Archive: Jun 2017

The recent increase in hate crimes and normalization of public anti-immigrant attitudes have contributed to undocumented immigrants fearing family separation and deportation. For the roughly 2.5 million undocumented children and adults living in the U.S., socioeconomic resources like physical and mental healthcare services, employment, and education are limited. Under these conditions, “ontological security” – or the degree to which one feels secure within their social environment – becomes vital. A new study by Elizabeth Vaquera, Elizabeth Aranda, Isabel Sousa-Rodriguez provides new insight into the ways in which young undocumented adults develop a sense of security and attempt to cope with their precarious legal status.

The authors interviewed 53 undocumented and formerly undocumented young adults residing in Florida that were recruited through immigration advocacy organizations. Participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 33 and at least half migrated from Mexico. Interviews addressed several topics related to emotional and psychological well-being, including background immigration stories, family life, educational history, and racial/ethnic identity.

The researchers find that undocumented young adults experience a variety of emotions related to their status. For example, many participants reported low self-esteem. Other participants reported feeling frustrated that their status limited access to a number of colleges and jobs for which they could participate. Additional feelings included isolation, fear, anxiety and insecurity. One person described the constant fear of public officials who could potentially remove them or members of their family, saying, “Growing up it was any person that looked official. You just stay away from them … mall security guards, anyone that looked official. They terrified me!” For some, retaining Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) provided some temporary relief, though many still struggled with sadness and depression. Networking with peers of similar legal statuses helps create strong peer networks and may help empower young undocumented adults to develop positive coping strategies and solutions.

To cope with these feelings, the interviewees were found to engage in both positive and negative coping strategies. Positive coping mechanisms included engaging in charity work, confiding in close family and friends, playing sports, and listening to music. Others reported feeling little hope in improved circumstances and turned to more disruptive behaviors. These participants resorted to things like drinking, smoking, harming themselves, displaying anger, and pondering suicidal thoughts. Yet despite these feelings, the authors note that networking with peers of similar legal statuses helps create strong peer networks and may help empower young undocumented adults to develop positive coping strategies and solutions. As we move forward in the current political climate, pro-immigrant advocacy organizations will be an important piece to supporting undocumented individuals and families.

New career opportunities can be exciting for young couples. Yet, when career opportunities involve moving to a new location, couples must negotiate if and how the move will take place. In heterosexual relationships, research finds that the stress of relocation more often falls on female partners, and women often decide to relocate for their male partner’s career. In line with these cultural trends, a new study by Jaclyn S. Wong examines how young heterosexual couples negotiate relocation for career opportunities, despite growing acceptance of gender equality in the United States.

Wong conducted 118 interviews with 21 heterosexual couples, between the ages of 22 and 35, who were considering relocation for career opportunities for one or both partners.  All couples had similar earning potential and were in their final year of graduate and professional school from universities in the Chicago metropolitan area. Wong observed couples follow three main trajectories when negotiating relocation. In the first trajectory, couples, particularly men, took steps to maintain desirable career outcomes for both individuals. They often formed future plans for relocation and altered their job search in order to help meet each partner’s career goals. Most couples in this pathway successfully found employment in their respective field after relocation. Many heterosexual couples continue to reproduce traditional gender roles in negotiating whose career to prioritize.

In the second trajectory, one member of a couple, typically the woman, changed their initial career desires to meet the career opportunities of their partner. They often re-framed their career goals to justify prioritizing their partner’s career over their own. In the final pathway, one of the partners, men in particular, withdrew from the negotiating process and seceded all the bargaining power to their partner. Due to this bargaining power, however, women experienced more stress and emotional labor because they had to determine which career opportunities satisfied both partners in the relationship. In sum, Wong finds that despite recent gains towards gender equality at work and at home, many heterosexual couples continue to reproduce traditional gender roles in negotiating whose career to prioritize.

African Americans have long endured criticism about their spending habits. Conservative campaigns in the 1980s and 90s used stereotypical images of “gold diggers” and “welfare queens” to convince white, middle-class Americans that low-income minorities not only drained government resources, but also spent those resources on frivolous items. Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz played to these sentiments recently when he said, “Americans have choices, and they’ve gotta make a choice. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own healthcare.” New research by Raphaël Charron-Chénier, Joshua Fink and Lisa Keister goes beyond such individual-level explanations to investigate the structural factors that contribute to racial disparities in consumption.

The authors use data from a nationally representative sample of over 9,500 households from the 2013 and 2014 Consumer Expenditure Surveys. These surveys measure total household purchases, including spending on food, entertainment, health care, housing, transportation and utilities. The authors then examined differences between black households and white households across low, middle, and high socioeconomic statuses. 
Low-income blacks are less likely than whites to spend money on goods that require large amounts of money up front. 

Charron-Chénier and colleagues show that the average total spending for black households was significantly less than for white households, with black households spending $8,387 and white households spending $13,713.  More specifically, blacks spent less on housing, transportation, healthcare, and entertainment. Low-income blacks in particular also spent less money on goods that required significant amounts of money up front than did low-income whites, though this difference diminished with income increases. Black households, however, did spend more than white households on goods that required long-term contracts, such as utilities, due to the threat of late fines and fees. So despite common criticisms about black consumer spending habits, this research shows that blacks actually spend far less than whites on “frivolous” items like new iPhones and they spend more on the long-term costs of maintaining a household.