Latinxs in La Migra : Why They Join and Why It Matters

Abstract

Once an exclusively white enterprise, the last forty-five years have witnessed the emergence of a disproportionately Latinx immigration law enforcement workforce. This article addresses the question of why Latinxs elect to work for agencies that have systematically targeted the ethnic communities to which they belong. Where existing scholarship has often implied Latinxs may self-select into immigration law enforcement due to a lack of identification with the immigrant-experience, a dissociation with ethnic identity, and generally restrictionist immigration attitudes, this article finds little empirical evidence to support such an assumption. Analysis of interviews with sixty-one Latinx Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents across Arizona, California, and Texas reveals, instead, Latinxs elect to work in immigration law enforcement in service of economic self-interest and survival, with “money,” “a good job,” and “benefits” cited as the primary motivation(s) behind applying for and accepting a job in immigration. This pattern holds irrespective of individual agents’ levels of identification with the immigrant-experience and particular attitudes toward immigration, and suggests a diversity in the demographics of immigration law enforcement agencies that extends beyond mere race and ethnicity, to include a diversity of perspective and potential for empathy.

Keywords

race/ethnicity Latinx identity immigration inequality

Introduction

Today more than any other period in history, the front-lines of federal immigration law enforcement agencies reflect the demographics of the populations they police. Across the agencies charged, Latinxs are over-represented relative to their proportion of both the overall federal workforce (8.6%) and general population (18.1%), with Immigration and Customs Enforcement–Enforcement and Removal Operations (ICE-ERO) at nearly 30 percent Latinx, and Border Patrol nearly 50 percent (U.S. Office of Personnel Management 2018). Once an exclusively white enterprise—viewed for much of the twentieth century as a foreign, occupying force in Latinx communities, and referred to pejoratively as “La Migra” (Hernández 2010)—the last forty-five years have witnessed the emergence of a much different immigration law enforcement workforce: a new “La(tinx) Migra.”

Perhaps most surprising about this demographic shift is that it has taken place in the context it has: amidst a historically antagonistic relationship between immigration agencies and Latinx communities—a relationship marred by violence and intimidation in which such agencies have never solely policed migration, but indiscriminately blanketed Latinx communities in a shroud of surveillance, policing, and battlefield technology (Dunn 1996; Sampaio 2015). Since the inception of the Border Patrol, Latinx immigrants, residents, and citizens alike have been targets of an organized state response to an ostensible problem: the territorial presence of non-white peoples in the United States (Hernández 2010). Throughout the 1930s and 1950s, millions of Latinxs, documented and otherwise, were rounded up in neighborhood and worksite raids and expelled from the country without due process (Calavita 2010; Nevins 2010).

These kinds of stories, however, are not merely relics of early-twentieth century biases; contemporary examples of abusive operations by ICE and Border Patrol abound in the form of continued nationwide-sweeps (Constable 2016), neighborhood patrols (Minnis 2016), and wide-reaching racial profiling across the borderlands (Goldsmith et al. 2009). So aggressive have enforcement actions within Latinx communities continued to be, scholars have characterized them as an ongoing racial project, designed to tie Latinx identity to criminality, and violently relegate Latinxs—regardless of status—to a permanent subclass, devoid of social, political, and economic power (Provine and Doty 2011; Sampaio 2015). In this light, the emergence of a disproportionately Latinx immigration law enforcement workforce is confounding. But where scholars have focused on this demographic shift and its implications, little theorizing and empirical evidence has been brought to bear on explaining it.

Motivated by the apparent contradiction of a disproportionately Latinx immigration workforce, scholars have made considerable efforts to understand how Latinx agents interact with ostensibly co-ethnic clientele (Heyman 2002; Prieto 2015; Vega 2017), how they understand their institutional roles (Correa and Thomas 2015), and how they understand themselves (Garcia Hernandez 2009). Laudable as this research is, however, much of it takes as granted the demographics of the agencies concerned. As a result, we know quite a bit about how Latinxs work in immigration, but significantly less about why. While some, indeed, have discussed factors that may have contributed to the emergence of the new La(tinx) Migra—noting, specifically, the Mexican American assimilationist movement of the 1950s (Hernández 2010), as well socioeconomic considerations among individual agents (Garcia Hernandez 2009; Heyman 2002)—to date there exists no empirical study of why Latinxs elect to work for agencies that continue to systematically target the communities to which they belong. The current study represents a substantive departure from this trajectory.

This article addresses directly why, despite all apparent contradictions, Latinxs elect to work in immigration law enforcement. What are the specific motivations involved in the decision among Latinxs to apply for and accept positions in agencies like Border Patrol and ICE? Is it possible—as has been implied by existing scholarship (e.g., Correa and Thomas 2015; Garcia Hernandez 2009; Heyman 2002)—Latinxs self-select into immigration work due to a diminished connection to ethnic identity or the immigrant-experience? Or is the decision—as has also been suggested (e.g., Garcia Hernandez 2009; Heyman 2002)—simply a reflection of economic necessity? Drawing on interviews with a non-probability, snowball sample of sixty-one Latinx ICE-ERO agents across Arizona, California, and Texas,¹ this article submits that why Latinxs enter immigration law enforcement may have less to do with ethnic identity than we might assume given both the motivating puzzle and elements of existing scholarship, and presents evidence toward an alternative explanation: subject to broad racially and ethnically stratified inequality, Latinxs elect to work in immigration in service of basic economic self-interest. What emerges is a picture of the Latinx immigration agent as a self-interested, rational actor in search of economic stability, mobility, and more broadly, survival, irrespective of attitudes toward immigrants, identification with the immigrant-experience, and salience of ethnic identity. In so doing, this article builds on, and extends, not only what we know about Latinxs in immigration law enforcement, but about the complexities of the Latinx experience in the United States.

Explaining the Latinx Immigration Agent

Given the contradictions involved, why do Latinxs elect to work in immigration law enforcement? To this question, existing scholarship has offered limited answers. While scholars have, indeed, noted potential motivations among Latinxs who enter agencies like Border Patrol and ICE—citing the social and economic mobility offered by government employment (Garcia Hernandez 2009; Heyman 2002), as well as efforts to prove thorough assimilation (Hernández 2010)—few have addressed the question directly. We can, however, infer much about potential explanations for why Latinxs work in immigration from previous assessments of how.

