Publicly Engaged Sociological Research for Immigrant Well-Being

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from the long tradition of U.S. sociology and from Latin American sociology, I describe a few examples of how I have endeavored to make my scholarship available to the public and to inform policy to enhance immigrant well-being. I frame this piece within discussions around public, policy, critical, and professional sociology to underscore that these strands of the discipline do not conflict but draw strength from one another. Identifying urgent issues that need our research attention is key to doing this work effectively to contribute to social change.

Introduction

I was home with my then 4-year-old son when I received a box in the mail with copies of my first book, Fragmented Ties (2000). Excitedly, I showed him the book. He opened it, ran his hands over the cover, leafed through it, and resigned, sighed, “No pictures in this book.” I explained that while it was not a “picture book,” I had written it, so I was happy to see it published. He smiled, looked at me, and asked, “You wrote this? All these words?” “Yes,” I exclaimed proudly, “I did.” “The whole thing?” he continued, and again, I said proudly, “Yes, the whole thing!” He looked at me directly, smiled, and simply asked, “Why?”

Coming from a 4-year-old, the question of why we write and produce the thousands of words that make up our work can be taken as a child’s many “why” questions. However, this question has a deeper meaning when considering it in relation to how we see our scholarship. Why do we do the work we do? Is there a larger purpose beyond academic recognition that moves us to do research and publish? For me, these questions have driven my work throughout my career and are central to guiding my efforts to translate scholarly knowledge into practices and policies that advance immigrant well-being.

In the decades since I have been doing research on immigration in the United States, I have become acutely aware of the crucial place that immigration laws and policies have on immigrants’ lives, their integration trajectories, and their well-being (Menjívar, 2000, 2011a, 2014, 2022). Laws and policies that are welcoming to immigrants can truly transform their lives, with impact across family members and into the future through multi-generational effects. At the same time, political decisions can create harmful policies that profoundly undermine immigrants’ welfare. Thus, in my work, I have underscored the critical place the state plays through laws, policies, and bureaucracies in the lives of immigrants and their families. Having accumulated a robust body of knowledge about the effects of laws and policies on immigrants’ lives has led me to ask myself, how can I put this work to contribute, from my position as a scholar, to ameliorating the harmful consequences of some laws and policies while also promoting and supporting laws and policies that enhance immigrants’ well-being? Although this is my own pondering, it is my hope that it will resonate with others and invite reflection.

In this essay, I share some examples of how I contribute with my scholarly work to spaces beyond academia to educate and inform but also influence policy decisions so that my work can serve to create meaningful change in the lives of immigrants and their families. I must clarify that there are hundreds of sociologists doing exactly this work in a variety of spaces, including scholars at various stages of their careers who have published articles in this special issue. My examples therefore should be seen as part of a larger collective effort by many scholars to address inequalities and injustices.

First, I will briefly contextualize this work in discussions about public and policy sociology, the sociological tradition most associated with the kind of work I discuss here. While I do not seek to argue where public and policy sociology should fall within the discipline, it is instructive to situate what I do within debates that address how this work should be done, perceived, and why.

Some caveats are in order. Moments of heightened hostility toward immigrants can and should serve as catalysts for scholars to respond with the research evidence we have accumulated, as many scholars have demonstrated—today and in the past. Far from feeling squashed by hostile forces, these moments represent an impetus to connect our scholarly work with policy and community efforts to address inequalities. Indeed, it is in these moments that our work is most needed and acquires a sense of urgency. Although the sociopolitical moment determines whether and to what extent policymakers will be receptive to our work, and how our work will be received, resisted, and interpreted (Menjívar, 2022), we should engage these challenges. And we should not lose sight of the forces against the scholarly work we produce, especially the obstacles created by the onslaught of anti-intellectualism, misinformation, anti-science, and anti-immigration.

Thus, as we mobilize efforts to inform policymakers and work to revert harmful immigration policies, we should also consider what we can do to overcome the limitations that sociological research faces when the sociopolitical context is unreceptive to evidence-based information (Menjívar, 2022). In this vein, we need to reflect not just on how best to effectively communicate our research findings but also, and equally important, on what topics we should study and what research questions are imperative for improving the lives of the immigrants at the center of our work.

