“I Might Just Feel a Little Safer”: The Imagined Futures of U.S. Born Young Adults of Color in a More Ethnoracially Diverse Nation

Abstract

As the U.S. population ethnoracially diversifies in the coming decades, it becomes ever more important to understand how Americans interpret and respond to these population dynamics. Nearly all related scholarship has focused on White people’s sentiments and reactions to the demographic shifts. This study leverages rich, qualitative interviews collected in 2023 with 43 U.S.-born Gen Z adults aged 18 to 26 years identifying as Mexican, Native, or with two or more races in Arizona to address two aims. First, we explore how young adults of color imagine that anticipated ethnoracial population changes will affect their lives. Second, we examine how their present-day ethnoracial and immigration contexts and experiences connect with how they imagine their future. Participants generally hope for decreased systemic racism and greater political empowerment, which will benefit their own lives. Some participants also are optimistic that these shifts will enable them to experience increased ontological security, or feelings of ease, safety, belonging, and trust. Extended case studies indicate that these imagined futures are tied to young people’s current experiences of systemic racism, xenophobia, and the racialization of illegality reinforced at the structural and individual levels nationally and in Arizona. These findings contribute to the sociology of the future and racialized future literatures regarding how White supremacy and systemic racism organizes the past, present, and the future. The results also illustrate the “spillover” harms of racialized immigration policies and practices beyond immigrants to U.S.-born young adults from diverse minoritized communities and from the present to future temporal landscapes.