A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
President Trump's tax cut and policy bill allocates about $170 billion to border and immigration enforcement. The expanded budget provides U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, with the funding to hire 10,000 new agents, in addition to the estimated 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel across 400 offices. Our next guest is a scholar on this workforce. Irene Vega is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of "Bordering On Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race And Morality." So let's start off with just your background, where you're from and how you've grown up has helped influence your research on this book.
IRENE VEGA: I am from a really small border town right on the U.S.-Mexico border in the American Southwest, and I grew up observing the immigration state.
MARTÍNEZ: Now, over the course of a couple of years, you interviewed 90 immigration enforcement agents. A lot of your research centered on what you call, quote, "the moral economy of immigration control." So what does that mean, and why does that matter?
VEGA: So the moral economy of immigration control, we can think about it very simply as the normative ideas that permeate agents' work - ideas about what is right, what is wrong, what is problematic and what is just common sense. I want to understand how those ideas that they take for granted as normal as the way things are and should be - how that both shapes their willingness to do the job, their strategies that they employ to do the job and then, ultimately, how that protects the status quo in the U.S. immigration system.
MARTÍNEZ: How many of the immigration agents that you spoke to felt maybe conflicted about their work or maybe felt that maybe because of maybe mixed moral feelings that they have over this that they can't do this job long-term?
VEGA: Most of the agents that I spoke to felt pride in their work, and they felt especially prideful about their job when they saw themselves getting the, quote-unquote, "bad guys." They felt really good about their work when they could go out there and arrest people who had criminal records who they perceived were bad for the country. The issue, as I argue in the book, is that those archetypal bad guys, if you will, were really hard to come by in their job because what immigration agents do most of the time, especially on - along the U.S.-Mexico border and in these border towns that I studied, is they process people who exist on various parts of this spectrum of illegality, that they don't necessarily have a criminal record at all.
I will say there was one ICE officer who was on the verge of retirement. When I interviewed him, he expressed to me how grateful he was to be on the way out as the first Trump administration was on the way in because he was very concerned that what was the product of that would be mass deportations, a focus not on those criminal aliens, those bad guys that he perceived to be the most legitimate targets of their work, but a focus on undocumented people writ large. And I think that's what we're seeing today.
MARTÍNEZ: How many of them feel like no one gets it? No one understands what they do, how they do it, why they do what they do.
VEGA: I dedicate an entire chapter to what I call stigma management strategies. Agents have ways to deal with those external critiques to dissipate the stigma that they feel from the public to then, again, do their job in an unproblematic way.
MARTÍNEZ: When it comes to Latinos, is it unfair to center a Latino officer's family history against the politics of their work, of what they do?
VEGA: I sought to understand how agents of different backgrounds understood and carried out their job. Most of those agents were Latinos who had grown up along the U.S.-Mexico border, who were immigrants themselves or children of immigrants, sometimes grandchildren of immigrants. So for those agents, this question was almost unescapable. I actually didn't have to bring it up myself in my interviews. They, in telling me how they got into the job, in telling me their experience on the job, would bring up this tension between their professional background and their either immigrant history or their racial ethnic background. And this is because this is an unescapable part of their experience given the racialized character of the U.S. immigration system.
MARTÍNEZ: The recent tax and spending law will fund a significant expansion of this agency. The government has said it's hoping to hire about 10,000 new agents. So what are your thoughts on that?
VEGA: The first thing I think about are those high school students that are going to experience a set of recruitment tools by the U.S. federal government as they seek to grow the workforce. But I also think about the other side - the paradox of that - that there are some people along the U.S.-Mexico border that are going to be welcoming this infusion as the possibility of better jobs and upward mobility.
MARTÍNEZ: Irene Vega is the author of "Bordering On Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race And Morality." Irene, thank you.
VEGA: Thank you, A.
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