Finally, we should be cognizant that detrimental immigration laws and policies are not only passed during moments of open or heightened hostility toward immigrant communities. Laws and policies that on the surface may seem beneficial as they offer immediate relief, may have long-term harmful consequences, such as statuses that leave entire classes of immigrants in legal limbo indefinitely. Often, policymakers formulate policies with benevolent or empathetic intentions but the results sometimes resemble those of overtly exclusionary policies; ultimately, immigrants are excluded and marginalized (Menjívar & Kil, 2002). Like the explicitly restrictive policies, seemingly benign regulations may also constitute legal violence (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012) given the long-term harm they may create in immigrants’ lives (Menjívar & Lakhani, 2016).

Situating My Work in Public and Policy Sociology Conversations

Questions about engaging in sociological research beyond academia have a long history in the profession and for me personally. For instance, in graduate school, some of my peers and I wondered whether our research would one day be used “in the real world” to inform solutions to the problems we were studying. We were acquiring a keen understanding of the issues we were researching and the necessary skills to formulate policies to contribute to improving the well-being of the people in our studies. We would talk about how this could be achieved, what tools were needed, and how to translate knowledge into practice. We were unaware of the vocabulary to capture these inclinations but the impetus was there. However, robust discussions about what this public engagement should look like and where it should stand in relation to other strands of the discipline, especially to “professional” or “traditional” sociology, have a much longer history (Calhoun, 2005; Clawson et al., 2007; Jeffries, 2009; Smith, 2023) that goes back to the discipline’s roots in “public” sociology (Glasser, 2023).

Thus, although publicly engaged scholarship has been part of U.S. sociology since its origins (Clawson et al., 2007; Gans, 1989, 2002; Hossfeld, 2021), conversations about the public impact of the discipline started to gain attention through Herbert Gans’s (1989, 2002) ASA presidential address in 1988 when he appealed for a more publicly engaged sociology, later noting, “Public sociologists can be particularly useful in debunking the conventional wisdom and popular myths. . . and reframe social phenomena in helpful ways” and asking for this kind of sociology to be “institutionalized as a legitimate way of doing sociology” (p. 8). Some years later, in another ASA presidential address, Burawoy (2005, 2021) expanded on Gans’s call to delineate a disciplinary division of labor that included professional (or conventional sociology), critical (critical of the world and status quo sociology), public (sociology that speaks to audiences beyond academia), and policy sociology (sociology to inform policymakers) and argued for a place for public sociology within this division of labor.

I do not proceed from a division of academic labor that separates professional, policy, critical, and public sociology. Although the use of concepts such as “public” or “policy” sociology may be more legible to capture publicly engaged sociological research, I do not use these terms here. I see professional sociology and public (and policy) sociology as informing, complementing, and shaping one another, even drawing strength from one another (see Burawoy, 2005, 2021; Zussman & Misra, 2007, p. 11) because to contribute publicly engaged research to effect social change, we need a structured and systematic understanding of the issues we seek to transform with our work (Massey, 2007). Thus, I align my work with the roots of the discipline, including Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others (see Hossfeld, 2021) as well as from Latin American sociology, where historical conditions have demanded that sociologists put sociological knowledge into practice. Influenced by these traditions, I define my publicly engaged research broadly as “doing sociology in a manner that affects the social world and can be accessed by those outside academia” (Glasser, 2023, p. 24), taking a critical approach to doing sociology rooted in a commitment to social justice (see Feagin, 2021).

Although U.S.-based sociologists have debated the place of public and policy sociology within the discipline and inspired reflection on the contributions we can make to improve the well-being of the people at the center of our work, ¹ for sociologists in other parts of the world this is not a matter of debate or institutionalization; it is simply how sociology is done. Calhoun (2005) observed that the tasks we associate with “public sociology,” such as informing and educating various publics and shaping debates, should be the responsibility of sociologists in general and not only for those in a specific subfield. In my understanding of publicly engaged scholarship, I follow Calhoun and the deeper historical roots of U.S. sociology, but I also take inspiration from Latin American sociology, where the tensions (from a U.S. perspective) between advancing scholarship or engaging in the struggles stemming from sociological knowledge have been blurred (Menjívar, 2023). As Venezuelan sociologist, Briceño-León (2002, p. 16), observed, the challenge in Latin America is not to choose professional or public (or policy) sociology but to find ways to better combine the two.