Here scholars are resolvedly clear: for all relevant purposes, ethnic identity is functionally irrelevant. To understand the Latinx immigration agent, scholars contend, we must look at them as they see themselves: not as “Latinx,” but as “citizen” (Heyman 2002), “insider” (Garcia Hernandez 2009), and “soldier” (Correa and Thomas 2015).² The implication being that Latinx agents experience no tension in their overlapping identities, because relevant cleavages—that is, those identities that operationally supersede ethnic identity—are in no way incompatible with their institutional roles. The resulting image of “the” Latinx immigration agent presented, while ascriptively Latinx, remains far removed from that frame of reference, ultimately unburdened by the tension it might engender in the course of their work, or as we could reasonably assume, might have precluded the decision to enter the profession in the first place.

For instance, in the most widely cited study of Latinx immigration agents to date, anthropologist Josiah Heyman (2002) explores how the lived experience of citizenship shapes Latinx agents’ attitudes and actions toward ostensibly co-ethnic migrants. Drawing on interviews with thirty-three Mexican American Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents, he argues agents are able to justify their work because they do not see themselves inherently connected to Latinx immigrants. “Citizenship is powerful,” he argues, and the rights and privileges it accrues—most importantly, access to primary labor market positions and benefits—effectively divide Latinx agents from co-ethnic clientele and the broader immigrant-experience (480). For Latinx agents, the status of “citizen” is the most salient mode of identification, and thus, it is the relative distance between the content of “citizen” and “non-citizen” that shapes the relationship between Latinx agent and migrant—not ethnic identity. The result, Heyman contends, is a dearth of empathy manifest in both routinized interactions between the state and (non)subject, and the development among agents of restrictionist immigration attitudes.

Laudable for its theoretical and empirical contributions, Heyman’s study is not without issue; the most relevant being that one of his corollary arguments—that Latinxs enter immigration agencies “unsystematically,” in service of social and economic mobility, and without regard for ethnic identity or particular attitudes (487)—is difficult to reconcile with the evidence presented. That is, despite Heyman’s argument that the inability of agents to empathize with non-citizens emerges from, rather than precedes, entry into the primary labor positions offered by immigration agencies, the validity of this contention is not entirely clear. In several instances, Heyman implies a lack of connection to the immigrant-experience and restrictionist attitudes—and thus, the superordinate status of agents’ “citizen” identities—may not only precede entry into immigration agencies, but may shape that very decision.

When discussing agents’ attitudes toward immigrants, Heyman states it is agents’ “development as citizens [that] motivate[s] them to join” immigration agencies, despite the fact that doing so engages them in efforts to arrest, detain, and deport co-ethnics (483). Moreover, Heyman implies that those Latinxs who are far removed from the immigrant-experience actively choose the path into immigration work—pointing out the choice to acknowledge a “common fate” with co-ethnic immigrants was available to agents in their life histories, but they “chose otherwise” (483). Pursuant to this, we might reasonably assume Latinxs elect to work in immigration precisely because they lack empathy for non-citizens, they lack strong identification with the immigrant-experience, and in protecting against the distribution of rights and benefits to non-citizens, they are immigration-restrictionists. Heyman, in fact, supports this logical conclusion when he states that, in their critical views of immigrants, Latinx agents are not “markedly unrepresentative” of the “Mexican American population as a whole” (483). This, for Heyman, suggests not only that Latinx agents hold restrictionist immigration attitudes, but the broader community from which they derive does as well.

Despite this inconsistency, Heyman’s work, long the only significant study of Latinx immigration agents, has gone relatively unchallenged. Likely due to the fact that his conclusions make intuitive sense—why would we expect Latinxs who feel a deep connection to co-ethnic migrants and the immigrant-experience to work in immigration law enforcement?—scholars, in the years since its publication, have only bolstered them.

Garcia Hernandez (2009), for instance, points similarly to the inherent contradiction of Latinx immigration agents. This contradiction, he contends, is rooted in the fact that immutable ascriptive markers leave Latinx agents just as much at risk of being targeted by La Migra as any other Latinx in the borderlands—the recognition of which, it stands to reason, should preclude their membership in such agencies. His explanation for why, still, Latinxs elect to work in immigration is that they have adopted the biases and ideology of “the oppressor” (Garcia Hernandez 2009, 190). Latinx agents, in other words, see themselves not as “Latinxs,” but as “insiders,” situated above the co-ethnic migrants they encounter—more closely aligned with the oppressive power structure for which they exercise, and from which they derive, their coercive authority. While rhetorically powerful, the argument put forward by Garcia Hernandez lacks substantiation. But absence of empirics notwithstanding, the essay is useful in tracking the trajectory of in-kind studies of Latinx immigration agents and their tendency toward arguments rooted in identity.

In a more recent study, for instance, Correa and Thomas (2015) focus on the lived experiences of Latinx immigration agents, and how internalized racial ideologies shape the enactment of state power in interactions between agents and communities along the southwest border. Drawing on data collected in in-depth ethnographic interviews, Correa and Thomas present another argument for thinking of the Latinx immigration agent outside of ethnic identity. They contend that a disassociation with ethnic identity, given a conflation of “Latinx-ness” with criminality, anxiety over terrorism, and the internalization of histories of violence leads Latinx agents to see themselves not as “Latinxs,” but as “soldiers,” whose sole purpose is defense of the nation.

While scholars have not engaged directly the question of why Latinxs work in immigration law enforcement, their conclusions about how suggest a rather simple conclusion: Latinxs self-select into immigration agencies because of a lack of attachment to ethnic identity, a similar lack of identification with the immigrant-experience, and particular attitudes toward immigration. Not only is this a logical extension of the premise that motivates these inquiries, but it is implied further by the arguments and findings presented therein. But is this the only possible explanation? While studies have, indeed, noted the social and economic mobility offered by federal employment—with some agents explaining they sought out jobs in immigration for “better pay and benefits” (Heyman 2002, 488)—the empirical record on why Latinxs work in immigration remains sparse. Lacking a dedicated assessment of the precise motivations involved—be it self-selection or economic necessity—it is difficult to say whether such statements represent the norm or only an exception to it.

