In 2017, about 29 million immigrants were working or looking for work in the U.S., making up some 17% of the total civilian labor force. Lawful immigrants made up the majority of the immigrant workforce, at 21.2 million. An additional 7.6 million immigrant workers are unauthorized immigrants, less than the total of the previous year and notably less than in 2007, when they were 8.2 million. They alone account for 4.6% of the civilian labor force, a dip from their peak of 5.4% in 2007. During the same period, the overall U.S. workforce grew, as did the number of U.S.-born workers and lawful immigrant workers.
Immigrants are projected to drive future growth in the U.S. working-age population through at least 2035. As the Baby Boom generation heads into retirement, immigrants and their children are expected to offset a decline in the working-age population by adding about 18 million people of working age between 2015 and 2035.
How well do immigrants speak English?
Among immigrants ages 5 and older in 2018, half (53%) are proficient English speakers – either speaking English very well (37%) or only speaking English at home (17%).
Immigrants from Mexico have the lowest rates of English proficiency (34%), followed by those from Central America (35%), East and Southeast Asia (50%) and South America (56%). Immigrants from Canada (96%), Oceania (82%), Europe (75%) and sub-Saharan Africa (74%) have the highest rates of English proficiency.
The longer immigrants have lived in the U.S., the greater the likelihood they are English proficient. Some 47% of immigrants living in the U.S. five years or less are proficient. By contrast, more than half (57%) of immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for 20 years or more are proficient English speakers.
Among immigrants ages 5 and older, Spanish is the most commonly spoken language. Some 42% of immigrants in the U.S. speak Spanish at home. The top five languages spoken at home among immigrants outside of Spanish are English only (17%), followed by Chinese (6%), Hindi (5%), Filipino/Tagalog (4%) and French (3%).
How many immigrants have been deported recently?
Around 337,000 immigrants were deported from the U.S. in fiscal 2018, up since 2017. Overall, the Obama administration deported about 3 million immigrants between 2009 and 2016, a significantly higher number than the 2 million immigrants deported by the Bush administration between 2001 and 2008. In 2017, the Trump administration deported 295,000 immigrants, the lowest total since 2006.
Immigrants convicted of a crime made up the less than half of deportations in 2018, the most recent year for which statistics by criminal status are available. Of the 337,000 immigrants deported in 2018, some 44% had criminal convictions and 56% were not convicted of a crime. From 2001 to 2018, a majority (60%) of immigrants deported have not been convicted of a crime.
How many immigrant apprehensions take place at the U.S.-Mexico border?
The number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border has doubled from fiscal 2018 to fiscal 2019, from 396,579 in fiscal 2018 to 851,508 in fiscal 2019. Today, there are more apprehensions of non-Mexicans than Mexicans at the border. In fiscal 2019, apprehensions of Central Americans at the border exceeded those of Mexicans for the fourth consecutive year. The first time Mexicans did not make up the bulk of Border Patrol apprehensions was in 2014.
How do Americans view immigrants and immigration?
While immigration has been at the forefront of a national political debate, the U.S. public holds a range of views about immigrants living in the country. Overall, a majority of Americans have positive views about immigrants. About two-thirds of Americans (66%) say immigrants strengthen the country “because of their hard work and talents,” while about a quarter (24%) say immigrants burden the country by taking jobs, housing and health care.
Yet these views vary starkly by political affiliation. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 88% think immigrants strengthen the country with their hard work and talents, and just 8% say they are a burden. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 41% say immigrants strengthen the country, while 44% say they burden it.
Americans were divided on future levels of immigration. A quarter said legal immigration to the U.S. should be decreased (24%), while one-third (38%) said immigration should be kept at its present level and almost another third (32%) said immigration should be increased.
Note: This is an update of a post originally published May 3, 2017, and written by Gustavo López, a former research analyst focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics; and Kristen Bialik, a former research assistant.
Abby Budimanis a research analyst focusing on global migration and demography research at Pew Research Center.
Featured Image :Immigrants listen to a speech as they wait to become U.S. citizens at a naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles. (Mark Ralson/AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Trump unleashed a scorched-earth campaign on Thursday against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. hours before Mr. Biden was to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, predicting “mayhem” if his rival won the general election in November.
“At stake in this election is the survival of our nation, it’s true,” Mr. Trump told a small crowd in a Pennsylvania town not far from where Mr. Biden was born. “Because we’re dealing with crazy people on the other side. They’ve gone totally stone-cold crazy.”
The president took aim at Senator Kamala Harris of California, the Democratic nominee for vice president, seeking to stoke fear of immigrants by offering a brutal description of a case involving an undocumented immigrant who was included in a jobs program while Ms. Harris was the top prosecutor in San Francisco.
“As district attorney of San Francisco, Kamala put a drug-dealing illegal alien into a jobs program instead of into prison,” Mr. Trump said. “Four months later, the illegal alien robbed a 29-year-old woman, mowed her down with an S.U.V., fracturing her skull and ruining her life.”
It was a reference to the case of Alexander Izaguirre, an undocumented immigrant convicted of selling cocaine in 2008. He was a participant in Back on Track, an initiative spearheaded by Ms. Harris that placed young, first-time drug offenders who pleaded guilty to their crimes into a jobs program rather than jail.
Mr. Trump’s attack on Ms. Harris was an echo of the Willie Horton episode during the 1988 presidential race between Vice President George Bush and Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts. Mr. Bush’s campaign and its allies repeatedly invoked Mr. Horton — a Black prisoner in Massachusetts who, while released on a furlough program, raped a white woman — to suggest Mr. Dukakis was soft on crime.
In July 2008, Mr. Izaguirre snatched a woman’s purse and jumped into a car. When the woman jumped onto the car’s hood, the driver slammed on the brakes and the woman was thrown to the sidewalk, The Los Angeles Times reported in 2009.