Furthermore, I would like to distinguish my work from that of public intellectuals, who do the important work of communicating their academic research to various publics, and whose work is often equated with other strands of publicly engaged scholarship. The publicly engaged sociological research I do parallels and complements what public intellectuals do, but I see publicly engaged work as being more directly informed by social justice principles and aiming to inform the public and policymakers to advance immigrant well-being (see also Smith, 2023). This work takes many forms and often does not have a “public” face or takes place in public spaces. Furthermore, this strand of publicly engaged sociological research is inscribed in collective efforts, as there is seldom a single individual behind it; it involves a constellation of actors working in public arenas where policy is debated and made and through which the public, media, and politicians are informed. It is work done to create social change in the lives of immigrants, as part of larger collective efforts, and not focused solely on communicating academic scholarship to the public. ²

Three Examples

There are many avenues to put our research to work for the well-being of immigrants, to inform immigration policies, and to reach a wide range of groups to inform, educate, and work with to achieve this goal. The key here is to deliberately blend the various strands of sociology (or other social science disciplines), such as professional, policy, and public sociologies (Burawoy, 2005, 2021) on the ground since while doing this work, these academic demarcations do not come so neatly compartmentalized. Importantly, without the legitimacy that scholarly (or “scientific”) work provides, the potential for contributing from our position as scholars to public conversations and efforts to promote more humane policies likely will be weakened. Furthermore, we can aim for various audiences.

For instance, one way of structuring our immigration scholarship to influence policy is to make our research accessible to lower levels of government, to states and municipalities, to demonstrate what has worked elsewhere, and to propose policies that governments at these levels can enact. These levels of government can be receptive to academic work and the policies they enact can be immensely influential in immigrants’ lives. From the extensive body of research on the positive effects of state-level laws on immigrants’ health (Bacong & Sohn, 2021; Dondero & Altman, 2020; Philbin et al., 2018; Vargas & Ibarra, 2017), we know what these levels of government can do to ameliorate the effects of harmful federal policies, especially those that restrict access to resources based on legal status (Zajdel, 2023). There is research agreement on the benefits of driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants (Amuedo-Dorantes, Arenas-Arroyo & Sevilla, 2020), which extend to communities, cities, and states (Cáceres & Jameson, 2015; Lueders & Hainmueller, 2017). Access to in-state tuition and other educational benefits makes a critical difference in immigrants’ well-being and processes of integration (Darolia & Potochnick, 2015; Ovink et al., 2016). And we know that there is variation in local or state government policies, including in enforcement approaches (see Light et al., 2023), as well as in their openness to research-informed recommendations. This means that there is room for scholars to bring to policy makers’ attention the research that has demonstrated the positive effects of humane policies in other states. Briefs and reports summarizing research on state-level laws can be shared with officials at these levels of government and possibly work with them to create policies that can sustain immigrant well-being.

At the same time, much of immigrants’ access to goods and benefits for themselves and their families is determined by their legal status (Menjívar et al., 2016), which only the federal government has the power to bestow. Thus, in principle, a natural avenue for our research to inform policy decisions is to make it available to policymakers at the federal level. Given the anti-immigrant climate that today dominates debates and the harmful policies that have been passed at the federal level (regardless of political power in office), it might prove effective to provide our research expertise to immigrant rights and advocacy groups as they work to inform policymakers of the benefits of more secure legal statuses. These organizations often need scholarly research to support their arguments; thus, this avenue can provide an optimal opportunity for our research to make a critical intervention for immigrant well-being.

I will share only three examples from my efforts to contribute to improve immigrant well-being, what policies have the potential to make the most difference in immigrants’ lives, and how we can inform the public and policymakers. I underscore that this is a multipronged effort comprised of various components, which involves policy and policy approaches, and that it is very much a collective effort, which is why I refer to the examples below as partnerships.

