Placing Belonging: How Relationships, Community, and the Physical Environment Shape the DACA Experience

• In Event: The Increasing Significance of Local Context in Immigrant Integration

Abstract

After more than a decade of failed attempts by Congress to put undocumented immigrant youth on a pathway to legalization, on June 15, 2012, President Barack Obama, introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, an administrative reprieve that offered eligible young people protection from deportation and work authorization, but stopped short of the conferral of lawful status. The policy transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of undocumented young people, opening new pathways to higher education, allowing beneficiaries to forge careers, and enabling them to purchase homes and start families. While less frequently discussed, DACA also improved the less tangible aspects of beneficiaries’ lives, like their sense of belonging—in other words, the deep subjective feeling of security, acceptance, and inclusion they experience within a group, community, or place. Yet these forms of belonging are unevenly distributed across the varied local contexts of reception across the United States. For DACA beneficiaries, where they live remains one of the most significant determinants of disparity. This paper offers new insights into the relationships between place and belonging for immigrant young adults by drawing on an unprecedented multi-sited longitudinal study of DACA-eligible immigrants living in diverse state contexts. We argue that local configurations of place shape unique contexts of belonging. However, the ways in which young people experience belonging do not always align neatly with traditional notions of “restrictive” or “inclusive” contexts. Instead, through friendships, community engagement, and their built and natural environments, our participants constructed and experienced belonging within the particular landscapes of their lives. At a time when immigrants face significant challenges from the federal government, our research offers new insights into how belonging operates as relational, community, and place-based process.

Authors

• Roberto G. Gonzales, University of Pennsylvania

• Sarah Bruhn, University of Pennsylvania

• Kristina Paige Brant, Pennsylvania State University