When she learned of the case, Ms. Harris said that year that Mr. Izaguirre’s inclusion in the program was a mistake, one that she had since fixed by requiring would-be participants to provide “everything from Social Security cards to whatever it is that they can produce” to show that they are in the United States legally.
At the time, 113 offenders had successfully completed the program, while 99 had failed and been sent back into the court system. Ms. Harris said in 2009 that Mr. Izaguirre was one of seven undocumented immigrants in the program, but was the only one who failed, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
As the president prepares for the Republican National Convention next week, he has begun to reveal the core of his coming campaign: a highly personal assault on Mr. Biden and his running mate.
“These people have gone insane and they are radical left,” Mr. Trump said, calling Mr. Biden “a puppet of the radical-left movement that seeks to destroy the American way of life.”
In Mr. Trump’s often blatantly misleading telling, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris will destroy the country by taking guns away from Americans, funding late-term abortions, encouraging “deadly ‘sanctuary cities’” and allowing low-income housing to “abolish suburbs.”
Seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s appeal in rural, blue-collar parts of Pennsylvania, the president lashed out at him, saying that Mr. Biden had “abandoned” his hometown, Scranton, when his family moved when he was a young boy.
Mr. Trump said that Mr. Biden had been at the forefront of a “globalist attack on Pennsylvania voters,” citing the former vice president’s support of trade deals with Mexico, China, South Korea and “the horrible, ridiculous Paris climate accords.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Trump asserted, “Joe Biden is no friend of Pennsylvania.”
In his remarks, the president also ascribed to Mr. Biden’s many positions that he does not actually hold or he mischaracterized Mr. Biden’s proposals.
Mr. Trump misleadingly claimed that Mr. Biden had “pledged to hike your taxes by $4 trillion dollars.” Three-quarters of the proposed increases would be levied on the wealthiest 1 percent of the population.
President Trump falsely said that Mr. Biden would “take away your guns.” Mr. Biden’s proposed gun control measures include a buyback program that would allow those who own assault weapons and high-capacity magazines to either sell them to the government or register them.
Mr. Trump also falsely said that Mr. Biden would “give free health care to illegal aliens.” Mr. Biden’s health care plan would allow undocumented immigrants to buy government-sponsored insurance or private plans on government-run exchanges, but it would not be “free.”
President Trump misleadingly claimed that Mr. Biden would “close down charter schools.” Mr. Biden has said that he would end voucher programs for private, for-profit charter schools, but that he supports high-performing public charter schools.
And Mr. Trump misleadingly claimed that under Mr. Biden, “I guess 600,000, 670,000 lose their jobs.” That is an estimate of the effect of a nationwide ban on fracking from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but Mr. Biden has not said he supports such a ban.
ILRC, Aug. 21, 2020 “The Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) today announced it had joined a coalition of 8 of the nation’s leading immigrants’ rights organizations in filing a lawsuit against the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Chad Wolf, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
(USCIS), and Kenneth Cuccinelli over DHS’s new Fee Rule increasing application fees for immigration benefits, including citizenship and asylum.
The coalition is seeking a nationwide injunction of the rule to prevent it from going into effect October 2, 2020.
In their lawsuit, the coalition noted that DHS’s new Fee Rule violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it is contrary to law, and constitutes arbitrary and capricious agency action.
The Rule raises application fees for many essential immigration benefits by 30 to 266 percent, while eliminating most fee waivers for qualifying low income immigrants.
DHS justified the rule in part based on what it claims are the costs of processing applications. But during the notice and comment period, many criticized DHS for failing to explain how it calculated its skyrocketing costs and burned through ample cash reserves it had on hand just a few years ago.
“With DHS’s new Fee Rule, the Trump administration has demonstrated its willingness to disregard the rule of law in pursuit of its anti-immigrant and xenophobic agenda,” said Melissa Rodgers, Director of Programs for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center .
By failing to address the rule’s obviously flawed revenue modeling projections, the Trump administration has not only undercut its own legal rationale for finalizing the rule, it has contradicted USCIS’ own leaderships’ statements to Congress about the financial condition of the agency.
Once again, the historic racism and bigotry of this administration is matched only by its staggering incompetence. DHS’s Fee Rule has been widely condemned for its exclusionary impact on vulnerable immigrant families, and particularly people of color.
By raising naturalization fees by an unprecedented 83 percent, DHS has made the cost of obtaining citizenship prohibitively high for millions of eligible permanent residents, effectively imposing the United States’ first ever wealth test for citizenship.
Through establishing the nation’s first-ever fee for asylum seekers, the Trump administration has also made the United States just one of four countries in the world to impose such a fee on people fleeing dangerous situations such as war or political persecution.
In their lawsuit, the coalition noted that the Immigration and Nationality Act prioritizes family unity and diversity. By deliberately making the cost of securing essential immigration benefits unobtainable for millions of immigrant families, the Trump administration’s policy makes family separation inevitable, and violates statutory and constitutional law.
The coalition’s lawsuit also noted that neither Kevin McAleenan nor Chad Wolf, who is currently serving as Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had valid authority to propose or promulgate the Rule under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA).
This makes the rule unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act. On Friday, August 14 the Government Accountability Office issued a decision confirming that Acting Secretaries Wolf and McAleenan were invalidly appointed to their positions.
The coalition argues that their invalid appointments render the Fee Rule void and without effect.”
We have great news for our readers. On August 19, 2020, the
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
(USCIS) issued an important announcement for applicants whose Form I-765 Application for Employment Authorization has been approved, but who have not yet received their employment authorization document (EAD card) by mail.