Partnerships With Immigrant Communities

I have found that working with immigrant rights organizations is one of the most effective ways to put my research to work for the well-being of immigrants. This work naturally blends my professional/scholarly work with public and policy sociology. I will provide one example based on a partnership with the National Temporary Protected Status Alliance.

Given my long-term engagement with Central American immigrant communities where I have researched the effects of legal status, and especially of prolonged uncertain statuses (Menjívar, 2000, 2006), in 2014 I was asked by leaders of Los Angeles-based Central American organizations to write a demographic profile of Honduran and Salvadoran immigrants who hold Temporary Protected Status (TPS). They knew I had done research in these communities and needed this profile for their campaigns in Washington D.C. to lobby for a more permanent solution to these immigrants’ temporary status. For a successful campaign, they needed to educate Senators and Representatives about who these TPS holders were and why they deserved a more permanent status. I did not have such data as my studies in the Central American community have been ethnographic or qualitative, based on small Ns, and study participants are not drawn randomly from the population at large. The U.S. government does not make readily available sociodemographic data on TPS holders. In the face of these data challenges, the organizations proposed that I collect the necessary data myself and they promised to assist me in this project. The leaders and community members emphasized that they needed the project to be conducted with the rigor of scholarly research so that no one would question the results.

In 2015, I started planning the project’s first steps through the Center for Migration Research at the University of Kansas with the sustained assistance of Victor Agadjanian, a social demographer and survey research specialist. To be able to draw a sociodemographic profile of a population that we did not even know its exact size, we had to structure a system that would generate the best approximation to sampling. First, we decided to survey in the five U.S. cities with the largest concentrations of Honduran and Salvadoran immigrants under the assumption that TPS holders from these countries would be concentrated there. We enlisted local Central American organizations in the five U.S. cities and the Salvadoran consulate in Los Angeles helped us reach the population we needed by allowing us to implement random selection procedures on the lists of names they maintained, which allowed us to access respondents. We surveyed over 2,000 Salvadoran and Honduran TPS holders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington DC/Virginia/Maryland, and New York/New Jersey.

Throughout, I worked closely with the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) in Los Angeles and the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON) to coordinate the entire operation. After developing the questionnaire that we would use for the survey, TPS holders held meetings in the five cities to review it and provide feedback. In collaboration with CARECEN and NDLON, we trained the survey takers, who were TPS holders themselves. And because this was a research project based at the University of Kansas, it had to go through IRB review and approval, meaning that the survey takers, all TPS holders, also needed IRB training and approval. Thus, the project took longer than anticipated. We implemented the survey over several months in 2016. I wrote a report in early 2017 that TPS holders reviewed and provided feedback on; it summarizes the sociodemographic profile of Honduran and Salvadoran TPS holders (https://ipsr.ku.edu/migration/pdf/TPS_Report.pdf). As the threats to end TPS designation for El Salvador and Honduras have continued, I have updated this report so they can continue using it in their advocacy work (https://latino.ucla.edu/research/temporary-protected-status/). ³

The organizers convened a national assembly of TPS holders in Washington D.C. where I presented the report at a legislative briefing at the Cannon Building of the House on June 23, 2017. I also accompanied delegations of TPS holders as they visited Senators’ offices to share information about themselves and garner support for their campaigns. And I presented the same report to the larger gathering of TPS holders where the National TPS Alliance was launched. As threats to end TPS designation for certain countries have remained, the Alliance continues its work through advocacy, legal cases, press conferences, and information initiatives.

Furthermore, the organizers suggested that I also produce scholarly work from the data collected. They reasoned that it would demonstrate that the study had been done rigorously and could stand the test of peer review. Thus, I published an article that shows the effects of living in liminal legality (Menjívar, 2006) for an extended period, concluding that it is an immediate benefit, but it has downside long-term consequences for immigrant integration (Menjívar et al., 2022).

