The Pew Research Center estimates that more than 40 million people living in the United States are immigrants – 35.2 million of them (roughly 77%) are here legally and about 10.5 million (around 23%) are here without authorization.37 About 25% of all immigrants to the United States come from Mexico and, like Vanessa’s parents, they come for work. According to Pew, industries that depend on the labor of unauthorized immigrants include agriculture, food production (slaughterhouses and canneries), construction, manufacturing, and hospitality (as maids and custodial workers).38 Families like Vanessa’s live in fear of getting caught up in raids and deported without notice. The Pew Research Center reports that from 2001 to 2017, a majority (60%) of immigrants deported from the United States had not been convicted of a crime.39 Despite Oakland being a sanctuary city, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are using the city airport as a staging ground for thousands of flights. Between 2010 and 2018, the ICE air operation flew nearly 43,000 people in and out of Oakland.40 Of these, almost 27,000 were being deported; the other 16,000 were being transferred as part of a detention and relocation system that seems designed to cut people off from legal and community support that could help them stay in the country.41
While the Trump administration refocused national conversations about immigration in very hostile ways, the truth is that as a nation we have never been willing to address the fact that unauthorized workers have long been central to US business. Immigrants and their families have been caught between the pull from businesses that rely on unauthorized immigrant labor and the push of immigration policies that result in deportation. Immigrants and their families pay a steep price.
In 2019, President Trump ordered ICE agents to conduct mass roundups of immigrant families across the country. His administration also sought to rescind Obama-era protections for immigrants, including the DACA program. “I think there’s not a single time,” says Vanessa, “when I am not afraid of something happening to my father or my mom or me that we’re no longer with each other. We’re afraid of deportations or removal proceedings, so just being with my family, spending time with them, absolutely brings me joy, because we could be here and in the split of a second … then we’re not.” And of course, this means saving every penny in case the day comes when her family is torn apart by a raid. In early summer 2020, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s effort to end DACA, but the government was able to change the reporting requirement for recipients from once every two years to once a year. For Vanessa and the DACA recipients like her, the battle continues.
Vanessa isn’t the only person in Oakland with a professional job and financial struggles, although the struggles all look a little different. Puppy Love (PL) is the name chosen by an African American man living in Oakland to serve as his pseudonym. He is in his fifties and has one child, who is now an adult. PL might be more of a homebody than people expect and spends a fair amount of time at home doing chores. For relaxation he works out and tries to go fishing at least twice a week. PL has steady, full-time employment as a manager in a nonprofit providing adult education to people with developmental disabilities. He cautiously refuses to talk about his salary, but volunteers that he has no savings, retirement plan, or assets. PL is one of only two men in the entire organization, about which he says diplomatically: “It’s definitely a challenge on some days; things aren’t thought about from a man’s perspective as easily as they are in this organization from a woman’s perspective.”
As a supervisor, he spends his days troubleshooting problems and likes the variation that problem-solving brings. “I don’t control what happens to my consumers when they’re not in my care, but when they are in my care, I need to provide the best welfare, safety, and security possible. That’s important to me. I don’t think that’s important to everybody else in society when it comes to this population. They’re very neat folks. They’re loving. They’re caring. They’re intelligent.”
PL has worked incredibly hard for the success he has had. He has held the same full-time job for more than five years; it’s work that he finds rewarding and which provides basic health care and vacation time. While he appreciates that he is fortunate to have a job that provides vacation time, PL can’t afford to take a vacation: like millions of others, he lives paycheck to paycheck. Despite having steady, full-time work that he loves, PL is a long way from economic security. “You know, my worries are that, you know, am I going to have a place to lay my head at the end of each night? I’m always worried about, you know, is my truck going to make it home? The cost of living in California goes up every day. The cost of health care goes up every day. Living in the Bay Area is quite expensive. Rent is raised dramatically from year to year. I work in a nonprofit organization, so I don’t get a raise every year.” In the last three years, PL’s monthly rent has increased by $250, yet his salary has remained static. He explained: “that $250 that I’m now paying extra on rent was going toward the grocery bills, the gas bills. Now I’m having to scrounge that money up. You know, it’s got to come from other places … It is definitely a hard place for me to live due to the rent.”
Oakland has been described as the new ground zero in the affordable housing crisis. The city’s weak rent control laws have failed to effectively stabilize rents in the city. It feels wrong to even call it rent control if a landowner can increase rents by 10% or more just by providing tenants with a written notice sixty days in advance. Locals are well aware that the city has long protected landowners over tenants. But the current housing crisis now feels like a betrayal to many who say the city has not only pandered to tech companies with tax breaks, but is also encouraging the rapid gentrification that pushes long-time residents out of the city.
Clearly, PL is not alone in his worries about rising rents; in 2018, 4,000 people competed for just twenty-eight spots in a new affordable housing development in Oakland.42 For people in the struggling class, rent is never one-third of their monthly expenses – everyone is “cost burdened” and the going rents are well beyond what many can manage. Between 2017 and 2019, Oakland experienced a 47% increase in residents unable to afford housing.43 A national renter survey in 2017 showed that one in five households had been unable to pay their rent in full within the past three months, and that roughly 3.7 million people had experienced an eviction as a result of non-payment of rent.44 The high cost of housing is forcing many older people into homelessness. According to HUD, people over the age of fifty make up 31% of those living without housing.45 Affordable housing is critical to keeping individuals and families out of poverty.
PL tells me that retirement is out of the question – he couldn’t afford to live in Oakland without a job. Although the East Bay is home, PL will need to leave if he is going to retire. However, like many people living with economic uncertainty, he can’t even imagine a place to move to. He has family in South Carolina and although it is less expensive to live there, he doesn’t think he could go back. “I couldn’t live in South Carolina, because the racial overtones are so prevalent there that it doesn’t work for a young man that’s grown up in California.” Yet California is changing in ways that make it harder for him to get by.
PL still experiences a lot of racism in the East Bay: derogatory comments, people crossing the street when they see a Black man coming toward them. “Sometimes you walk into service stations or you walk into an organization and you don’t get service as quick as other people, or you’re ignored, so that happens a lot in the Bay Area.” Even while PL experiences racism, he considers it as related to class as well. “If you’re in the upper, top middle class of Americans, I think a lot of these things are not issues for you, because you have the money, the financial backing to do what you want. But when you don’t, you know, you live in a certain neighborhood, you have to drive a certain car, you have to wear certain clothes, and those things are identifiers for certain people in America