What’s this all about
Since the emergence of the Coronavirus outbreak, there has been significant delays affecting the production of certain Employment Authorization Documents also known as EAD cards, which permit an applicant to obtain lawful employment in the United States, a driver’s license, and other important documentation such as a Social Security number.
These delays have caused hardships for applicants and created additional obstacles to finding employment during an already difficult economic time.
The good news is that USCIS is providing temporary relief for applicants who have received an approval notice, but have not yet received an employment authorization document (EAD card) in the mail.
Due to the unprecedented and extraordinary circumstances caused by COVID-19, USCIS will allow foreign nationals to temporarily use their Form I-797 Notice of Action, with a notice date on or after December 1, 2019 through August 20, 2020, informing the applicant of the approval of their I-765 Application for Employment Authorization, as evidence of Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification.
In other words, individuals can now provide employers with the I-797 Notice of Action, receipt of approval of the Form I-765 Application for Employment Authorization, in order to qualify for lawful employment.
Pursuant to the announcement, the Notice of Action is now considered a List C #7 approved document that establishes employment authorization issued by the Department of Homeland Security, even though the Notice states that it is not evidence of employment authorization.
Accordingly, employees can present Form I-797 Notice of Action showing approval of their I-765 application as a list C document for Form I-9 compliance until December 1, 2020.
For I-9 completion, employees who present a Form I-797 Notice of Action described above for new employment must also present their employer with an acceptable List B document that establishes identity. The Lists of Acceptable Documents is on Form I-9. Current employees who require reverification can present Form I-797 Notice of Action as proof of employment authorization under List C.
We believe this is a step in the right direction and hope that USCIS can quickly and efficiently resolve the EAD backlogs as soon as possible.
For more information on acceptable documentation for verifying employment authorization and identity please click here.
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser and an architect of his 2016 general election campaign, was charged on Thursday with defrauding donors to a private fund-raising effort called
We Build the Wall, which was intended to bolster one of the president’s signature initiatives: erecting a barrier on the Mexican border.With a wounded Air Force veteran and a Florida venture capitalist, Mr. Bannon conspired to cheat hundreds of thousands of donors by falsely promising that their money had been set aside exclusively toward building a new section of border wall, according to a federal indictment unsealed in Manhattan. Prosecutors said that after siphoning money from the project, Mr. Bannon plowed nearly $1 million into paying off his personal expenses.
Mr. Bannon was arrested early Thursday on a $35 million, 150-foot yacht that was off the coast of Westbrook, Conn., law enforcement officials said. Working with the Coast Guard, federal postal inspectors and special agents from the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan boarded the vessel, which belonged to the exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, the officials said.
The charges, filed days before Mr. Trump was to be nominated for a second term at the Republican National Convention, marked a stark turn of fortune for Mr. Bannon, a high-living and flamboyant political strategist. He had first burst into the public eye when he was in charge of the right-wing media outlet Breitbart, where he had aligned himself with the alt-right, a loose network of groups and people who promote white identity.
Now in custody in New York, Mr. Bannon joins a growing list of Trump associates who have been charged with federal crimes, including Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; and Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s onetime lawyer and fixer.
Audrey Strauss, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, said Mr. Bannon and his three co-defendants defrauded donors to We Build the Wall by “capitalizing on their interest” in the border wall and falsely telling them that “all of that money would be spent on construction.”
The 24-page indictment, unsealed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, was by far the most politically sensitive case that Ms. Strauss has handled since she assumed her job after her predecessor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was fired in June by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Bannon was expected to appear before a federal magistrate judge in New York on Thursday afternoon. Investigators from Ms. Strauss’s office and postal inspectors conducted several searches around the country on Thursday morning, at the homes of the defendants and at other locations, law enforcement officials said.
Shortly after the charges were announced, Mr. Trump sought to distance himself from Mr. Bannon and the fund-raising initiative, though the president also expressed sympathy for his former chief adviser.
“I feel very badly,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “I haven’t been dealing with him for a very long period of time.”
The president said he knew nothing about the multimillion-dollar campaign but quickly contradicted himself, saying he disliked it.
“I don’t like that project,” Mr. Trump said. “I thought it was being done for showboating reasons.” He called paying for the border wall privately “inappropriate.”
A White House official said Mr. Trump did not know ahead of time that Mr. Bannon was being arrested, and he was told by aides after it happened.
One of Mr. Trump’s sons, Donald Jr., publicly promoted the We Build the Wall effort at an event in 2018, calling it “private enterprise at its finest.”
Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement on Thursday that he had no involvement with the effort beyond praising it at that one event.
According to the authorities, Mr. Bannon hatched the plot to defraud the donors with three other men: Brian Kolfage, a 38-year-old Air Force veteran and triple amputee from Miramar Beach, Fla.; Andrew Badolato, 56, a venture capitalist from Sarasota, Fla.; and Timothy Shea, 49, of Castle Rock, Colo.
Mr. Kolfage and Mr. Badolato were arrested in Florida on Thursday, and Mr. Shea was arrested in Denver.
Mr. Kolfage, who lost both his legs and one of his arms during his service in Iraq, created We Build the Wall as a GoFundMe page in December 2018. It was an immediate success, raising nearly $17 million in its first week online, prosecutors said.
To persuade donors to contribute to the effort, prosecutors said, Mr. Kolfage promised them that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that all of the money he raised would be used “in the execution of our mission and purpose.” According to the indictment, Mr. Bannon described We Build the Wall as a “volunteer organization.”
But all of that was false, prosecutors said. Instead, they claimed, Mr. Kolfage secretly took more than $350,000 in donations and spent it on home renovations, boat payments, a luxury S.U.V., a golf cart, jewelry and cosmetic surgery.
Mr. Bannon, working through an unnamed nonprofit organization, received more than $1 million from We Build the Wall, prosecutors said, some of which he used to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses.