A Theory of Economic Self-Interest and Survival

Admittedly less provocative than the assumption that Latinxs enter immigration agencies because they fit a particular mold—“vendidos [sell-outs],” “race-traitors,” or worse (see, for example, Romero 2018)—the argument proffered here rests on a much simpler narrative: faced with dwindling economic circumstances and scant occupational opportunities, the decision to enter immigration work is, for Latinxs, purely instrumental, and at root, about little more than basic economic self-interest. Pursuant to this, the sections that follow outline the context in which Latinxs across the country decide to enter immigration law enforcement.

That Latinxs in the United States occupy a lower socioeconomic position relative to non-Latinx populations is a well-established, empirical fact (see, for example, Hero 1992; Jones-Correa and Wallace 2016). For nearly three decades, research across a host of measures of economic wellbeing—from labor market participation (DeFreitas 1991), educational attainment (García Bedolla 2012), and income (Morales and Bonilla 1993), to homeownership (Flippen 2001), health coverage (Medeiros 2012), and wealth accrual (Kochhar, Fry, and Taylor 2011)—has found Latinxs consistently, and systematically, lag behind their non-Latinx white counterparts. In a 2012 report on the state of Latinxs in the United States, for instance, researchers found that despite improvements in recent years, Latinxs continue to trail non-Latinxs on the most basic economic measures (Cardenas and Kerby 2012). Whereas the unemployment rate among non-Latinx whites during the economic recovery of 2011 was 7.9 percent, the rate among Latinxs was 11.5 percent—suggesting Latinxs were disproportionately affected by the 2008 recession (Kochhar and Fry 2014). With respect to educational attainment, the center found a similar story. Despite improvements over the last thirty years (see Figures 1 and 2), Latinxs continue to trail all other racial and ethnic groups in both high school and college completion.

Figure 1.

Percent of people twenty-five years and over who have completed high school by race/ethnicity, 1975–2017.

Figure 2.

Percent of people twenty-five years and over who have completed four years of college or more by race/ethnicity, 1975–2017.

Among Latinxs not subject to prolonged unemployment in the years preceding the study, only one in six employed Latinxs held college degrees, “less than half the proportion of employed whites” (Cardenas and Kerby 2012, 2–5). In terms of health coverage—another indicator of economic wellbeing—Latinxs again lagged. In 2010, at the height of the Affordable Care Act debate, the uninsured rate among Latinxs was, at 30.7 percent, more than two and a half times the rate among non-Latinx whites (Cardenas and Kerby 2012, 7).

In 2015, a Census Bureau report on income and poverty similarly illustrated how inequality continues to shape the Latinx experience. While the official U.S. poverty rate in 2014 was 14.8 percent—10.1 percent among non-Latinx whites—the rate among Latinxs was 23.6 percent (DeNavas-Walt and Proctor 2015, 12–14). The report also revealed that in terms of median household income, Latinxs trailed the national rate $42,491 to $53,657, a ratio of 0.79 (see Figure 3); the ratio of Latinx income to non-Latinx whites was reported at 0.71—down over the previous forty years from 0.74 (DeNavas-Walt and Proctor 2015, 7).

Figure 3.

Median household income by race/ethnicity, 1975–2017.

As dismal a picture these data paint of the socioeconomic status of Latinxs across the United States, the dynamics of inequality are even more pronounced in the predominately Latinx communities where agencies like Border Patrol and ICE typically recruit their personnel—communities that consistently rank among the highest in terms of poverty and unemployment, and lowest in terms of economic mobility (Hero 1992). The Rio Grande Valley of Texas (RGV)—a region covering four counties along the Texas/Mexico border, in which immigration law enforcement is a constant presence—is only one of these communities, but the conditions it faces are common across the borderlands (Hero 1992; Massey 1993). The percentage of people living in poverty in the RGV ranks among the highest in the nation, at rates between 33 and 35 percent (more than twice the nationwide rate), and the unemployment rate consistently outpaces the national average (Ura 2016). In this community, and others like it, where Latinx median household income averages just over $32,000/year, the decision to apply for and accept a job that offers a starting salary of $52,500/year, and generous benefits (U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2018), is not a complicated one.

The circumstances outlined here lend support to the contention that Latinxs elect to work in immigration strictly in service of economic self-interest. That is, attitudes toward ethnic identity and immigrants may play a smaller role in Latinxs’ decisions to enter such agencies than we might otherwise assume. The pain of historical violence, as well as the potential for violence at the hands of today’s immigration agencies, may simply pale in comparison with the very present pain of dwindling occupational opportunities and rampant economic inequality. To test this theory, I draw on data collected from interviews with sixty-one Latinx ICE-ERO agents across Arizona, California, and Texas.

Data and Method

Data collection for this study took place between November 2014 and December 2015. Using multiple-entry snowball-sampling, I conducted interviews with sixty-one Latinx ICE-ERO agents across Arizona, California, and Texas. The interviews, averaging seventy-four minutes in duration, were all conducted face-to-face, and were semi-structured to allow for comparison across cases. Most interviews took place in agency offices (e.g., agents’ personal offices, conference spaces, break rooms), with some conducted in public spaces (e.g., bars, restaurants, coffee shops), and a smaller proportion in agents’ homes. The interviews were designed to be peaceable conversations. As agents were recruited with an invitation to share their stories, my goal throughout was to provide them the space to do so. While discussions naturally assumed lives of their own, each covered pre-determined topics, including agents’ upbringings, family histories, length of time in immigration enforcement, attitudes toward current/past policies, lives outside of work, levels of community engagement and political activity, and reactions received for working in immigration. A demographic overview of the cases—and how they compare to the agency overall—is included in Table 1.

Table 1.

Demographic Overview of Cases.

	Cases				Agency
	Arizona agents	California agents	Texas agents	Total	ICE-ERO
Avg. Age	40	40	43	41	44
Sex
Male	8 (73%)	14 (74%)	25 (81%)	47 (77%)	5,852 (78%)
Female	3 (27%)	5 (26%)	6 (19%)	14 (23%)	1,650 (22%)
Latinx	11 (100%)	19 (100%)	31 (100%)	61	2,221 (30%)
Avg. Tenure (years)	10	10	14	12	15
Veteran	3 (27%)	5 (26%)	12 (39%)	20 (33%)	2,896 (39%)
Foreign Born	3 (27%)	5 (26%)	2 (6%)	10 (16%)	—
Parents Foreign Born	7 (64%)	16 (84%)	18 (58%)	41 (67%)	—
N	11 (18%)	19 (31%)	31 (51%)	61	7,502

ICE-ERO = Immigration and Customs Enforcement–Enforcement and Removal Operations.

