 This is the third of our events in this largest really initiative, public initiative, public policy initiative, public research initiative by the college. I'm grateful to know it's on a subject very dear to my heart immigration and deportation. As you know, both subjects are, you know, two of the major issues in contemporary society. Usually, or in the past, probably in social science, American social scientists, the emphasis has always been on immigration. And immigration usually, especially from a sociological perspective, has been considered usually within frameworks of assimilation. And the last 15 odd years, certainly since 1996, but prior to that, going way back, if you like, into the 1800s, but the more recent time deportation has come to be a major issue, but an issue that nobody really wants to talk about, or at least in any kind of reasonable way. And so as social sciences, sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, wherever we come from, anthropologists, our duty is basically to take on those issues that are often opaque and obscured and somehow buried beneath a welter of hearsay and stereotypical information. So we're going to punch at that. We're going to punch at the stereotypes. We're going to punch at the myths. And we're going to get to some of the most grounded research around in the present period by our four esteemed guests here tonight. Before we go on to their presentations, I just want to point out that at the back there are fliers on regarding the next few events. The next one I got here was on Thursday with a workshop and performance with a well-known hip-hop group that does a lot of strong political music and performance called Rel Diaz, and that's on Thursday, October 17. From one to two it's called the Immigration Workshop and from two to three musical performance. And thereafter there's a whole host of events coming up all the way through to December. So there's something there for everybody, and by all means bring your friends along and your mums and dads and your girlfriends and your boyfriends and whoever else you think is interested in this topic. One other thing is also mentioned on October 22 downstairs in the theatre, in the Black Box Theatre, we have a special symposium and teaching which I'm co-organising around the Snowdon Affair and the issue of the surveillance state, the security state in the United States and the contemporary forms of witch hunts which are taking place with greater propensity in this fair country. So we will move ahead and the order will change from what you have here. We have Shirley Larrow going first, Michelle Waslin going second, Juan Manuel Panderosa going third and Jorge Chavez going fourth. So we'll start with Shirley. Shirley is actually one of my students, a graduate student, getting her PhD in criminal justice, I'm very happy to say. And also teaches as an adjunct in the Department of Sociology of which I'm a chair. She's a managing fellow of the Centre of Race, Crime and Justice and served as co-chair for the Centre's 2002 issues of immigration in criminal justice conference from which came the book Outside Justice. Her present research interests are social disorganisation, immigration and crime and the Latino paradox and she indeed is a co-editor of the book that just came out. So without further ado, let's welcome Shirley Larrow. Good afternoon. Do you hear me well? Yes. So it took me a little while to figure out how I was going to give this presentation. I was kind of torn and I struggled a lot. What am I going to speak about? Because this is, as Professor Brudetton said, this is a book talk, right? And the book is in the back table over there. And that book is a product of a conference that we held in March of 2012 and some of the presentations are represented in forms of chapters in that book. And so we're going to discuss what we worked on since that conference and since we submitted our chapters in the book. And my work is still an ongoing project. And so I decided, you know, what am I going to talk about? So one of the first things I did was I revisited my chapter because I hadn't read my chapter from the moment I emailed it out to the publisher. I didn't want to look at it again because it was, you know, a process. And so I reread the chapter and after I read it, I said, oh, you know, I was unhappy with the stuff that I saw, right? Because it's a, you know, we're a year and a half removed from the chapter. And I've conducted more work and I've studied more and conducted more research. And there are so many things that I thought were right or that I thought made sense. And, you know, not so much now that I've conducted more research. But that's normal. As I understand it, you know, sometimes we write things and a year later, we're not happy with it. I'll talk to PhDs who've been PhDs for 25 years and they talk about their own dissertation. And they say they're not happy with it. So I'm all right with that. But what am I going to talk about and this presentation from the moment that I submitted that chapter? My research is the effect of deportation on community social organizations, specifically, right? What I look at is fear, deportation, the threat of deportation and how this promotes a culture of fear in communities. And how this culture of fear disrupts community organization. It disrupts the cohesion, right? The well-functioning aspects that you find in a community. So there's been a lot of work done on immigration and the positive effects of immigration. It's since all social science subjects. So in sociology, anthropology, even political science, we know that there are a lot of positive effects of immigration. It promotes social capital, there's integration, there's economic revitalization, there's a thing called collective efficacy. There's a lot of things that are positive of immigration that contribute to the organization of a community and that promotes social organization. There's no, in sociology we have this thing called social disorganization. Criminology, social disorganization is the dominant theory that relates immigration to crime, right? Some people believe that immigration leads to increased crime rates in neighborhoods and the dominant theory that says that is social disorganization. And we know that that's not true. We know immigration actually leads to positive community effects. And what I look at is how the threat of deportation disrupts that by promoting a culture of fear. The best way I can illustrate this is I work in a law firm. Full-time. And it's a really big law firm, 19 floors over 500 attorneys. And it's really one of the best places I ever worked at. The atmosphere was congenial, everybody got along so well. Management was always laid back, everyone got along very well. It's been great. But then the last couple of years, the firm has been victim to the financial crisis that we are all reading and experiencing, right? And so they had a meeting and they told the staff, we don't need as many of you. Technology has made it so that we can do a lot of the work ourselves. So within the next few months, there are going to be a bunch of layoffs. And what used to be a really congenial, affable, friendly environment changed drastically. Departments weren't working together, people were throwing each other under the bus if some copy wasn't made properly. Nobody wanted to take responsibility. They were trying to blame someone else. Well, you didn't fill the right form. You couldn't get anyone to work together and you pretty much couldn't get any work done. In the firm that I worked at there for 10 years and it was so much fun before. And now people were afraid to lose their jobs. They were afraid to