To conceal the illicit flow of money, prosecutors said, the four men routed payments from We Build the Wall not only through Mr. Bannon’s nonprofit group, but also through a shell company that Mr. Shea controlled.
Read the document
Mr. Bannon and three others are accused in a scheme to use funds raised for construction to pay for personal expenses.
Court papers suggested that prosecutors were in possession of several text messages between the men, including one in which Mr. Kolfage told Mr. Badolato that the payment scheme was “confidential” and should be kept on a “need to know” basis.
It remained unclear precisely when the yearlong investigation into the scheme began. But last year, a bank informed Mr. Bannon that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed records related to We Build the Wall, according to a person briefed on the matter.
Prosecutors said that despite the effort’s early success, there were questions almost instantly “about Mr. Kolfage’s background” and the viability of his promises to give the money he had raised to the government to actually build Mr. Trump’s wall.
Because of these concerns, prosecutors said, GoFundMe warned Mr. Kolfage that if he did not find a “legitimate nonprofit organization” to handle the money, it would return it to the donors. Mr. Kolfage claimed that the group had determined that only $800,000 of the funds needed to be given back.
“No rules were broken,” Mr. Kolfage said in an interview last year. “Ninety-four percent of the donors we have been able to reach are opting in. We’ve reached 75 percent of all the donors so far.”
But some donors wondered what had happened to their money.
Harvey Garlotte of Hattiesburg, Miss., donated $60 to the fund and was among those who complained when he received a refund — minus the $3 he had added as a tip for the group.
In a complaint to the Florida secretary of state filed last year, Mr. Garlotte wrote that he felt he had been cheated by We Build the Wall, noting that even though Mr. Kolfage lived in Florida, he could find no record of a Florida charity registration.
“From my side of the road, Mr. Kolfage was simply using a hot button topic, a very emotional topic, and his status as a wounded veteran, for selfish and self-serving reasons and personal financial gain,” Mr. Garlotte wrote in his complaint.
As the problems with donors mounted, Mr. Kolfage said that he would establish a board of advisers for the group and incorporate it as We Build the Wall Inc.
Mr. Kolfage enlisted Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, to serve on the board. Mr. Kobach, a longtime Trump supporter and a prominent immigration hard-liner, was not named in the indictment.
Mr. Kolfage also brought in Mr. Bannon, who had joined Mr. Trump’s campaign as chief executive officer in August 2016 and became the White House’s chief strategist after Mr. Trump was elected.
Prosecutors said Mr. Bannon was by then already working with Mr. Badolato on a separate project: a nonprofit group dedicated to “promoting economic nationalism and American sovereignty.”
And within days of becoming involved with the wall-building effort, the two men took “significant control” of its day-to-day activities, prosecutors said, including its “finances, messaging, donor outreach and general operations.”
In January 2019, prosecutors said, the group announced that it was changing its mission and would seek to build a wall privately. The group told its donors that they would have to “opt in” to the altered plan, prosecutors said.
Several times, prosecutors said, Mr. Kolfage falsely assured his donors that every dime they gave him would go to the wall.
“It’s not possible to steal the money,” he said at one point, according to the indictment. “We have an advisory committee. I can’t touch that money. It’s not for me.”
But prosecutors contended that Mr. Bannon and Mr. Badolato started making secret payments to Mr. Kolfage in February 2019 through Mr. Bannon’s nonprofit group.
Some of the payments, prosecutors said, were made to Mr. Kolfage’s wife and were disguised on tax forms as “media” expenses.
Stephanie Saul and Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.
The entrance to one of New York City’s three immigration courts in lower Manhattan. Photo via Google Maps.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the DOJ component with jurisdiction over the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), has in recent months taken to posting a page captioned “EOIR OPERATIONAL STATUS DURING CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC”. It provides updates on which immigration courts are open during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, and which aren’t. Surprisingly, two immigration courts in New York City, one the nation’s largest, remain closed, except for detained cases and filings. EOIR needs to do what it can to get them open.
I use the adverb “surprisingly” for three reasons.
First, the New York immigration courts remain shuttered while many other courts, including those in erstwhile coronavirus hotspots, have reopened.
At the outset of the pandemic, that EOIR page looked like the departures sign at O’Hare during a blizzard. Other than detained courts, every other immigration judge was at home, and every other courtroom was empty. Now, the “OPEN” signs seem to outnumber the “CLOSED”, “OPEN FOR FILINGS ONLY”, and the “OPEN FOR FILINGS AND FOR DETAINED HEARINGS ONLY” signs.
Even the Newark Immigration Court, separated from Manhattan and the New York immigration courts by a small peninsula, is “OPEN”. Why not Gotham?
Why not, indeed, leading me to my second reason: Schools will be in, but immigration courts are still out.
The Gothamist reported on Wednesday that: “With September fast approaching, city officials are crafting a plan to reopen schools for New York City’s 1.1 million public school students.” To be specific: “Depending on the school’s chosen model, most students will attend in-person instruction in their schools between one to three days a week.”
Not perfect, but that is “one to three days a week” more than the New York immigration court will be open.
That Gothamist article then leads me my third reason. It reports that Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) “announced on August 7th that based on the state’s low infection rates, he has authorized all school districts in New York state to re-open this fall for in-person education, including New York City.”
So immigration courts in other cities that were coronavirus hotspots have reopened. New York City schools will reopen (at least one to three days per week). And those schools can reopen because of New York’s “low infection rates”. Why can’t the New York immigration court — again, the nation’s largest — reopen for non-detained cases again?
TRAC reports that the two non-detained New York immigration courts (not specifically identified, but Broadway and Federal Plaza) have a combined backlog of 123,272 cases. How much has the backlog been reduced in the past five months? There may be some ambiguity, but I will guess that the answer is “by zero”, or something close.