Case Selection

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and resulting reshuffling of law enforcement, immigration, and intelligence agencies under its umbrella, brought about significant changes in the structure and mandates of immigration agencies. ICE-ERO, for instance, the division of ICE that previously comprised the enforcement operations wing of INS, became a standalone law enforcement agency dedicated to the identification, arrest, and removal of individuals present in the United States without authorization. That is, while Border Patrol serves as a “hard-shell” along the nation’s territorial boundaries, ICE-ERO serves, in essence, as a mobile border, enforceable anywhere within the country’s interior (Bosniak 2006). This is the primary reason I elected to focus on ICE-ERO agents alone. Not only is the agency smaller relative to Border Patrol—and thus, more manageable given available resources—but the role of ICE-ERO in immigration law enforcement puts agents in much more contact with the Latinx community, broadly conceived. That Latinxs make up such a sizable proportion of ICE-ERO is all the more interesting given it is this agency, not Border Patrol, that is responsible for neighborhood and worksite surveillance, raids, arrests, and detention and deportation. Still, it bears noting, thirteen of sixty-one interviewees (21%) were Border Patrol agents prior to ICE.

Categorizing Interviewees

While primarily concerned with evaluating the theory that Latinxs work in immigration in service of economic self-interest, I also wanted to address the possibility that Latinxs may self-select on account of limited identification with the immigrant-experience and attitudes toward immigration (e.g., Heyman 2002). Doing so required classification of interviewees on two basic measures: (1) attitudes toward immigration, simplified to classify “liberal” and “restrictionist,” and (2) connection to the immigrant-experience, simplified to classify “high” and “low” levels of identification. The simplicity of these categories, it should be noted, necessarily leads them to be rather crude. Absent of specific questions to build scale measures of immigration attitudes, manual classification on these axes required a careful, wholistic evaluation of interview data. To be clear, however, these categories are not the centerpiece of my evidence; only a means of visualizing broader patterns across cases.

Given that interviews varied considerably at times, I developed a rubric for classifying each interviewee. For instance, I classified an agent as an “immigration-restrictionist” if they (1) believed entering the country without authorization was grounds for deportation; (2) believed being undocumented necessarily made someone a “criminal”; (3) believed the majority of immigrants who entered without authorization were “criminals,” or were in the country to do it and/or its citizens harm; (4) believed the agency was doing “too little,” and should be removing all unauthorized immigrants, regardless of time in the country, or humanitarian concerns.

Contrarily, an agent was classified an “immigration-liberal” if (1) they did not deem unauthorized-entry, alone, grounds for deportation; (2) they rejected claims that being undocumented necessarily made someone a “criminal”; (3) they believed the majority of unauthorized immigrants were “hard-working people in search of a better life”; (4) they believed the agency was doing “enough” or “the right thing by focusing on ‘serious’ criminals.” Agents were also classified as immigration-liberals if they expressed support for reform of the legal avenues of immigration to, as some put it, “make it easier for those who want to come to make a better life for themselves and their families,” including other forms of “dealing with” those already present beyond punitive measures.

Classification of interviewees in terms of connection to the immigrant-experience was similarly split across two categories: “low” or “high.” Being the child of immigrant parents or being immigrants themselves did not immediately warrant a “high” classification. Rather, an agent was categorized as having a “high”-level connection to the immigrant-experience if, in the course of talking about clientele, they brought up their family’s (or their own) immigration story. An interviewee was also classified on this axis based on how they talked about their family’s roots outside the country. Naturally, those who struggled to recall their families’ immigration histories, or claimed no roots outside the United States, were classified as having “low” connections to the immigrant-experience.

Results: On Self-Selection

It became clear early in data collection that self-selection—be it for limited identification with the immigrant-experience, internalized racial biases, a disassociation with ethnic identity, or restrictionist immigration attitudes—was an insufficient explanation for why Latinxs work in immigration. But in the interest of unpacking fully the motivations involved, I evaluate the arguments put forward by previous scholarship with the data collected here.

First, the claim that the rights and privileges of citizenship distance Latinx immigration agents from the immigrant-experience—or “life-world”—such that they are unable to empathize, much less perceive a co-ethnic connection with, Latinx immigrants (Heyman 2002). If this is, indeed, the case, and Latinxs select into immigration for this reason, we should expect agents to demonstrate, if not limited identification with, than a distancing from, the immigrant-experience.

Second, the claim Latinx agents, due to internalized racial biases, deny a co-ethnic bond with Latinx immigrants who are seen as criminals (Correa and Thomas 2015; Garcia Hernandez 2009). If this claim is true, and Latinxs select into immigration because of it, we should expect agents to express negative perceptions—via the use and repetition of stereotypes—of undocumented immigrants. Given the presence of such attitudes was used in the classification of “immigration-restrictionists,” we should expect agents to fall primarily into that category. Such results would also provide a test of the third claim, that in the interest of protecting the boundaries of citizenship, Latinx agents are restrictionists (Heyman 2002).

As expected, the data reveal much more variation in Latinx agents’ levels of identification with the immigrant-experience, and attitudes toward immigration, than we might expect if they selected into immigration on account of the arguments presented previously. Where we might expect to see limited identification with the immigrant-experience, agents revealed a much different story: a majority of agents (forty-six total) exhibited high levels of identification with the immigrant-experience (see Table 2). This may be a product of the fact that more than half (forty-one total) were children of immigrants, and ten were foreign-born, and thus, immigrants themselves. That a connection to the immigrant-experience runs deep among Latinx agents—and those with low connections constitute a minority of cases (fifteen total)—suggests Latinxs do not work in immigration because of a distance between themselves and that life-experience, but that some other factor must bring them to this line of work.

Table 2.

Categorization of Latinx ICE-ERO Agents, Immigration Attitudes × Immigrant-Experience Connection.

Connection to immigrant-experience	Immigration attitudes
Connection to immigrant-experience	Liberal	Restrictionist
High	31 (50.8%)	15 (24.6%)
Low	2 (3.3%)	13 (21.3%)

Percentages are of total number of interviewees, n = 61.

