They work in factories, making clothes for brands we all wear. They work as dishwashers in high-end restaurants or as maids for the elite. They're kids who came to the United States without papers — or parents.
In fact, that’s the name of the book Stephanie Canizales wrote about a group of them who came of age in Los Angeles in the last decade.
Stephanie Canizales is the author of the new book "Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States," which traces the stories of undocumented, unaccompanied migrants who came to the U.S. just as President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was announced. But they couldn’t qualify for DACA.
Conversation highlights
STEPHANIE CANIZALES: To be a DACA-eligible young person, there are various requirements. Most of which are sort of hinged around this idea that young people are growing up in parent-led households. Parents are working. Therefore, kids can go to school and meet those eligibility markers of high school education or a college degree.
But these undocumented young people entered the U.S., not having been apprehended. There long-settled relatives don't take them in. They didn't have an adult figure that was really doing the work, the sort of economic work, so that they can sit back as these dependent young people. They didn't have the opportunity to enroll in school. They also didn't have anyone telling them, you know, maintaining documentation is important. Any sort of evidence that you've been in the U.S. for the past five, 10, 15 years is important.
So they not only were unable to materially meet the requirements of being a diploma-holding or a school-enrolled young person, but they didn't have the records to show that they had been in the U.S. longer than the last five minutes, you know.
Talk a little bit about why they came here and why they came on their own. One of the things that DACA spells out is that you were brought here by your parents as a child, right?
CANIZALES: Yeah. The young people that I interviewed — and I spent six years doing this research. I met hundreds of unaccompanied, undocumented youth and young adults, and they all tended to tell a similar story. And I do bring up in the book that violence and poverty are the driving structural forces for why people are displaced of all ages, but particularly more and more children.
But when I asked people why they migrated, they talked more about what I call the rupture or not being able to see an imagined future. And that's really important, because we're not only talking about immigrants who are displaced, but we're talking about adolescents who are thinking about their transition to adulthood. They're teenagers, and they're trying to imagine who will be when I grow up.
And these young people made decisions sometimes alongside their parents, but often by themselves, independently, that they would have to migrate in order to achieve the imagined future. Whether that is education or future employment. Or the future of their families and households if they no longer wanted to experience poverty. And that's not an if, right? Like no one wants to experience poverty in the future. But young people talked about not wanting their siblings to suffer, their parents to suffer. So it was a collective imagined future in a lot of cases.
What did they do when they came here? They're working, because they really have nothing else they could do, but they're working under the table doing doing what?
CANIZALES: Yeah, I interviewed young people who grew up as garment workers, predominantly, in the sort of hidden fast-fashion industry in downtown Los Angeles. I interviewed people who worked as florists in the flower district, dishwashers in restaurants. As facilities workers and hotels and warehouses — just across the spectrum. A lot of the work that you imagine undocumented adults do — construction workers, right?
But these were young people as young as 11, 12, 13 years old occupying these very hostile, violent, exploitative industries. And I'm interviewing them at the point at which they're 18 and older. So by the time I'm talking to them, they had been in these jobs for several years, in some cases a decade. So they would talk to me about chemical burns, and pull up their sleeve and show me the scars and burns. They would talk about the neck pains and the earaches and all kinds of physical manifestations of the fact that they had started these jobs very early, and that they'd accumulated harms over the years of having occupied them.
You talk about these being exploitative industries and they're so young — they're just kids. How bad did it get for them? What kinds of violence did they encounter?
CANIZALES: Yeah, I heard stories of sexual abuse at work among young women. I heard stories of upwards of $8,000, $9,000 $10,000 of stolen wages. People were — the factory workers are some of the most grueling stories that I heard. These young people would be working up to 16 hours a day doing repetitive work. And in the garment factories, this is piece-rate work, which means you get paid for every sleeve, you sew, every button, you sew every denim seem. So young people are working at fast rates, right? To make that $100 by the end of the day. And they would talk to me about doing the math in their head. Like, how many T-shirts do I have to put together today to make $60 or $70 by the end of my 12-, 13-hour shift.
You were interviewing them a little later on, they are trying to transition into adulthood. What happened to a lot of these young people? What are they doing today?
CANIZALES: Yeah, I, I tell two stories in the book. These participants, they would talk about having developed community, having maybe not achieved material mobility. They weren't making increasingly larger sums of money every year. They weren't homeowners or any, you know, by any stretch of the imagination. But they felt that they had adapted to life in the U.S., right? They had their community, they had their sort of rhythm of life
And then they tell another story in the book. One of what young people called "perdición." In English, it translates to perdition. A loss of self, a loss of hope in the future, a loss of goals and the momentum to achieve the goals young people set when they originally migrate. And this, this ends up looking something like entering into abusive relationships, right? In order to escape the loneliness, or drug addiction, self-harm, suicidal ideation — all of these things that that sort of manifest for young people across the immigration status or class spectrum in that transition to adulthood. But acutely so for young people that are experiencing such a violent coming of age as low-wage workers, undocumented young people and unaccompanied children.