This is a problem because, again according to TRAC, the average wait for a decision in those courts is 678 days and 882 days, respectively. That wait isn’t getting any shorter so long as those courts are closed.
William Gladstone, Victorian-era British prime minister, famously stated: “Justice delayed is justice denied.” William Penn, founder of the former colony and later state that bears his name, was blunter: “To delay justice is injustice.” EOIR should mitigate the injustices prompted by these closures and delays, and open the New York immigration courts, tomorrow if possible, but as soon as possible otherwise.
Let’s face it: It would be ridiculous for New York students to be in class while the city’s immigration judges are on recess.
Immigrant ‘Dreamers’ in Search of a Job Are Being Turned Away
President Trump hopes to end DACA, which has granted employment authorization to thousands of young immigrants. Already, some large employers are refusing to hire them.
David Rodriguez, a DACA recipient from Venezuela, received a rejection letter from one company after revealing his immigration status.Credit…Maria Alejandra Cardona for The New York Times
MIAMI — Nattily dressed in a sports coat and slacks, David Rodriguez took a seat in the front row to hear a presentation about an internship opportunity at Procter & Gamble, the consumer giant.
What he heard excited him, said Mr. Rodriguez, a Venezuelan immigrant who was studying business at Florida International University. The company valued diversity. It aimed to hire interns as full-time employees after they graduated. But when he applied, one question on the form stumped him: “Are you currently a U.S. citizen or national, OR an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, OR a refugee, OR an individual granted asylum?”
He was none of these things. He informed the company that he was a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, under which he and thousands of other young immigrants have permission to work legally in the country.
Before his qualifications were even considered, he received a rejection letter.
“It was like a punch in the stomach,” Mr. Rodriguez, who is now 37, said of the experience in 2013 that undermined everything he understood about his status in the United States.
He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit that seeks to use civil rights law to prevent employers from turning away immigrants like himself, a legal fight that is underway even as President Trump is threatening to end the program.
Since its introduction by the Obama administration in 2012, DACA has enrolled some 800,000 undocumented immigrants, often called Dreamers, who were brought to the country illegally as children. Many have gone on to graduate from college and build successful lives under the program, which has bipartisan support in Congress.
Yet while the courts have accepted DACA’s legality and have blocked the recent attempts to abruptly cancel it, some of the country’s biggest companies are unilaterally refusing to hire Dreamers. Since Mr. Trump stepped up his attacks on the program, the employment roadblocks have become even more prevalent.
These employers, including Procter & Gamble, say they are wary of investing time and money to train workers whose long-term employment eligibility is not secure. Other firms want to avoid getting ensnared in the nation’s contentious immigration debate.
“On the one hand employers are trying to hire the best talent available to stay afloat and recover from Covid-19 while on the other hand they are worried about investing the time and resources to train someone who could get deported,” said Woody Hunt, the co-chair of the American Business Immigration Coalition, a group that advocates immigration reform.
It is impossible to know how many people have been denied jobs based on their DACA status, said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which has filed several lawsuits against companies that refused to hire DACA recipients.
Bank of America and Northwestern Mutual are among those that have settled such employment cases. M&T Bank and Procter & Gamble are defendants in current lawsuits.
“If major companies are engaging in this practice, countless smaller companies are doing the same thing,” Mr. Saenz said.
Concern about hiring DACA recipients has intensified since the Trump administration announced in September 2017 that it would dismantle the program, throwing its survival into doubt even as courts forced the government to keep it in place.
“Employers come to me saying, ‘I would love to hire this person but my worry is that I hire them, invest three or four months in training them and if Trump does away with the program then I have to hire and train a new person.’ That gets expensive and time-consuming,” said Dagmar Butte, an immigration lawyer in Portland, Ore.
“I tell them, ‘If you really like this person, this program is not dead yet. So you shouldn’t assume they will be unable to continue working for you. But if your reason for not hiring the person is a business reason, then that is a decision for you to make,’” Ms. Butte said.
Some employers say the advantages of hiring DACA recipients outweigh the risks.
Alivio Medical Center, located in an immigrant enclave of Chicago, employs doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants who have employment eligibility through DACA, aware that they are “potentially deportable,” said Esther Corpuz, its chief executive.
She said their life experiences as immigrants and diverse cultural backgrounds are assets. “These providers really are able in a professional and empathetic way to treat our patients,” she said.
David MacNeil, who built an automotive accessories empire, WeatherTech, in Bolingbrook, Ill., said some of its “very best” employees are DACA recipients.
“U.S. educated and bilingual, they help us sell American-made goods all over the world. We couldn’t support our export customers without them,” said Mr. MacNeil, a Trump supporter who said he would not consider terminating an employee who has a legal work permit simply “because they might not be able to continue to work for you.”
That came close to happening to Ismael Hernandez.
He graduated from DePaul University in Chicago with an accounting degree in 2013, a year after DACA was introduced.
“It felt like I could open a window and feel a cool breeze for the first time; I could breathe,” recalled Mr. Hernandez, 29, who was brought to the United States from Mexico when he was 5 months old. He amassed the necessary documents and plunked down $465 to apply for the program, renewing every two years.
Thanks to DACA, he qualified for a job at a top accounting firm. A few years later, he took a position in the tax department of a well-known internet company, also in Chicago. But when the Trump administration announced it would wind down the program, Mr. Hernandez was summoned for a meeting. “I had a gut feeling that it was about DACA,” he recalled.
Across the table, a human resources officer and two company lawyers explained that they would have to discuss a “contingency plan” for his job, in view of the administration’s move to end the program, and that they must tell Mr. Hernandez’s manager about his precarious status.
The next day, the situation got worse. “We don’t know if you’ll even be able to stay in the country,” Mr. Hernandez said he was told. “We need to think of the company. We want to post the job.”