In terms of Latinx agents’ attitudes toward immigration, agents again demonstrated wide variation. Where we might expect a majority of agents to be classified as immigration-restrictionists, the group is nearly split; twenty-eight agents were classified as restrictionists and thirty-three as liberals (see Table 2). Not only does this severely complicate the arguments provided by existing scholarship on their own grounds, but it helps dispel with any assumption that Latinxs select into immigration because they are predisposed to negative perceptions of immigrants and immigration. If that were the case, we would not see such a large proportion of agents classified as liberals.

Results: On Survival

How, then, if not the identity-based rationales implied by existing scholarship, do we explain the decision among Latinxs to work in immigration law enforcement? The interview data, in this case, offer clear support for the theory set forth here: Latinxs elect to work in immigration primarily in service of economic self-interest. Despite the variation exhibited in Latinx agents’ identification with the immigrant-experience, or attitudes concerning immigration, agents across those axes overwhelmingly cited “money,” “a stable/good job,” and/or “benefits” as their primary motivation(s) for seeking out and accepting a job in immigration (see Figures 4 and 5). This suggests that regardless of particular attitudes toward immigration or perceptions of undocumented immigrants as inherently good-hearted or “criminal,” the decision to work in immigration is most often based on little more than immediate economic necessity.

Figure 4.

Distribution of economic motivations across immigration attitudes.

Figure 5.

Distribution of economic motivations across connection to immigrant-experience.

Claudio “CJ” Juarez, 48, was a case in point.³ By the time we met, CJ had spent half his life in immigration between Border Patrol and ICE; an experience that left him anything but meek. Not more than five minutes into our conversation, he steered directly into questions of identity—a topic I typically built toward to avoid putting agents off. But he wasn’t interested in that route. With zero prompting, CJ extolled the changes he’d witnessed in the demographics of the agency over time and stressed the importance of having “people like him”—Latinxs, he meant—“on the inside” of immigration agencies. “If there’s not Latinos on the inside making sure that people are doing the right thing,” he explained, “then we have no protection.” When I asked if it was that kind of thinking that motivated him to apply for a job with INS in the early 1990s, he answered frankly:

No—because I was literally starving. [laughing] I ate a lot of beans and rice in those days, let me tell you, man . . . But, really, I wish I could say that it was idealistic, or . . . more sexy—but it really was as simple as they were the first ones that called me, and I jumped on the first opportunity.

While there was little ambiguity in CJ’s description of his decision, I was determined to rule out rival explanations for why he’d opted into immigration work, specifically. When I asked if he had been aiming, at the time, for a position in federal law enforcement, generally, or immigration, in particular, he made clear that nothing could have been further from his mind. He just wanted a job, and the economic security that came with it.

My sights were actually a little lower than that. I was just hoping for a federal job. I applied for the Post Office . . . I just wanted to get in with the government. I wanted those benefits. I wanted something secure, with benefits that I could support myself and my family. Growing up [on the border], government jobs were the gold standard. If you could get a government job, [scoff] you know, those folks that I knew, they lived on the nice side of town—they lived good, you know? So . . . I started applying everywhere.

CJ’s story was no aberration. Sylvia Newman, 36—who was beginning her ninth year with ICE—described a similar frame of mind. For her, the decision had nothing to do with ethnic identity or particular attitudes toward immigration; it was about economic survival, plain and simple. From the beginning of our conversation, she described her life prior to the job in explicitly socioeconomic terms: “I was at the bottom, bottom bracket, you know?” But also present in her recollection of that period was an unabating determination to stay afloat. “I worked two jobs,” she explained; “I mean, I sold cars . . . I sold jewelry . . . I worked at CVS—you name it, I’ve probably done it.” In total, it was clear her application for a job with ICE was merely an extension of that determination; and she acknowledged it as such:

I was a single parent—that’s why I got this job . . . I had just gotten divorced and had a two-year-old and a three-year-old; and I needed a job with a little more security . . . So, I started applying . . . I just went to all the federal agencies, to see—you know, like—[what] the qualifications were . . . and I just started applying—and then [the ICE application] started going through.

Like a fair number of the agents I interviewed, Sylvia described her entry into immigration almost as happenstance—merely a consequence of the fact that “they called first.” Some agents, like Rosie Acevedo, 30, for instance, described their application with ICE as one of nearly a hundred they sent out. “I put in for every agency you can think of,” Rosie explained; “I applied for every position . . . but ICE was the first one who offered me a job.” Abel Lozano, 40, had a similar story; except for him, ICE was the only agency to call. “I started applying to different agencies,” he recalled, “and the only one that I got a call from was ICE.” For agents like this, it wasn’t a disconnection from the immigrant-experience, a denial of ethnic identity, or, for that matter, an interest in immigration, that led them to the job; it was good fortune. And some described it in those terms, exactly.

Patty Delgado, 54, was among those agents who recalled feeling “lucky” to be offered a job in immigration; not because it was immigration, not even necessarily because it was a job—but because it was a good job in a place where good jobs were scarce. The morning she applied with Border Patrol, nearly twenty-five years prior to our meeting, illustrated this perfectly: “It was during a mass-hiring that they had,” Patty recalled; “and [the agency announced that] the first two-hundred people to get [to a local auditorium] were going to be allowed to test.” While Patty had a job at the time—a part-time position as a police radio-dispatcher—she recognized the opportunity at hand. This was an opportunity for a federal job, and all that came with it; so she gave it a shot.

There was a group of us—about fifteen [that went]—and [at 5am], the line of cars was probably a couple of miles [long]. I said, ‘there’s no way we’re going to be [in] the first two-hundred.’ [But] the very first truck parked in that line was our friend’s; so all of us got into the truck, we drove in, took the test, and out of the fifteen, two of us ended up passing—I was one of them. I thought, ‘well, this could be a good opportunity,’ and that’s what got the ball rolling. I just thought myself lucky, [so] I accepted.

While Patty was clear about the motivation behind her decision, questions remained about the role of other potential factors. With her job at the police department, for instance, Patty had already elected to work in law enforcement, so it was not outside the realm of possibilities that her decision might have been part of a broader interest in law enforcement, or perhaps, a belief in the mission of the agency. But this did not appear to be the case. When I asked if she had ever thought previously about working in immigration—or any kind of law enforcement—she replied with a resounding “no,” and reiterated that all that had drawn her in was economic necessity, or as she put it, “a job, actually.” As with many of her fellow agents, that the job Patty accepted involved “immigration” was secondary to it being a good job. But that doesn’t mean some didn’t struggle with the distinction.

