Every year, children from countries across Central and South America make their way north alone to the U.S. At nine years old, Javier Zamora made that solo journey from his home in El Salvador and would become a celebrated poet in his adopted home. His 2022 memoir Solito, selected for the 2026 UC Davis Campus Community Book Project, shares his story.
On January 27, a UC Davis Global Migration Center, or GMC, expert panel discussed the book and how different disciplines explore complex questions about immigration in the U.S. GMC is a multidisciplinary research center in the College of Letters and Science that seeks to understand the causes and consequences of large-scale global migration.
“Immigration stirs a lot of strong emotions, but often research is about trying to study and understand things before they get to the emotions,” said Giovanni Peri, a panelist and professor of economics at UC Davis.
Economic and personal perspectives on immigration in the U.S.
Peri, GMC founding director, studies the economic impacts of immigration policies. His research has debunked common but false ideas about immigration, such as that immigrants take jobs from native-born workers, that they depress wages and take benefits from public safety net programs intended for the native-born.
Peri’s research has found the opposite of these claims. His work has shown that immigrants drive economic growth and prosperity.
The year 2025 was unprecedented with a sudden decline of 1.5 million people in the U.S. foreign-born population. This has never happened in the last 20 years, and Peri said that research will show the impact that has on the U.S. economy.
Robert Irwin, a panelist and professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, studies immigration from a public humanities approach.
“Migration is a very complex phenomenon that needs to be understood and interrogated from a range of different angles,” said Irwin, who is also GMC deputy director.
For his Humanizing Deportation Project, Irwin goes frequently to Tijuana and records stories from migrants who share their own stories, experiences and perspectives. For the past nine years, he and his team have collected more than 500 of these testimonies.
“We arrive with the microphone and ask migrants what they want to say,” said Irwin.
Understanding the personal experience of deportation
Panelist Raquel Aldana, a human rights lawyer and professor at the UC Davis School of Law, said she read the book thinking about the laws and policies that prompted Zamora’s family to send him to the U.S. on his own.
What’s missing, she said, was the bigger context of U.S. support of the civil war in El Salvador, where Zamora was born, or the reasons why a lawful path for reunification with his family was unavailable.
“The book is a really thorough, careful portrayal both of trauma but also a kind of redemption because there was a lot of grace,” said Aldana.
Erin Hamilton, a professor sociology, calls Zamora’s experience an example of forced migration. She studies a different type of forced migration, which is the experience of people who have been deported from the U.S. Her recent book The Returned: Former U.S. Migrants' Lives in Mexico City examines the experiences of returned migrants in Mexico City.
Hamilton’s research has found that children who grew up in the U.S. and then accompanied a deported parent to Mexico experience serious disadvantages after they arrive. Compared to similar children who migrated to Mexico for reasons other than deportation, children whose parents were deported from the U.S. are less likely to be enrolled in school, less likely to continue school past primary school and less likely to have health insurance.
She argued that the potential for these harms should be included when U.S. judges decide deportation cases.
“Forced migration has extensive and long-lasting harms,” said Hamilton.
The possible ripple effects of large-scale immigration enforcement
In 2025, the U.S. federal government launched a large-scale deportation effort that radically changed the nation’s immigration landscape. Kevin Johnson, a professor and former dean of the UC Davis School of Law, pointed out that no modern president has deployed military troops on a mass scale across the country.
“Scholars, like the scholars in front of you, 100 years from now will be writing about what's going on today in the streets of this country and the way that immigrants are being treated,” said Johnson.
At the same time, he said, the immigration system has always been embedded with systemic racism. He cites laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the more recent bans on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.
“When you have ICE officers on roving patrols hunting down people of Mexican appearance, what is that telling you about the racial basis for laws that are in place and how they are enforced?” said Johnson.
Brad Jones, a professor of political science, studies undocumented immigration, particularly how immigration enforcement affects people’s attitudes, beliefs and political behavior. He said that the narrative of the criminal immigrant is especially powerful.
His current research is finding that this narrative increases support for large-scale deportation among both Republicans and Democrats. He also found that counteracting that narrative, reduces that support.
A recent study in economics on immigrants and crime has found that the narrative of large-scale criminality among immigrants is completely false. For the past 150 years, immigrants in the U.S. have had lower incarceration rates than the native-born, and since the 1960s that gap has significantly grown.
“The persistent use of the criminality narrative can work in terms of increasing people’s support for immigration enforcement,” said Jones, “but the kind enforcement we’re seeing now is beyond anything I envisioned.”
He added, “I can guarantee you right now that people will be in the field all the way up until November asking what role the immigration enforcement that we've seen over the past year will have in terms of voting behavior in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Learn more about the UC Davis Campus Community Book Project.
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