Fighting back tears, Mr. Hernandez urged them to wait until his DACA status expired the following year before taking any action. Ultimately, they agreed.
In the meantime, Mr. Hernandez married an American and received a green card. He has since changed jobs.
The first DACA employment lawsuit, in 2014, was filed in federal court in New York against the financial company Northwestern Mutual on behalf of Ruben Juarez, a college graduate and immigrant from Mexico.
In late 2013, a recruiter had expressed enthusiasm for hiring him. But after he presented his work permit, Mr. Juarez was asked whether he was a U.S. citizen or green-card holder, according to court documents.
Mr. Juarez said he had employment authorization through DACA, and was told that noncitizens needed a green card to be hired. The parties settled out of court in 2015, and as part of its terms, the company began a program aimed at recruiting immigrants, including DACA recipients.
In Miami, Mr. Rodriguez never imagined that he would end up being part of a class-action lawsuit against the maker of iconic brands like Pampers, Tide and Crest.
He still remembers the day he received his employment authorization card in December 2012. “I felt like I had just unwrapped a chocolate bar with a golden ticket,” he said of the card, the size of a driver’s license, tucked in his wallet.
Having worked for years at restaurants and bars, he could put his higher education to use and fulfill his professional aspirations.
After he was rejected for the internship at Procter & Gamble, he sought clarification from the company’s recruiter. “Unfortunately, per P & G Policy, applicants in the U.S. should be legally authorized to work with no restraints on the type, duration, or location of employment,” the recruiter emailed back, adding, “If your status in the future were to change to no restrictions, please shoot me a note.”
The case, which is now pending in Miami federal court, turns on language in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that prohibits “alienage discrimination,” or discrimination because a person is not a citizen of the United States.
The complaint asserts that Procter & Gamble’s policy constituted unlawful discrimination. The company’s lawyers argued that the decision not to hire Mr. Rodriguez was based strictly on his immigration status, an issue that is commonly a subject of employment decisions. It said the rejection was not unlawful because it was “not synonymous” with alienage discrimination.
In June, a federal judge denied a motion for summary judgment and decided that the case should proceed to trial, deeming the policy to be “facially discriminatory” and in violation of the civil rights law. The company is seeking to appeal the summary judgment ruling.
Procter & Gamble said the company believed it had acted legally and would continue to defend the case in court.
“For perspective, we hire people with the expectation of a long-term career,” the company said in a statement. “So our recruitment systems focus on people with long-term work authorization in the U.S.”
It said the company’s application process had been modified to allow for greater flexibility since the lawsuit was filed. “The company has and will continue to consider individuals authorized to work under DACA for employment opportunities at P & G.” It did not say whether any DACA recipients had been hired under its revised policies.
His hopes of working at Procter & Gamble dashed, Mr. Rodriguez decided to pivot to real estate, a booming sector in Miami.
He extended his studies at Florida International University, graduating summa cum laude in 2017 with a major in business administration and a concentration in real estate and finance.
He currently works at Lincoln Property, one of the country’s largest real estate management companies. In Miami, one of the most diverse cities in the country with a booming population of Spanish-speaking immigrants, Mr. Rodriguez himself is a hot property.
At a campaign rally in Yuma, Ariz., on Tuesday, President Trump repeated almost word for word the contentious comments he made on the day he announced his campaign in 2015.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
YUMA, Ariz. — President Trump on Tuesday accused former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic rival, of seeking to throw open United States borders to criminals and disease, using the backdrop of the border city here to stoke fears of immigrants as Democrats prepared for the second day of the party’s nominating convention.
Speaking at an airport hangar, Mr. Trump boasted about his own efforts to sharply limit immigration during his time in office, claiming to have made the country safer by blocking asylum seekers, refugees and other immigrants seeking to live and work in the United States.
The president reprised the darkest language of his 2016 campaign, warning that should Mr. Biden win the presidency, the Trump-era restrictions on foreigners would be abandoned in favor of policies that he said would allow “aliens with criminal records” to roam free across the country, threatening violence and stealing jobs from Americans.
“We’re talking about abolishing ICE. We’re talking about abolishing prisons,” Mr. Trump said to an enthusiastic but small crowd, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Biden’s campaign has turned into a cult for open border and other zealots.”
That message is already at the center of the attacks that Mr. Trump has leveled at Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California. In remarks this week, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that Mr. Biden supported allowing anyone to enter the United States.
On Tuesday, he called Mr. Biden’s proposals a “recipe for abolishing America’s borders.”
Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant stance helped him win the election in 2016 and has been at the core of his presidency. He has denied entry to foreigners seeking protection from persecution, tried to end a program shielding from deportation young people brought to the United States illegally as children and cut back on legal immigration programs.
While courts have blocked some of his most extreme efforts and he has failed to persuade Congress to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, the president and his top aides — including Stephen Miller, the architect of his administration’s assault on immigration — have succeeded in enforcing many regulations and policies aimed at making it harder for immigrants to enter the United States.
And Mr. Trump has built a small part of his promised border wall, though he has failed to get Mexico to pay for it.
The crowd in Yuma cheered as Mr. Trump said he was “proudly defending the jobs, safety and security” of the American people.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
On Tuesday, he said that Mexico was paying for the wall, then told reporters that the United States might impose a small fee on anyone who crosses the border. Pressed on how that would work and whether it had already started, Mr. Trump said that it was under consideration but refused to give any details.
“We won, we got the wall,” he said, claiming that his administration had built almost 300 miles of wall, though he did not disclose to the crowd that most of that was replacement of border barriers that had already existed before he was elected.
Hours before the president’s speech in Yuma, a coalition of more than 100 pro-immigration organizations released an “action plan” of recommendations for how Mr. Biden could roll back Mr. Trump’s policies and improve the nation’s immigration system.