Lalo Rivera, 41, was in his ninth year in immigration when we met. The son of a port-of-entry inspector, he was one of a handful of agents whose parents had also worked in immigration in some fashion. But that wasn’t why he joined. In fact, Lalo was quick to say that by the time he applied, he felt like he’d held out as long as he could. “Not yet, not yet,” he recalled saying to himself as he bounced from one job to another, before settling into a position as a truck driver for a beer wholesaler. It wasn’t that he saw working in immigration as necessarily a bad thing, he explained; he simply never had an interest in “that kind of work.” When he did finally decide to apply, it was because his job at the time lacked the kind of economic security he needed. The desire for “a career,” as he put it, and “not just a good job,” simply outweighed any ambivalence he had toward the work, itself—an ambivalence that, by no means, faded upon accepting the position. When I asked if he remained uninterested in the work he was doing, he was unambiguous; working for ICE was about one thing alone:

[It’s about] what’s going to provide for your family, you know—that’s it. Yeah, it’d be nice to have a career where you look forward to going to work every day; but when that ‘Golden Eagle’ shits in your account every two weeks and you see how much it’s leaving, you’re like, [scoffs] ‘Alright!’ [laughing] It’s like, ‘You’re paying me this much for that?’

Why They Join and Why It Matters

Analysis of the interview data reveals little empirical support for the assumption that Latinxs self-select into immigration law enforcement. What the data does reveal, however, is the broader effects of racially and ethnically stratified inequality. In areas along the U.S.–Mexico border, where Latinxs are more likely to experience low educational attainment, high unemployment, and dwindling economic opportunities, the decision to accept a position in immigration appears to have little to do with considerations of identity and much more with basic survival. From one interview to the next, Latinx agents described the lack of substantive employment opportunities and high levels of poverty where they lived, and how those patterns in their own lives shaped their entry into immigration—many explicitly citing “money,” “a stable job,” and “benefits” as the specific reason for applying.

It bears noting, however, that the measure used in this article—the use of specific language concerning economic self-interest when describing the decision to enter immigration enforcement—is an arbitrarily high bar. Even among those agents who did not attribute the decision to economic necessity, but instead a natural transition from military service or prior law enforcement experience, the pictures they painted of their lives prior to ICE or Border Patrol were characterized by economic precarity. And such characterizations were not unfounded. Among the five modal counties in which interviewees lived prior to applying for a job in immigration (see Table 3), four fell below the nationwide average in median household income among Latinxs; three had a higher rate of poverty than Latinxs nationwide; four had a higher rate of unemployment; and four had a lower high school and college completion rate. That Latinxs faced with such circumstances would consider anything but economic security when applying for, and accepting a position in immigration law enforcement is not only difficult to imagine, but even more difficult to support, empirically. Still, however, the question remains why it matters.

Table 3.

Modal County Measures of Latinx Socioeconomic Health.

	Measures of socioeconomic health
	Median family income	Poverty rate	Unemployment rate	High school completion	College completion
U.S. Non-Latinx whites	$65,845	10.6	5.9	94.1	33.8
U.S. Latinxs	$49,793	23.4	8.7	70.5	17.2
County 1: Latinxs (Sixteen agents)	$46,695	22.6	9.5	58.8	11.4
County 2: Latinxs (Fifteen agents)	$31,546	35.5	9.6	61.0	13.7
County 3: Latinxs (Five agents)	$38,084	25.1	7.9	71.7	17.8
County 4: Latinxs (Four agents)	$33,876	34.8	9.3	59.5	15.2
County 5: Latinxs (Four agents)	$49,861	19.6	9.4	66.7	16.0

Source. U.S. Census Bureau, 2012–2016, ACS 5-Year Estimates; 2003 to 2017 Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey.

Highlighted cells denote where county-level measures diverge negatively from nationwide figures.

A Distinction with a Difference

Fundamental to previous studies of Latinx immigration agents has been a single, overriding assumption: that identity is static. In fact, more than any other, this assumption has done much of the theoretical work for the arguments presented therein. Most importantly, it has allowed for, if not a conflation, then merely a glossing over of two distinct processes: why and how Latinxs work in immigration—the distinction being the difference between the decision to apply for and accept a position and the work, itself. If we grant the self-selection assumption, these are one in the same. Because Latinxs who enter immigration ostensibly do so because they deny their ethnic identity, lack a connection to the immigrant-experience, and are immigration-restrictionists, then as agents, they can be expected to behave accordingly.

The argument presented here, however, rests on a completely different set of assumptions. Resolved that identity is, by its very nature, dynamic, but more importantly, situational (see, for example, Barvosa 2008; García Bedolla 2005; Okamura 1981; Tajfel 1981), the survival thesis treats why and how Latinxs work in immigration as two separate moments, imbued with, and subject to, their own specific identity-shaping contexts. Disentangled and acknowledged as such, the claim put forward here—that the decision to work in immigration has little, if anything, to do with identity—serves, thus, not as a determination of identity as irrelevant, absolutely, but rather, given relevant extenuating circumstances (i.e., a dearth of educational, occupational, and economic opportunities), merely a moment of low ethnic identity salience. Under these conditions, while those Latinxs who elect to work in immigration can most certainly be the non-identifying ethnics theorized previously—in favor of restrictive immigration policies and far removed from the immigrant-experience—they don’t all have to be. Because we cannot expect economic hardship to accrue among Latinxs along ideological lines, we cannot assume that those Latinxs who enter immigration agencies may not also be strong ethnic identifiers—in favor of liberal immigration policies, with strong connections to the immigrant-experience. That Latinxs elect to work in immigration in service of economic self-interest, thus, suggests for such agencies a diversity beyond race and ethnicity, alone, to include a diversity of perspective, connection to the immigrant-experience, and potential for empathy, and the data, again, bear this out.

What Survival Gets Us

At the most basic level, when asked how they chose to identify, a majority of interviewees (fifty-three agents) described themselves in ethnic terms, with most (forty-one agents) opting for terms like “Latina/o” or “Hispanic,” and a smaller proportion (twelve agents) opting for country-of-origin-specific terms like “Mexican American,” “Mexican,” or “Salvadoran.” While there were, indeed, agents who denied ethnic identification—most opting for the term “American”—these represented a minority of cases. This, alone, suggests that if the decision to enter immigration enforcement is a prima facie test of ethnic self-identification, it is a poor one. But further analyses confirm these identities, ethnic or otherwise, are more than skin-deep.