make a mistake. And they were really just, they were afraid, right? And that's pretty much a microcosm of what I'm looking at, right? When management, which is the US government in my study, threatens to fire people, to lay people off, right? Or to remove people, deport them. People are going to be afraid, right? We all have a self-interest. We're afraid of losing our jobs. People are afraid to get deported, to be removed. And what happens, this fear leads to suspicion. It leads to them distrusting each other. They throw each other under the bus. They also don't want to work together. Things don't get done. And this is what I'm looking at. How the fear of deportation leads people to no longer trust each other, to not want to work together. And how that leads a community to not function well. And how that can lead to social disorganisation, right? That's what I'm looking at. Since 1996, Professor Brotherson mentioned 1996, we've had increased immigration control policies, right? We've been designed to ease the process of deportation. And in recent years, we've had an unprecedented number of deportations in the US. In the last four years alone, over 1.2 million deportations have occurred, right? That's an unprecedented number. That's a large number. It's huge, right? We have over 85 immigration and customs enforcement dedicated detention facilities, right? So this doesn't include those jails where people are being held until they get sent to the detention facility, right? Dedicated detention facilities across the country. We have at least 85. And when we think about who is being deported, some people like to think we're making our streets safer, right? Because we're deporting the criminals. But the Department of Homeland Security, immigration and customs enforcement, this is their own data. As you can see, I feel like I'm teaching. I feel like I have a click or a point there where I can laser point. Oop, look what I did. Most of the people being deported are being deported for non-criminal violations, right? So this rhetoric that you hear that we're deporting the dangerous folks, those immigrants who have the calves the size of cantalopes because they're drug runners and they're harming our society, those aren't the people, for the most part, who are being deported. And even those people who do get convicted of a crime and who do get deported for criminal violations, many of those violations are not the most serious criminal violations. So we have this immigration control regime pretty much, right? Where we have these massive amounts of people being deported. And what I want to look at is how it affects communities. You saw on the previous slide how immigration has positive effects on communities. And what I'm looking at is how deportation leads to suspicion and fear, how this promotes community instability. And it negates all the positive aspects that immigration promotes and the effects that it has in communities. This leads to social disorganisation. And in criminology, social disorganisation means increased crime rates. So that's my study, right? Now, one of the things that I had to grapple with during my study, right, because it's a great idea, but then some of my research study, research method students, they'll know that I'm like, how are you going to operationalise this? How are you going to be able to prove it? How are you going to conduct this study? So one of the questions that kept coming up is, well, if deportation is meant to reduce crime and people are afraid to be deported, then isn't it true that they won't commit any crimes? Isn't it true that they're going to try to stay under the radar? That they're going to try to keep their nose clean and therefore they don't have to worry about getting arrested because they didn't do anything wrong and therefore they get deported? Isn't that true? So that's a question I had to deal with. Another question I had to deal with was, how am I going to go about who exactly, because mine is a qualitative study, I wanted to interview folks about their level of fear. You can't really quantify fear, right? So I had to speak to people about their level of fear and how they feel about these deportation initiatives going on around the country and in their own neighbourhood. Well, who am I going to interview? How am I going to be able to show that there are communities that actually feel or experience this type of fear? So I want to study New York. I want to conduct my study in New York. A lot of people, when they hear deportation, when they hear about immigration studies, you think about where you hear the anti-immigrant rhetoric, Texas, Arizona, California, places where you hear a lot of this, we don't want our immigrants or these places where they're passing a lot of anti-immigrant policies. But New York is interesting. I have two minutes left? Wow, okay. So let me tell you really quick about New York. This data was taken, it's a result of a lawsuit. It was a Freedom of Information Act request given to ICE because ICE is not transparent with their numbers. And so there was a lawsuit filed and out of that lawsuit we were able to get some never before released data from ICE. And we found out some really interesting numbers about New York. ICE apprehended over 34,000 New Yorkers between 2005 through 2010. Just under 10% of all people deported from the US come from New York City. That's huge, right? So almost one in 10 people who get deported from the United States are from New York. And it's kind of huge because you don't hear the anti-immigrant rhetoric, right? You don't hear people saying, we don't want these immigrants here. You don't have senators and politicians talking about how we don't want them here. So to know that almost one in 10 people who are deported come from New York, that's pretty surprising. So there's a need to study this here, right? 91% of all people who are detained in New York get deported. So pretty much if you get deported, I mean, if you get detained, it's almost guaranteed you're going to get deported, right? 35% of the people deported are in Queens. This is where I want to conduct my study. I'm going to study two neighborhoods that are pretty much similar. They are highly populated. There's a high immigrant population. There's a lot of businesses, a lot of restaurants, right? Elevated train stations, tale of two neighborhoods, Estoria, Jackson Heights. Highly populated, high immigrant population, except the way the immigrants look is different, right? You have most of the immigrants who are in Estoria, European, most of the immigrants who are in Jackson Heights, not. And so what I'm looking at is the level of fear that these folks feel. And I want to compare whether or not there is an effect. If you want to look at geography, I just want to just see real quick. It's almost equal distance from Rikers Island, which is where you'll be held if you get arrested and are waiting deportation or being transported to a detention center. So the proximity to where they will be held is pretty much the same. So there is an awareness, the same type of awareness of where they'll be sent in each. What a fine I have to go because I'm already over time. I will tell you that there is fear in each area, but there is confidence in Estoria that if they do not commit crimes, they'll be okay. And yet in Jackson Heights, they still fear that even though they're not committing any crimes, a police officer will recognize them as an immigrant, will incarcerate them, and then they'll be deported. So this is indicative of fear of deportation. My sample is still very small, but I'm still continuing this. I got to go, but stay tuned as I guess what I'm going to say. All right.