The Project on Immigration

The study was multi-method by design, and Leo helped build it: the survey questions for an ethnosurvey of randomized households, the IRB application and its addendums, statewide surveys of immigrant and political sentiment across Virginia, component studies with day laborers and with immigrant women facing trauma and barriers to care. The components were layered so they could be checked against one another, and against national and regional economic data. The point was to be able to say something and know why it was true.

One of those components meant going where the men waited. Leo worked the day laborer site in Manassas long enough to know who came regularly, and long enough that they knew him.

One morning a man did not come. Leo asked after him, and the others said he had been beaten by an employer. His house was nearby. Leo went and found him there, face badly bruised, concussed, in no condition to work and not going to be for a while.

Reporting it meant putting his immigration status in front of the police, and the risk was his to carry, not Leo’s. Leo told him what he could promise, which was that he would stay with him through all of it, and what he could not. He also laid out the other side: no report, no case, no wages, months of not working and nothing coming in. The man decided to report.

They went to the police together and then to the prosecutor, Leo translating in both directions. The hospital had photographed the injuries. Leo had photographed them as well, and both sets went in as evidence. He handed the prosecutor one thing more: citations from his own fieldwork on how employers treat the men who work for them.

On the court date Leo drove him to the courthouse and sat with him through it. The prosecution used the evidence he had helped collect. The jury convicted. The judge sentenced the employer to ninety days in jail and ordered him to pay three months of back wages, the medical bills, and six months of wages going forward.

Leo finished the degree in 2009 and moved to Cincinnati. A year later a traffic stop put an eighteen year old into federal immigration detention: Deferred Action.