The most consequential aspect of an immigrant’s life in the U.S. is legal status, which continually defines education and employment opportunities, and familial and social life, Oscar Cornejo Casares ’17 said in a talk at Dartmouth on the power and limits of immigration legalization on Jan. 22.
“In the long term, how does the legal status of documented and formerly undocumented immigrants impact their everyday lives and incorporation patterns in the U.S.?” asked Cornejo Casares, a Dartmouth sociology major who is now an assistant professor of Latin American studies at Davidson College in North Carolina.
Assistant Professor of Sociology Sunmin Kim introduced the discussion, which was sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies, and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy.
“Cornejo Casares left his footprints on the campus and was connected to a lot of student groups,” Kim said. The department “wanted to initiate an occasion where students can see someone who was in their shoes who comes back and tells them what they learned.”
The talk coincided with the 12th anniversary of the launch of the Coalition for Immigration Reform and Equality at Dartmouth (CO-Fired), of which Cornejo Casares was a co-founder; and against a backdrop of law enforcement operations by both United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection in such states as Minnesota, Tennessee, and Maine.
Cornejo Casares, who grew up in Chicago as the oldest child of Mexican immigrants, was always interested in teaching, he said. Since leaving Dartmouth, he has focused his research on the politics and mechanics of immigration, in particular the “incessant presence of a category that has profoundly shaped American society and the intimate lives of undocumented immigrants,” he said.
In 2023, Cornejo Casares said, the undocumented population in the U.S. reached nearly 14 million—out of a total population of more than 340 million—which he called a “historic, unprecedented high.”
The last major legalization program in the U.S. was 40 years ago, when the Immigration Reforming Control Act of 1986, also known as the Reagan Amnesty after then-President Ronald Reagan, was enacted into law, legalizing nearly three million undocumented immigrants, Casares said.
But the current reality is that most undocumented immigrants “will never be able to legalize. Current immigration laws are too restricted for many to be eligible and, in turn, successfully start any form of legalization. Few and narrow pathways define contemporary immigration law,” Casares said.
As part of the research for his PhD dissertation at Northwestern University, Cornejo Casares conducted in-depth interviews in Chicago with 56 undocumented and formerly undocumented Latin American immigrants born between 1965 and 2002, he told the audience.
He found that even in the case of immigrants who had attained a legal status, there was an enduring fear of deportation, or of not doing enough to maintain legal status, which could lead to a sometimes exhausting pursuit of achievement. Participants in the interviews called this threat the “Boogey Man,” Cornejo Casares said.
The anxiety induced in immigrants by this specter of deportation tends to reinforce parameters of immigration law, Cornejo Casares said: “‘Legalizability’ functions as a form of control, through a kind of hope of a desired and not-yet-plausible future.”
Many of the people Cornejo Casares spoke to, particularly undocumented immigrants, had recurring nightmares of immigration enforcement officials showing up at their door or trailing them. This shaped people’s behavior, from practicing concealment to observing a conspiracy of silence, Cornejo Casares said.
“And it is so ubiquitous because it happens early in the childhood or adolescence of undocumented youth. The child is brought in as part of a group to maintain an open secret, to maintain secrecy and silence,” Cornejo Casares said.
Dartmouth was a formative experience, Cornejo Casares said. When he arrived on campus, he wanted to major in biology. But spurred by his interest in sociology and anthropology, he switched to a sociology major and also created a second major that melded Native American and Latin/Latinx and Caribbean studies.
He had always been interested, Cornejo Casares said, in “the politics of belonging in society. Why are things the way they are? What are the origins? What are the problems and how do we solve them? Sociology gave me the theoretical, intellectual understanding of the ponderings I had about life.”
His years at Dartmouth brought about an increased political consciousness, particularly when it came to the thorny debate surrounding immigration law reform and enforcement, he said.
After graduation Cornejo Casares co-produced the 2019 documentary film Change the Subject, which traced the efforts of Dartmouth students to eradicate the term “illegal alien” in American library catalogues. After the documentary came out, some libraries in Europe, Australia, and Canada formed committees to study how to eliminate this term in their own catalogues, Cornejo Casares told the audience in Dartmouth 101.
A paradox, he said, is that while legalization status does provide undeniable economic and educational advantages it does not necessarily accomplish the complete absorption into American society that many immigrants want and expect. “It doesn’t alleviate what they endured in the past,” he said.
Cornejo Casares is now part of a group working on a follow-up documentary on immigration during the two Trump presidencies.
“Everyone is subject to the immigration enforcement power of the state,” he said. “Everyone in this room is subject—regardless of your race, regardless of your citizenship status–to immigration enforcement: especially detainability. So I wouldn’t bank on it to say that your citizenship offers immunity.”
After the talk, Brendan Chapman ’29 said it was valuable to hear Cornejo Casares’ take on the complex debate around immigration and legalization. “I think it’s a very emotional topic in today’s political climate. So it’s special to see someone so educated and insightful on the issue talk about it with compassion,” he said.
Rosa Lopez ’26, a bio-ecology major who is part of the current chapter of Co-FIRED attended Cornejo Casares’ talk to learn more about his experience and research. “I really enjoyed the terminology and the language that he used to describe the undocumented experience,” she said. “Those were really profound to me.”
What most moved her, Lopez said, was hearing, in the stories Cornejo Casares told, that immigrants to the U.S. persevere in the face of what seem to be insuperable obstacles, and that a love between two people, who may be of differing legal status, can endure.