TOWN OF MANLIUS – The spring season of the Manlius Informed speaker series kicked off April 6 with guest Gladys McCormick of Syracuse University.
McCormick, an associate professor of history, spoke on matters surrounding immigration and matters at the border of the United State and Mexico.
A native of Costa Rica who came to the United State in her 20s, McCormick said she has taken a particular interest in matters concerning immigration based on her own firsthand experience.
“A few years ago I started working on issues of immigration,” McCormick said. “I came to the U.S. in the mid ‘90s and stayed on a student visa and then a work visa and married and American and have a green card and several years ago I became a U.S. citizen. We are raising our kids here and I have chosen to make this my home. Like other Latinos my family followed me up here. Some stayed and some went back to Cost Rica. It is part of that cyclical immigration tradition that is not privy just to Latinos but to all immigrants in general. I helped my family go through that process.”
While studying in the U.S., McCormick earned her doctorate from the University of Madison in Wisconsin and has been teaching at Syracuse University for a little over a decade now.
In her teaching McCormick said she focuses on matters relating to Latin America and the Caribbean.
“It has been an incredible amount of fun,” she said. “Part of my research led me to strange territory. I look at the history of drug trafficking and the cartels. If you watch ‘Narcos’ on Netflix, I get to teach about that. I can give you spoilers and tell you what they did wrong.”
McCormick’s research and teaching looks at issues of security and violence and she works with students in a number areas like the social sciences and international relations.
She has also served as director of diversity, equity and inclusion and writes opinion pieces for numerous outlets on topics related to her teaching and studies in areas like trafficking and drug cartels.
During her talk for Manlius Informed, McCormick focused on immigration and some of the topics that have been buzz words or hot button issues in recent year and tried to give some context to what the numbers have to say as opposed to how these statistics and people have been used in a more politicized context.
Using information from the Washington Office on Latin America and the Migration Policy Institute, which McCormick said is the best nonpartisan think tank when it comes to these matters, McCormick looked at numbers spanning from the early 2000s to the present day to put immigration, particularly those trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican border in context.
McCormick said one of the terms that gets used a lot but lacks context is unaccompanied minors.
She said these are often children as young as three or four and they are classified as unaccompanied, but in reality this is because they are with an aunt or uncle, grandparent or older sibling rather than their parents.
So the term can be misleading, according to McCormick.
“It is not necessarily the whole story,” McCormick said. “When they are detained they are considered unaccompanied because they don’t have their birth parent with them. But there is that caveat and they are not just three and four year olds trekking across the border on their own.”
Again looking at the numbers, McCormick said from about 2014 to 2015 and 2016 numbers of immigrants were relatively steady and the rate of undocumented immigrants was the lowest it had been since 1971.
McCormick said the numbers show there was a steady decline from the early 2000s and by 2008 the numbers declined dramatically.
She said there were a variety of reasons for this including the economic recession the United States was facing.
“In 2008 there were more Mexicans and Central Americans returning than in fact were coming here,” she said.
And despite the politicizing of the issue in the 2016 campaign, McCormick said the numbers indicate a continued decline and in fact Americans were moving to Mexico at this time, she said.
“There was this critical campaign trail crisis of immigration but that is not the case, there is no data to base this analysis on and it was fabricated as part of the political milieu of the time of the election,” she said.
McCormick said the numbers actually indicate that the majority of undocumented people coming to the United States were actually from Canada and were people who entered on student or working visas and overstayed.
She said other countries including China and India also accounted for this, again from student or working visas.
Since the election of Joe Biden, McCormick said there has been an up tick, but not the critical situation that has been portrayed.
McCormick attributes this in part to COVID-19.
She said Mexico and Brazil among other countries have been hit hard and have seen their economies shut down and shrink by 20 percent or more with many of the people seeking to enter the U.S. doing so to seek work or escape hostile political situations.
McCormick also pointed to criminal enterprises such as cartels that have also been hit by COVID-19 and its economic ramifications.
She said these organizations have taken to trafficking people in order to make money.
She said there is also excitement that the Biden administration will make improvements to the immigration policies of the Trump administration.
McCormick’s presentation was followed by Trish LaMonte of Advance Media New York who visited Manlius Informed to discuss contemporary issues in media and local journalism.
Upcoming dates include, April 27, 2021: Paul Joslyn of AccessCNY on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, May 4, 2021: Vir Phoha of Syracuse University on facial recognition technology ethics, May 11, 2021: Michael Hayes of Colgate University on President Biden’s First 100 Days, May 18, 2021: Daniela Molta of Syracuse University on combating misinformation on social media and May 25, 2021: Brittany Kmush of Syracuse University on the future of COVID-19.
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