Transcribed by AI with Human Review:
Ko’u Hopkins:
Hello, and welcome to today's episode on Community Voices. I am your host, Ko'u Hopkins, and today we have a very special guest with us. We have Dr. Isabel Skinner. Could you please introduce yourself?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Hi, Ko'u. I am an assistant professor in the School of Politics and International Affairs here at UIS.
Ko’u Hopkins:
How long have you been working here?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
This is my 4th year here at UIS and my 4th year in Illinois. I'm originally from North Carolina and lived in Arizona, and now I'm happy to be here.
Ko’u Hopkins:
And what do you primarily teach here at UIS?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
So I teach American politics subjects, but I focus on minority politics. So I teach about the US-Mexico border and African-Americans and American politics, as well as women in politics. So gender issues, race and ethnicity issues, as well as immigration status, those types of questions are very interesting to me, as well as citizenship courses for our first year students.
Ko’u Hopkins:
And I know that you kind of have a favorite subject out of all of those.
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yes, so immigration is very near and dear to my heart. That is what most of my research is about, public attitudes towards immigrants and immigration policies.
Ko’u Hopkins:
How did you get into the subject of immigration?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yeah, so I studied for my PhD at the University of Arizona, and obviously Tucson is close to the US-Mexico border, but I also became very interested in refugee politics before starting my PhD in my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. I worked at the International House, where lawyers and volunteers gave pro bono work to refugees, and I became really passionate about the subject there. I worked as a bilingual receptionist, but I started to think about how I could continue to study in this area.
Ko’u Hopkins:
So you like learning more about immigration and all those things related?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a very exciting, nerve-wracking time to study such a hot button issue. But I also know a lot about kind of the deep and long history of immigration in the US. So I take sort of a broad picture approach to these issues. But I also do research that is like experimental work about how individuals and groups respond to immigration. And that is the part that's really fascinating for me.
Ko’u Hopkins:
So do you feel like you are very well versed in everything related to immigration and immigration laws?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yeah, so while I'm not a lawyer, I try to keep up with the super quickly changing policies on immigration. Obviously, a lot has happened in the past few years and in the past three presidential administrations. But again, I know kind of the longer story, so that gives me some background and some context for those issues. But I would say that I'm an expert on the topic, but especially in how public attitudes are formed about immigrants and immigration. And so I study actually political psychology, which is kind of why people believe what they believe. So my main takeaway in my work and also a lot of other people's work is that immigration attitudes are based on perceptions, not even really based on like reality of what's actually happening, right? So that's kind kind of one of the really interesting parts, the stereotypes, feelings, those kind of perceptions, those play a lot into people's attitudes, more than say how many people are crossing the border, what's going on with refugee issues and wars and conflicts around the world, et cetera, et cetera. Those real world contexts, like that's only a part of the story.
Ko’u Hopkins:
So stemming off of that, what do you think the country should be doing to try to reform immigration laws or processes and perceptions as you were talking about to improve the situation?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
So again, I might have sort of a different view than a lot of people do, but I believe that's because of my expertise on the topic. I strongly believe that the government should make it easier and cheaper for people to migrate permanently and become citizens. So A pathway to citizenship, including for people who currently are not in line at all, they're totally outside of that. That would be undocumented people. I think they should be able to legalize their status because that would give people benefits, but it would also help people clearly understand and perform their responsibilities to the US. So that would be an alternative to people that are just raising their families and working in the shadows, right? And the US is really extracting their labor. So I think that that's my view of making it actually easier for people to get right with the law and be citizens. But I also think that members of the public should try to resist stereotypes and really push back on their leaders using stereotypes and kind of falsehoods. so that we can set aside, prejudices and really respect immigrants for what they bring to our country and to the table.
Ko’u Hopkins:
And I know that with immigration, this is a big topic that is being talked about right now is that immigration brings in new ideas. And currently there are so many immigrants or even Americans that are leaving the US and we're having that brain drain.
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yeah, so we're definitely having a brain drain, but we're also having a care drain as well and other really critical jobs and industries are not being filled because we have kind of an aging population. And so good ideas are being lost, work that is just absolutely necessary for our society to survive and perform. Those things need to happen. So a really good example is care work for children and for the elders, for sick people, and people that just need some extra help, people with disabilities, et cetera. We need people to perform that care work. And right now, a large amount of that work is being done by immigrants, especially immigrant women. And so that's vital work that just has to happen. And then I know some other stuff about people doing other kinds of work, if that's interesting as well.
Ko’u Hopkins:
And with these processes to come into the United States, is that blocking immigrants with criminal records?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
So if you are a legal resident or a green card holder or you're a student visa holder, you can be deported for really minor offenses. If you fail to report a past offense from a different country, for example, and so, those minor offenses add up and more serious offenses, a lot of those are deportable offenses. So in reality, it's very unlikely that people are like committing crimes if they are legal residents or green card holders. So, and they wouldn't be admitted in the 1st place, right? Furthermore, refugees are super strictly vetted. So I remember in the first Trump administration, they talked about, quote unquote, extreme vetting, but that seems crazy to me as somebody who knows more about this because refugees are already super vetted, like before they ever arrive on U.S. soil. So I think that that's a common misconception. Like there's a very little chance that people that are legally present are committing crimes. And actually people that are undocumented are also less likely to commit crimes. But I'm happy to speak more about that too.