As evinced in preceding sections, Latinx agents do not fall uniformly into the categories of “immigration-restrictionist” or “low connection to the immigrant-experience” as we might expect if the self-selection assumption were true. The four primary agents discussed previously are a prime example. While each opted into immigration for economic reasons, they represent the spectrum of attitudes toward immigration and the immigrant-experience that exists across the agency. CJ, for instance, was classified as an “immigration-liberal” with a “high” connection to the immigrant-experience, while Patty, also a “liberal,” exhibited a “low” connection. On the opposite end, both Sylvia and Lalo were categorized as “restrictionists,” but Sylvia exhibited a “high” connection to the immigrant-experience, while Lalo exhibited the contrary. While these categories are admittedly crude, the differences between agents placed in one category over another are real and, as such, difficult to dismiss—especially given the expectations implied by existing scholarship. Where those studies suggest we should find uniformity, the current finds pronounced variation.

Consider CJ again, for instance. A self-described “Latino,” he didn’t mince words when it came to his ethnic identity and how it connected him to co-ethnic migrants. The most striking example of this was his use of the word “we” when describing the importance of having Latinxs in immigration. When he said that without “Latinos on the inside . . . we have no protection,” he not only acknowledged a conception of Latinx identity that transcended citizenship status—linking himself with the people he was duty-bound to arrest, detain, and deport—he also made explicit how this shaped his approach to the job. Surprised by such a naked expression of shared ethnic identity, I pressed him on this assertion, but he stood firm:

It’s true. If we, ourselves, are not . . . in ‘the henhouse,’ so to speak, then we’re screwed—we don’t even have anybody to look out for our rights. And going back in history, that’s always how people see to it that their rights are protected. You’ve got to get people in Congress, you’ve got to get people in positions of power, you’ve got to. Otherwise . . . you’ve got no hope.

CJ’s connection to the agency’s clientele was a recurring theme in our conversation. For instance, in recalling reactions he’d received for working in immigration throughout his career, he focused, specifically, on claims that, in so doing, he was “betraying [his] people.” But where others might have responded by drawing distinctions between “their” people, or themselves for that matter, and the migrants they encountered on the job (see, for example, Heyman 2002)—and they did—CJ doubled-down. Pressing his fingers against his desk, he pushed back as if his detractors were in the room:

No, on the contrary, I’m protecting them—because there’s laws in this country, and the way we enforce those laws, that’s where we have some leeway. [It’s] the way we enforce them; when we show discretion, where we show discretion.

Comments like these provided early indications of CJ’s liberal immigration attitudes, but it was a later exchange, related specifically to policy, that led me to classify him as such. During a discussion about ICE’s enforcement priorities, CJ began by immediately criticizing prior, Bush-era policies that he deemed too “heavy-handed.” When I asked what it was about those policies, specifically, that he took issue with, he responded with a clear endorsement of what, at this point, can only be characterized as “liberal” policy.

I thought there should have been more [focus] towards adjudicating these cases; more towards clearing up some of this backlog; more towards, ‘Hey, if folks are prior deports, fugitives, a threat to the community’—and [management has] done that now; they focus now on, ‘OK, this is our priority.’ [But] those were the things that I was pushing [for] back then.

While CJ’s connection to the immigrant-experience came, as he explained, from having “[grown] up in [immigrant] communities,” others were born of more first-hand experience. Sylvia, for instance, was an immigrant, herself. “I have an ‘A-Number,’” she exclaimed as we began our conversation, before adding, jokingly, “[but] I’m not telling you what it is!” Having immigrated at eight, and naturalized at sixteen, Sylvia expressed a high connection to the immigrant-experience; after all, she was living it. But this didn’t necessarily translate to ethnic self-identification or liberal attitudes. In fact, despite her identification with the immigrant-experience, Sylvia was adamant that she was “American,” opting for this over any other term. For her, there was a distinction to be made. While she acknowledged her ethnic background, saying, “I speak Spanish,” she qualified the statement immediately, adding, “but I’m American, like, through and through.”

Among the most candid agents I interviewed, classifying Sylvia as a restrictionist was not a difficult exercise. Simply put, she was not shy about how she viewed the agency’s enforcement priorities and the immigrants she encountered on a daily basis. Referring to Obama-era policies that focused agency resources on the removal of “violent criminal aliens” as opposed to individuals whose only offenses involved immigration, she offered the following:

I think it’s pretty bad that it used to [be] enforcement [and] now it’s ‘let everyone go.’ You basically have to prove why this person who just stabbed their six-month-old . . . why we have to keep her in custody. And I’m not kidding. Or you know, [a] child molester, why we have to keep them in custody, or why they should be . . . put through immigration proceedings. It’s like, ‘Um, are you kidding?’ . . . And what do you see in the media? Nothing. Everybody’s a ‘valedictorian!’ Um, no, they’re not.

The restrictionist language did not end there, however. Throughout our conversation, Sylvia expressed support for mass deportations, “the wall,” and an end to birthright citizenship. But perhaps most striking was her description of an argument she recalled having with her grandmother concerning the location of one of Sylvia’s cousins, who happened to be undocumented: “She’s like, ‘That’s your blood!’ [and] I’m like, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter.’”

On nearly every count, Patty was Sylvia’s polar opposite. Describing herself as “very proud” to be “Hispanic,” and more specifically, “Mexican American,” she stood out in stark contrast to those who stressed superordinate “American” identities; not because others didn’t identify similarly, but because if I expected anyone to prioritize a national over an ethnic identity, reason suggested it should have been Patty. The great-grandchild of Mexican immigrants, Patty referred to herself, on several occasions, as “third generation”—far removed from anything resembling the immigrant-experience—and in at least one instance, pointed to this as a reason for her self-professed lack of Spanish-language proficiency. Had she identified as “American,” it would have come as no surprise; still, however, she maintained her ethnic identity.

Another point of contrast revolved around Patty’s immigration attitudes. While she acknowledged that her family did have an immigration history of their own, tracing back to “different parts of Mexico,” her lack of familiarity with the story was indicative of limited identification with the immigrant-experience. But this didn’t appear to shape her attitudes toward immigrants, nor immigration more generally. Like CJ, Patty expressed unease over past policies she characterized as “arrest everybody, remove everybody.” As such, it came as no surprise that when I asked what, if anything, should be done for the undocumented, she offered the following: “You know, I think for those individuals that have been here working hard and have [spent] their time in the United States trying to better themselves, there probably should be some carrot within their reach.” Throughout our conversation, it was clear that, to Patty, entering the country without inspection did not necessarily make someone a criminal; it made them human.