Partnerships With the Legal Community and Advocates

In addition to doing research on U.S.-bound Central American migration, my other line of research focuses on gender-based violence in Central America. For instance, I conducted ethnographic research in two semi-rural towns in Guatemala (Menjívar, 2011b) where I focused on the multiple forms of violence (structural, symbolic, institutional, gender, political, every day, etc.) that women endure in their everyday lives. When in 2014 the number of Central American women seeking asylum in the United States increased, some legal aid organizations approached me to ask for my assistance in providing expertise on country conditions to substantiate the women’s asylum applications. Since then, I have been providing my research-based expertise to dozens of individual cases of Central American women seeking asylum. ⁴ I have decided to only provide expert testimony gratis to fully pro bono cases (e.g., where the applicant does not pay for the services), which are usually cases from non-profit legal aid organizations and law school clinics. ⁵ This is my personal decision to support the neediest cases of applicants who lack the resources to pay for legal services.

As in the case of TPS I describe above, here too there was an iterative process whereby my research initially gave me the platform to contribute my scholarship to advocacy efforts, but through this work, new research questions and projects emerged for me. During court testimony in a Salvadoran woman’s asylum case, ⁶ as judges usually ask the experts, this judge asked me if, in my expert opinion, the government of the applicant’s country was unable or unwilling to provide her protection. I explained that based on my research I would conclude that the government seemed unable but that I needed further research to determine its willingness, why, and how. The judge and I had a good conversation that I hope expanded his understanding of the contexts that Central American women flee. For my part, our conversation planted a seed for new research questions that I have addressed through a project with a series of publications.

With a political scientist colleague, we set out to investigate why Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador could not protect women from violence even if they had some of the highest rates of gender-based violence and feminicide in the region and each country had passed multiple violence against women laws. Building on my framework of multisided violence in women’s lives (detailed in Enduring Violence 2011), we wrote a series of articles (Menjívar & Walsh, 2017; Menjívar & Walsh, 2016; Walsh & Menjívar, 2016a, 2016b) focusing on what the state does through its agencies and bureaucracies that place obstacles to implementing laws. We concluded that in contexts where the state is unwilling to make other changes to improve women’s lives (e.g., institutional practices and laws that disfavor women remain unchanged), violence against women laws will remain symbolic. Rather than finding explanations in individual motivations to cause harm, in “machismo” culture, or in cultural practices that are presumably violent, we linked justice system failures to broader structural conditions that lead to implementation failures. In a separate project, I directly took the question of whether the government was unable to protect women from violence. We found (Diossa-Jiménez & Menjívar, 2023) that the Salvadoran government had great capacity to implement laws with full force but only when (poor) women are suspected of having an abortion, not when it comes to protecting them from violence. Given justice system failures in their origin countries, where governments are sometimes unable but mostly unwilling to protect women from violence, women have no other choice but to seek protection elsewhere. These peer-reviewed publications now provide research evidence to substantiate arguments about state failures and government unwillingness and neglect in Central American countries to protect from violence women seeking asylum.

This work led to my involvement in larger class action lawsuits seeking to revert harmful policies that fail to recognize women asylum seekers’ plight. During the Trump administration, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions published a decision in 2018 to eliminate gang violence and domestic violence as credible grounds for asylum, deeming them “private violence” (https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1070866/download). Mr. Sessions’s decision overruled the case of a Guatemalan woman seeking asylum (Matter of A–B), undermined the standards by which gender-based violence cases were evaluated, reverted precedent, and significantly narrowed the basis for requesting asylum (especially for Central American women). And in contrast to what my research shows (see above), where the governments of the sending countries figure prominently in failures to protect women from gender-based violence, in Mr. Sessions’s rationale those governments had nothing to do with the violence the women experienced, which he saw simply as “misfortune” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/us/politics/sessions-domestic-violence-asylum.html).

Soon thereafter, several organizations (the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, the ACLU of Texas, and the ACLU of D.C.) coordinated a response by filing federal lawsuits challenging Mr. Sessions’s decision (https://www.aclu.org/cases/grace-v-barr). They requested affidavits from scholars who could provide scholarly expertise to support the different elements of their legal argument. With a few colleagues from across the country (including political scientists, anthropologists, and historians), we worked with the litigating parties and coauthored affidavits for each of the Central American countries of our expertise (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). Although under the Trump administration this initial response was unsuccessful, the litigation and advocacy continued. The case was finally successful in 2021 when Attorney General Merrick Garland vacated the Matter of A-B- ruling (https://cgrs.uchastings.edu/our-work/matter-b-0).