The report, obtained by The New York Times, lists 10 broad steps, including decriminalizing immigration, protecting immigrant children and families, phasing out immigration jails and restoring the “right to seek and receive protection from persecution” at the border.
“We need a vision,” said Tyler Moran, the executive director of the Immigration Hub and one of the leaders of the effort. “It really is a road map that we think a new administration can take.”
Ms. Moran said the Biden campaign already had a “strong platform” on immigration, but she said the coalition planned to share its action plan with the campaign on Tuesday in the hopes that they could work together during a transition if Mr. Biden won.
The recommendations include enacting a moratorium on deportations pending a comprehensive review of immigration enforcement, reinstating and expanding the program for young immigrants known as DACA, repealing all “Muslim, African, refugee and other travel bans,” establishing a White House “Office of New Americans,” and suspending all criminal prosecutions for migration-related offenses.
“The current administration has usurped and weaponized our ineffective and broken immigration system to advance a xenophobic governing agenda,” the report says. It calls for a rollback of “a long series of current administration policies.”
As candidates, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have repeatedly condemned the president’s immigration policies, accusing Mr. Trump of embracing a xenophobic approach to foreigners and vowing to reverse many of the administration’s policies if they win the White House.
But Mr. Biden has been careful not to endorse some of the most extreme ideas among some in the Democratic Party, who have called for abolishing ICE.
The issue can be a tricky one for the Democratic ticket. Many liberals in the party are eager for someone to completely repudiate Mr. Trump’s policies like the decision to separate migrant families at the border and refusing entry to asylum seekers fleeing from poverty, war and persecution.
But some moderate Republicans — especially in critical swing states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are likely to be turned off by the impression that Democrats are the “open borders” party, as Mr. Trump claims.
During the coronavirus pandemic, voters in those states could be looking for someone to blame for their economic instability. Despite scant evidence, Mr. Trump will be eager to suggest that immigrants are at fault for their failure to obtain good-paying jobs.
In his remarks on Tuesday, the president focused on physical threats from immigrants, drawing cheers from the crowd by declaring that he was “proudly defending the jobs, safety and security” of the American people.
Repeating almost word for word the contentious comments he made on the day he announced his campaign in the summer of 2015, Mr. Trump said that “we have people coming into this country, some great people, some really bad people, too. I mean murderers. I mean rapists. I mean, really bad people.”
His appeal to the crowd was simple: Vote for me, or Mr. Biden will put you in danger with “insane and lethal” immigration policies.
“A flood all across our border and prosecution of illegal border crossings ensuring that illegal aliens will repeatedly re-enter the country over and over again, and terminate all protections we have enacted against asylum fraud,” Mr. Trump predicted. “They want to do things that nobody thought was even possible.”
Earlier this month, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden stated, during an interview, that while he would not tear down the elements of the border wall system updated or constructed under President Trump, he would not build “another foot of wall.” While this is a major concession to the open-borders left, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wants to go even further.
That’s because the organization – which filed almost 400 lawsuits or legal actions against the Trump administration, almost half of which (174) were related to immigration – would like to see every foot of border wall built under Trump completely demolished.
Keep in mind that, as of August 10, the Trump administration has completed 275 miles of the Border Wall System (with 463 miles under construction or in “pre-construction”). Admittedly, what has been “built” consists overwhelmingly of upgrades to dilapidated or insufficient border barriers erected under previous administrations – and authorized by congressional legislation in 1996 and 2006.
We do not know – because Mr. Ladin has not clarified – whether the ACLU plans to tear down the updated fencing and bring back the dilapidated or insufficient barriers that were there before the upgrades. Or will the demolished updates simply be replaced by nothing?
The Biden approach (stopping all construction while not tearing anything down) is likely an attempt by the Democratic candidate to walk the tightrope, i.e. simultaneously trying to appease the radical pro-illegal-alien base (and associated ethnic advocacy activists on the left), while hoping to placate mainstream Americans who think border security is a common-sense idea.
The ACLU’s extreme position is no doubt closer to how the Democratic party’s leftist base feels about the wall (and this is not the first time someone on the left has called for its demolishing). For the Democrats, opposition to the wall – Donald Trump’s signature campaign promise – is about resisting Trump and denying him a victory on the border security front (many top Democrats once supported a border fence).
For the radical left, the wall is not only a “monument to hate,” but also an allegedly racist attempt by the descendants of European colonizers to protect their ill-gotten wealth and territories by keeping out the poor descendants of the natives. As the extreme leftists see it, the United States was illegitimately founded in sin and evil, and therefore has no moral right to enforce its borders and laws.
But regardless of which option one chooses – be it Biden’s promise to retain what has been built but not build “another foot of the wall,” or the ACLU/radical left desire to see the wall torn down – the practical consequences will be the essentially similar. Tearing down the wall would send an obvious and clear invitation to would-be illegal border crossers to rush our southwestern border. And if a potential Biden administration halts all border wall construction upon coming to power, the message south of the border would also be loud and clear, that the “new guy” in America is soft on border security and immigration.
SHOW THEM YOU’RE GOOD A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College
By Jeff Hobbs
Immigration narratives are often only about the journey, but what happens when a migrant arrives at his or her destination? And what happens to his or her children after they’ve been there a while and grown-up? That’s the story Jeff Hobbs tells in “Show Them You’re Good,” a portrait of four exceedingly bright and ambitious Central American and Mexican-American high school seniors in California who find themselves after years of straight A’s and stellar extracurriculars hoping to gain admission to Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, and other top-tier colleges.
It’s senior year, 2016. For Carlos, the most promising of the group, Trump’s presidential victory two months into the school year is particularly worrisome; unlike his friends, he’s undocumented, an applicant for DACA, and the possibility of deportation threatens to destroy his shot at the American dream.