Patty’s empathy for immigrants was offset by attitudes conveyed by Lalo. In a conversation that included references to immigrants as “mojados [wetbacks]” and “pieces of shit,” Lalo left little doubt about his restrictionist predispositions. Thus, it was unsurprising—if not still somewhat jarring—that when I asked about potential policy solutions, he offered the following:

Like I said, all these illegals that have been here for . . . some of them . . . decades: ‘Learn the fucking language! . . . You don’t want to blend in? Learn to adapt.’ But no, the problem with our country is we adapt to everybody else. We cater to everyone else. It’s like, ‘No!’

Lalo spoke with conviction. These weren’t random thoughts he threw together off the cuff, or phrases he’d heard that he now claimed as his own; they were reflections of something deeper—core beliefs about who he was and how he differed from those on whom he exerted his coercive authority. Unlike CJ, the co-ethnic migrants Lalo encountered were not “his people.” So when friends and family criticized him for working in immigration given that he was, at least, ascriptively Latinx, he responded simply:

[They ask,] ‘How can you do that to your people?’ [and] I’m like, ‘They were born in Mexico, I wasn’t’ . . . . If they were my people, I wouldn’t even be touching them, because that [would mean] they were born here.

On this point, he was consistent. When I asked how he identified, Lalo was adamant that he was not “Mexican American.” To him, it mattered that “American” came first; “I’m an American of Mexican-descent,” he stressed, noting that it was his grandparents who were “Mexican.”

Conclusion

Despite the significant attention garnered by the emergence of a disproportionately Latinx immigration law workforce, little theorizing and empirical evidence has been brought to bear on explaining it. While some, indeed, have discussed factors that may have contributed to the emergence of the new La(tinx) Migra—noting, specifically, the assimilationist movement of the 1950s (Hernández 2010), as well socioeconomic considerations among individual agents (Garcia Hernandez 2009; Heyman 2002)—scholars simultaneously have provided evidence to suggest Latinxs self-select into immigration law enforcement, due to a disassociation with ethnic identity, limited identification with the immigrant-experience, and/or particular attitudes toward immigration. Thus, with respect to the question of why Latinxs work in immigration law enforcement, the record remains unclear. This article builds on previous work and offers clarity.

Drawing on interviews with a non-probability, snowball sample of Latinx ICE-ERO agents across Arizona, California, and Texas, this study finds little empirical evidence to support the assumption that Latinxs self-select into immigration work. Instead, interviews reveal that for most Latinx agents, the decision to work in immigration is about little more than economic self-interest and survival,⁴ and this pattern holds regardless of agents’ levels of identification with the immigrant-experience and attitudes toward immigration. What this suggests for immigration agencies is a diversity that extends beyond race and ethnicity, to include a diversity of perspectives and potential for empathy with co-ethnic migrants. Ultimately, the findings outlined here portend a much less uniform model of “the” Latinx immigration agent than typically presented (see, for example, Correa and Thomas 2015; Garcia Hernandez 2009; Heyman 2002), and with it, a potential explanation for seemingly anomalous findings in other relevant research.

Recent studies, for instance, have suggested Latinx immigration agents wrestle with the pressures of their overlapping ethnic and institutional identities, and those tensions appear to shape the exercise of their discretionary authority (Cortez 2017; Vega 2017). To believe the self-selection assumption is to view such findings as anomalies. Under the premise that Latinxs enter immigration law enforcement because they are far removed from the immigrant-experience, we would not expect Latinx agents to experience any tension, whatsoever. If, however, we take seriously the argument presented here, these findings appear much more plausible—even intuitive. Because Latinxs elect to work in immigration for economic reasons, as opposed to being restrictionists or disconnected from ethnic identity, it is reasonable to expect agents to encounter tension when they move from the process of applying for and accepting a job to confronting the reality of the work. In acknowledging, and demonstrating, the socioeconomic factors that push Latinxs into immigration law enforcement, this article makes room for a different kind of analysis of Latinx agents—and Latinxs, in general (Jones-Correa, Al-Faham, and Cortez 2018)—than previously undertaken. Future research should, thus, take care to acknowledge the variation that results from Latinxs unsystematically entering such agencies—variation across not only ethnic and racial lines, but identification with ethnic identity, the immigrant-experience, and immigration attitudes.

In closing, it bears noting an issue highlighted by this research: the study of Latinxs in immigration law enforcement suffers a serious disciplinary imbalance. That is, as evinced in preceding pages, the scholars leading the field of inquiry are anthropologists, sociologists, and legal scholars. Despite the relevant implications of the new “La(tinx) Migra” for political science (i.e., representation, street-level bureaucracy, immigration), the discipline has largely refrained from engaging the issue (cf. Cortez 2017, 2019). To continue to do so, however, is a serious mistake—especially considering all the discipline has to offer.

For instance, most striking about the case of Latinx immigration agents is that the neoliberal economic policies that push migrants north to the U.S.–Mexico border are the same that push Latinxs into immigration law enforcement (see, for example, De Lara 2018; Gonzales 2016; Rocco 2010). Market fundamentalism, and the economic instability it engenders, in other words, converges at the border in the mirrored experiences of co-ethnic agents and migrants. Here, reasonable people—political scientists, included—might be concerned about the fact that Latinxs who reside along the border see immigration law enforcement as among their only options. The findings of this study, thus, raise important public policy questions around economic reinvestment; most pressingly, how we might shift not only our focus, but our resources, from border militarization to revitalization. To address such questions, however, requires that political scientists recognize the emergence of a disproportionately Latinx immigration law enforcement workforce as both a result and a precipitate of politics. It is my hope this article serves as an opening for political scientists to join that conversation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes thanks to the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Migration Research Group and the University of Notre Dame Department of Political Science and Institute for Latino Studies for their support throughout the development of this manuscript.

Author’s Note

Data and Replication Materials: Interview materials, including a question outline, can be found here: . Due to IRB restrictions, the full data cannot be posted. For all related inquiries, please contact the author.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1144153.

ORCID iD

David Cortez

Notes

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Irene I.

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