A key point to reiterate is that these were all joint efforts through collaborations across organizations and individual scholar experts. The aim was for our research to right a policy wrong to ensure that applications of women seeking asylum in U.S. courts would be properly contextualized in country conditions. Thus, this work had clear elements of professional (conventional) scholarship as well as public and policy sociology.

Speaking to the Public

There is a strong tradition of public intellectual work in academia where scholars take to public spaces to express an opinion on a pressing issue through research-based opinion pieces, blogs, media interviews, and the like. It is perhaps the most visible and legible form of “public” sociology. This approach stands in contrast to the other two modalities I describe above in three key aspects. First, communicating our research to various audiences, whether in writing or public speaking, is by definition not done behind the scenes; it places the public intellectual in full view of the public. In contrast, the work I do is usually performed collectively or in collaboration with other groups or community organizations, and is usually conducted away from public spaces. Second, the iterative process and feedback loops I identified in the other two forms, where a line of my research evolved through questions that emerged in the non-academic spaces I worked with, are not necessarily present in public intellectual work. And lastly, in contrast to public intellectual work, the work I have described here is explicitly informed by principles of social justice, done from a critical perspective, to create social change and a more just society.

Importantly, public intellectual work is not inconsistent with the other modalities I have described; in fact, just as public, policy, and professional sociology, each derive strength from the other two, speaking to audiences and doing public intellectual work complement and draw strength from the other strands. Thus, I also have shared my work with various publics by writing opinion pieces and blog posts and giving interviews to news media. ⁷ In all these instances, I base my comments on the research I have produced.

Speaking to the public, however, requires learning a different form of communication, in writing and discourse, as audiences differ and their familiarity with academic communication styles varies. For this reason, translating our work for a broader audience is not always easy, but it can flow naturally when there is public interest in the subject matter. In one instance, when the issue of Central American asylum seekers received much attention, my colleague and I wrote a brief based on our research on state failures to protect women from violence for an audience of policymakers and media (Menjívar & Walsh, 2019), which I presented at a congressional briefing at the Rayburn House of Representatives on October 11, 2018. Although there was interest and Congressional staffers took lots of notes (and thus I might have accomplished the goal of informing policymakers), I cannot assess any policy impact of my presentation.

Discussion and Conclusion

I have described a few examples of how I have done publicly engaged sociological research, framing this piece within discussions around public, policy, critical, and professional sociology (Burawoy, 2005, 2021) to make legible the work I do. I draw inspiration from the longer historical tradition of U.S. sociology (see Hossfeld, 2021), but mostly from Latin American sociologists who regularly do sociology with one foot in academia and the other in public arenas to create more just and equitable societies (Menjívar, 2023). I follow these traditions and adhere to Burawoy’s assertion that public, policy, professional, and critical sociology do not contradict one another but draw strength from one another. And I agree with Calhoun’s (2005) observation that educating various publics and shaping debates (and policy) should not be relegated only to certain subfields of the discipline but should be the responsibility of sociologists in general. To this, I add that identifying urgent issues that need our research attention is key to doing this work more effectively to contribute to social change.

As the many scholars who contribute a range of scholarship to forge a more just society may attest, the work I propose is not easy or free of challenges. A key point to remember is that the publicly engaged work I is not done separately from our academic research; it is centrally anchored in and fully integrated into rigorous social science scholarship. Undertaken with this in mind, this work should not be a distraction or derailment from the requirements to meet academic career benchmarks. But as the many colleagues engaged in this work can attest, it is enriching personally and expansive as it is often done in collaboration with dedicated individuals who aim to improve the lives of the people at the center of our work.

Mobilizing our scholarly work beyond academia to educate audiences, inform policymakers, and promote a more just treatment of immigrants may not fundamentally change the policy landscape to improve immigrant well-being. However, it can make a dent to begin undoing the harms that immigration legislation and enforcement policies for decades have inflicted on immigrants and their families today. In my view, taking our work beyond academia is a step in the right direction.