The boys attend Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School in Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest school district, in a city that ranks fifth from last in spending per pupil.
They live in Compton, surrounded by neighborhood gangbangers and I.C.E. agents, of whom they live in fear; their parent’s clean houses or drink too much or struggle to support their families on meager wages. But the boys are harder to pin down, fresher as types, and their stories, Hobbs writes, “represented exactly the immigrant narrative that had been celebrated through generations as central to American ideals — except that this narrative was neither celebrated nor idealized when the flesh of its central characters was not white.”
Carlos, whose older brother (likewise undocumented) received a full scholarship to Yale, studies all night after school in his family’s cluttered illegal shack in another family’s backyard. Tio is a skateboarder and prom king with a 4.0 G.P.A. Luis and Byron take A.P. courses, play pranks, and aspire to be engineers.
Immigrant youth, especially undocumented students and so-called Dreamers, have been shoved around as political pawns, alternately lionized and vilified, but we don’t have much in-depth, nuanced reporting about who these youth really are, how they think and live, how they navigate and interact with American institutions beyond border walls and detention camps.
This has started to change in recent years, most notably with Eileen Truax’s “Dreamers” (2015), an oral history of DACA youth, and with memoirs by undocumented writers like Jose Antonio Vargas’s “Dear America” and Marcello Castillo’s “Children of the Land.”
Hobbs’s carefully observed journalistic account, written with the detached intimacy of ethnography and reported over a year and hundreds of hours spent watching and interviewing his subjects in class, at dances, sporting events, assemblies, homecomings, proms, graduations and in the students’ homes, helps flesh out this larger body of work with an empathetic but objective eye, and in so doing widens our view of the modern “immigrant experience” to include that classic crucible: high school and college admissions, specifically, the experience of first-generation overachievers and the unique challenges they face in this regard.
As Tio explains, when he and other students across Los Angeles organize a walkout in protest of Trump’s presidential victory, kids like him must “stay together and say what we know to be true about us.”
Curiously, the book also follows five students at Beverly Hills High School, 22 miles across the city from Compton and one of the wealthiest districts in the country. The Beverly Hills students mostly don’t have to worry about money, or the law, and suffer a more tedious form of ennui and anxiety, like that experienced by Owen, son of a very wealthy Hollywood writer and former actress, who “felt spoiled, a little undeserving, as if he’d been born to parents so intelligent and caring that they’d deprived him of the rite of stumbling clumsily through youth’s travails, as most kids did, knocking into chairs and corners, gaining wisdom from poor choices.”
Hobbs contrasts the experiences of the two groups of boys and is interested in how both groups struggle to carve out lives from the expectations prompted by their origins — the Latinos slandered by Trump as “bad hombres” and “rapists,” the Beverly Hills kids resented by Middle America as spoiled brats. But his attempt to link their senior-year struggles through the supposed “stigma” that results from their origins feels facile and ignores meatier discussions of race or class that would better illuminate the boys’ two worlds — and the gulfs between them. The inclusion of the Beverly Hills students makes the narrative feel unbalanced, especially given the wildly lower stakes of their challenges compared with those of their peers in Compton, and by the end of the book, one doesn’t have a much greater understanding of the factors that structure the lives of both groups of boys, nor, really, why some have succeeded while others failed.
Upon graduation, the Beverly Hills students go off to top tier colleges where the most privileged among them “didn’t have to factor money into [their] decisions at all.”
In Compton, Byron doesn’t get into any four-year school and must choose between work and the military; Luis goes to the University of California at Santa Barbara; Tio is heartbroken that, despite his 4.0 G.P.A. and extracurriculars, he’s denied acceptance to every school except the less prestigious U.C. Riverside, where he’ll study agricultural science.
Carlos, meanwhile, achieves the near-impossible, gaining the right to a two-year legal stay in the United States as a DACA recipient and earning a full ride to Yale even while his family is evicted from their illegal home.
Hobbs celebrates Carlos’s victory as “the completion of some fantastical cycle by which his parents had come here together, alone and moneyless and without the faintest inkling of prospects, and now, almost 20 years later … the sons they’d brought with them might both attend Yale University — together.”
Readers of Hobbs’s last book, “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” — about his former roommate at Yale, a Black student who can’t disentangle himself from his roots in Newark and is ultimately killed in a drug deal — will know that the value of getting into an Ivy League school, absent relief from broader systemic racism and economic disadvantage, is often dubious.
Oddly, Hobbs’s subjects seem to understand this better than Hobbs himself. We learn in the epilogue of “Show Them You’re Good” that at Yale, Carlos becomes an outspoken critic of what he sees as the unfair treatment of undocumented and poor students on campus, and he’s criticized in turn for being “ungrateful.”
Tio, meanwhile, feels betrayed by his ambitions, by the “encouragement” that “had brought him to override his own cynicism, layered over 18 years of life, about the idea that a system that had rarely worked in favor of people who looked like him might have begun to change. That it had in fact changed for Carlos, Luis, his girlfriend, and others in the hallways at school, but it hadn’t for him, further concentrated his melancholy.”
As deportations of undocumented young people increase, as thousands of migrant children end up in cages and as President Trump disparages Latinos whenever it’s politically useful, readers aren’t likely to be convinced by Hobbs’s broader suggestion that the American dream, that “fantastical cycle,” has simply been picked up and revived by the newest generation of ambitious immigrant youth like Carlos, Tio, Luis, and Byron.
But despite the book’s perhaps unfounded optimism and the baffling juxtaposition between Compton and Beverly Hills, “Show Them You’re Good” is an admirable addition to the growing body of literature that humanizes the struggles and expands the scope of our understanding of the lives of immigrant youth at a time when they’re under near-constant threat of dehumanization.
