Please join us April 8th, 1126 E. 59th Street, Rm 401, for the first City, Society and Space workshop of the quarter!  We are excited to have Robert C. Smith, Professor of Political Science at CUNY present his recent work: “Horatio Alger Lives in Brooklyn, But Check His Papers… And Give Him DACA”, a culmination of data and analysis stemming from the New York Children of Mexican Immigrants (NYCOMP) project.

As usual, food and drink will be provided!

The abstract for the talk is below:

This talk will 1) present findings from the two decade long year ethnographic New York Children of Mexican Immigrants Project (NYCOMP), which will appear in the author’s forthcoming book, Horatio Alger Lives in Brooklyn, But Check His Papers (California) and 2) briefly introduce the Deferred Action Access Project, a large service, evaluation and long term research project for which the author is Lead.   The book documents the long term trajectories of incorporation of children of Mexican immigrants in New York, both documented and undocumented, over many years. The main finding is that legal or US citizen children of Mexican immigrants in New York are at least modestly upwardly mobile, and many more so, but those who lack legal status become stuck.   The book documents how undocumented status imbricates itself into daily life, derailing upward mobility, and fostering larger inequality. From a policy perceptive, I frame this maintenance of long term undocumented status as a natural experiment with undocumented children, producing negative outcomes American claims to want to avoid.   The Deferred Action Access Project is a concrete intervention that seeks to address this lack of legal status by supporting at least 1000 new applications for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program among Mexicans in New York. This part of the talk discusses DACA’s benefits and limits to address the problems analyzed in Horatio Alger.