Ko’u Hopkins:
So is crossing the border without permission, is that counting as a criminal violation?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yeah, it depends actually. This is actually kind of a more complicated question because if you cross the border without authorization, that is a crime under federal law and there might also be state penalties depending. And it can be a felony if people have crossed more than once without authorization. But if you're already an undocumented person living in the US, your mere presence without authorization is actually a civil offense, so that's not a criminal offense. Furthermore, there's a lot of people that are asylum seekers and technically under US law and international law, it is legal for you to cross the border and seek asylum, even if you don't enter at a border or checkpoint or proper port, even if you cross, you know, in the desert, for example, and, you know, turn yourself into authorities or something like that. Technically, that's completely legal to do. Unfortunately, in practice, refugees and asylum seekers are being deported before they get to make their claims. And so international human rights groups are saying that that's actually illegal, but it's actually what's happening in practice.
Ko’u Hopkins:
I know that we were talking about a little bit about the brain drain, and there's also about the US's negative birth rate. So do you think immigration can help with our negative replacement birth rate?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yes, definitely. So the U.S. is aging. The Population Reference Bureau is a group that tracks these statistics, and they argue that the US is the oldest that it's ever been, and that people that are over 65 are going to be like 82 million people in 2050. So actually, the only reason why the US population isn't already in decline is because of immigration keeping it steady. And a good example, kind of a counterpoint, is Japan. So Japan, unfortunately, they have very restrictive immigration. So they're getting really top heavy in their in their population. So imagine if you think about a shape with the younger group at the bottom and the older groups at the top, their population is starting to be shaped like a coffin. So that's like a really bad sign in terms of population because that means that there just aren't enough young people to fill jobs and take care of the older people in their society. Also, we have this weird like multi-tier service economy now, right, where everyone doing these labor of, information and that kind of type of work, they're farming out everything they could need, laundry, food, all these different things to other workers. And so there's just like putting all these essential work on that lower class and lower class, lower class. So there's just these global cities full of people from all over the world taking care of others through these like micro classes. And so we really need immigrant workers to meet those demands and help us to raise a younger generation of US citizens, including their own children.
Ko’u Hopkins:
And I know that you kind of talked about the Trump administration. They said that they were going to go after the worst of the worst, but you said that's actually not true in its execution. Can you kind of talk more about that?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yeah, definitely. So going back a little bit to thinking about what kind of roles people fulfill, we really need immigrant workers to perform work like picking the food, picking crops, right? A lot of that work is still done manually. And, you know, think about it. If crops are on the vine, they can literally die on the vine. And that's just wasting food. And that's super problematic. And so we need people to do that work. And the USDA estimates that almost 60% of farm workers are immigrants. But we also can think about people doing really hazardous work like meat processing, mining and construction. Those are low paid and dangerous jobs. And I already mentioned care work and childcare and elder care, those kind of jobs. Those are really important. Those are just like super important jobs. So those are the kind of people that unfortunately are being picked up in these ICE raids through workplace raids. And so thinking about places like Chicago or Charlotte, where I'm from, the kind of people that were getting picked up are like grandparents. They're people that are married to Americans.
They have kids that are U.S. citizens. There were people that were detained and deported when they showed up for their immigration interviews, even their citizenship interviews. So that's wild, right? Those are people that are quote-unquote, like doing the right thing, going about it the right way, you know. And so I think that it's really frustrating because these folks were trying to do things the right way, but the government knew where they were. They knew who they were and where they were. So they picked those people up because that's way easier than finding undocumented people who are pretty good at living in the shadows at this point, right? And so that's who has been caught up in these. A lot of these people are, you know, everyday folks who are, you know, family members, good community members, hard workers. And so that's pretty frustrating. Also, the transactional records access clearinghouse or track, that's a really good place to find data about this kind of stuff. And they show that almost 70% of ICE detainees have no criminal record at all. So like the worst of the worst, like who are we talking about? We're talking about people's like grandmas and stuff. Like that's not the worst of the worst, in my opinion.
Ko’u Hopkins:
Yeah, that is really frustrating to hear, especially when it's people who are trying and doing the right thing, but they're getting lumped in with others who are saying they're the worst of the worst. But when talking about criminality, what is the percentage of criminal immigrants compared to citizen criminality?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yeah, no, this is a super important question. So much social science and economics work shows that immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. And when immigration increases, that's not linked to increases in crime. If anything, crime stays stable or decreases, according to the Marshall Project. There was also a new study last year from Elisa Jacoma Northwestern, and she found that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated. And that's true today, but it's also been true that there's never been more immigrants incarcerated than citizens since 1870. So, for over 100 years. So I think that it's just mind-boggling that this myth of criminal immigrants or crimmigration continues to persist.
Ko’u Hopkins:
Thank you so much for your time today, Isabel Skinner. Really, we really appreciate it. And I know there are many listeners who have also been thinking these burning questions. Do you have anything else to add?
Dr. Isabel Skinner:
Yes, thank you so much for having me, Ko'u. I would say that my only thing to add is just to really resist these dehumanizing language and stereotypes and find out for yourself the truth about these myths. So there's just no reality in which immigrants are more likely to be criminals. So we just can't continue to function in that mindset. So we have to respect immigrants for the contributing members of our society that they are. So thanks so much for having me to talk about this stuff.
Ko’u Hopkins:
We are very happy to have you. And that is such an important message to remember that these are people, these are people who are trying to revive for their family. These are people who are seeking asylum. They are trying to escape war, famine. anything in their home countries that they believe that it is the best to move their entire family, to leave their home country, go into another country that they might not even know the language, and who are just trying to survive. And I think that's an important message that everyone should be making sure they take home. And thank you again so much for coming in today, and thank you to all of our loyal listeners. And I am your host for today's Community Voices. Thank you so much.
