Typically a confident, articulate young woman, Mayra began to fidget quite a bit when she talked about her mother. Although Mayra was born in the United States and is therefore a U.S. citizen, the issue of immigrant legal status (as conferred upon individual migrants through U.S. immigration laws) makes her nervous; her mother is an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. Unable to maintain eye contact during this part of the interview, Mayra shared the following about her experience growing up with an undocumented mother:

The deeply divisive and largely misinformed U.S. national debate about undocumented immigrants and immigration laws often masks the great complexity and diversity of legal statuses and their repercussions for immigrants and for entire communities. The discourse suggests that the roughly 11.2 million undocumented immigrants in the country (Passel and Cohn Reference Passel and Cohn2011) are a monolithic group of law breakers, and that the exclusion and deportability associated with undocumented status only affects immigrants who are undocumented. In the preceding excerpt, however, Mayra proves otherwise. First, her mother, Brenda, is a multifaceted human being with multiple ties and responsibilities – as a worker, congregation member, and single mother. And second, the fear of detention and deportation – some of the gravest repercussions associated with undocumented status – affect not only individual undocumented migrants, but also the people around them.

In this case, despite being a U.S. citizen, Mayra grew up carrying the heavy weight of fear because the law’s implementation would have a direct impact on her life, even though, from a legal perspective, she is not the target of these laws. Using Mayra’s situation as a starting point, this chapter sheds light on some of the complexities of “illegality.” In particular, I emphasize that undocumented immigrants in the country experience illegality in diverse ways, depending on a series of factors, and that the repercussions of illegality often associated only with undocumented immigrants affect documented and semidocumented immigrants as well as U.S. citizens in notable ways.

Illegality – the historically specific, socially, politically, and legally produced condition of immigrants’ legal status and deportability (De Genova Reference De Genova2002) – intimately and deeply impacts all immigrants. Arguably, Latinos are disproportionately affected. After the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States, legal moves to criminalize undocumented immigrants were magnified and accelerated (De Genova, Chapter 2).¹ In the current historical moment, immigrants have been detained, deported, controlled, and vilified in record numbers throughout the country (Donato and Armenta Reference Donato and Armenta2011; Menjívar and Abrego Reference Menjívar and Abrego2012).

Simultaneously, mainstream media’s visual representations and powerful public discourses work to dehumanize Latino immigrants – whether documented or undocumented (Chavez Reference Chavez2001, Reference Chavez2008; Chavez, Chapter 4; McConnell Reference McConnell2011). While making immigrants’ contributions as workers and community members invisible, these images and discourses also make immigrants’ very presence in the country hypervisible – but only through the lens of illegality. Although undocumented status is largely a matter of civil law, the mainstream media tends to portray matters related to persons who are categorized as undocumented as criminal issues. News coverage frequently depicts undocumented immigrants as criminals; while they are being apprehended, handcuffed, and publicly treated in ways that are reminiscent of presumed criminals who have committed serious, potentially dangerous crimes. These repeated images are powerful and compelling, despite the fact that official statistics confirm that the majority of immigrants who are deported through local, state, and, federal programs such as § 287(g) and Secure Communities, do not have criminal records (see, e.g., National Community Advisory 2011).

Implicitly postulating that laws are always fair, the antiimmigrant movement has taken advantage of the perceived legitimacy of the legal system to use the language of illegality to turn “undocumented” immigrants into “criminals” in ways that can be violent (Menjívar and Abrego Reference Menjívar and Abrego2012). These persistently negative visual representations shape the general public’s view, but also affect how immigrants understand and experience “illegality.” This chapter examines some of the ways that Latino immigrants experience illegality in their day-to-day lives. To underscore the diversity within the undocumented population, I compare experiences across generation, gender, and spaces or local contexts. Furthermore, to highlight illegality’s broad reach, I also examine its pervasive effects for immigrants across legal statuses.

The data for this chapter come from various research projects. Between 2001 and 2006 I conducted a longitudinal study of undocumented high school and college students throughout California from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico (for more information, see Abrego Reference Abrego2006, Reference Abrego2008). In a separate study, between June 2004 and September 2006, I conducted 130 in-depth interviews with Salvadoran families in the midst of long-term separation, including forty-seven parents in the United States (mostly in Los Angeles) and eighty-three relatives of migrants – mostly adolescents and young adults – in El Salvador (for more details, see Abrego Reference Abrego2009). Based on the interviewees’ narratives and participant-observation notes from my ongoing work with immigrant rights organizations, the chapter draws on Latina and Latino immigrants’ and their children’s voices to highlight some patterns that demonstrate diversity and widespread differential effects of illegality.

Criminalization through Laws and Representations: Internalizing Illegality

Maricela is an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant who has been living in Los Angeles for fifteen years. Although she qualified for Temporary Protected Status, she was unable to apply because she was a live-in domestic worker with little time and money to file the paperwork. In general, she considers herself an upstanding person whose main goal in life is to do her best to provide for her family. She has three children – the oldest who still lives in El Salvador with her mother and two others in elementary school who live with her and her partner. Despite her strong work ethic and her children’s many achievements in school, Maricela worries that she will never feel safe in this country. When I asked her why she felt this way, she explained:

Unable to convince the general public that her good deeds merit a legitimate place in this country, Maricela, like many immigrants, takes cues from the media and understands that her residency is reduced to a label – “illegal.” For Maricela, illegality taints the image of who she is, makes invisible her contributions to her family and to society, and diminishes her children’s chances for optimal well-being. Much like many undocumented immigrants, she experiences illegality as a matter of severe exclusion from a society where, by most measures, she should have earned a place.

Exclusion leads to several other associated experiences of illegality for undocumented immigrants. These include fear of deportation, a general sense of insecurity, and lack of solidarity. For example, at group meetings, several undocumented immigrants raised issues of insecurity in their neighborhoods and helplessness when they know they cannot count on the police to protect them. Individuals shared stories of common crime and violence that went untold in their communities because people were worried about the police questioning their legal status. Several people at these meetings made comments to the effect of, “Oh well, there’s nothing we can do,” while those around them merely shrugged their shoulders, nodding in defeat and agreement. As Norma, a Mexican undocumented immigrant, sums it up, “we are here and we know this is not our country. They don’t want us here, so you have to be careful. Always be careful.” In this experience of illegality, immigrants are made to feel constantly insecure, unaware of who they can trust, and unable to rely even on institutions that should represent safety for all.

This sense of insecurity can spread through entire families and communities, often making it difficult to build solidarity. In some spaces, however, people are able to devise creative strategies of solidarity. For example, neighbors, even when they are documented, learn to avoid police contact as part of a strategy of solidarity with undocumented neighbors. In one case in point, one weekday afternoon, children were riding their bikes on the street when suddenly there was a thunderous crash and loud wailing. Several neighbors – all of them Latinos – ran out to see what was going on. When they saw that a boy, roughly twelve years old, was hurt and had potentially suffered a fractured bone, some ran to get a nurse they knew who lived nearby. Others, meanwhile, brought the child their cell phones to call his mother and offered ice and food to try to make him more comfortable. As the boy continued to scream in pain, a white man who had recently bought a home in the mostly Latino and Armenian immigrant neighborhood ran toward the group. He yelled at everyone as he dialed 911: “You don’t just stand around and watch someone in pain! You call for help, that’s what you do!” he scolded. This was his version of solidarity. Most people in the group understood him, but did not respond. Instead, they asked the boy (in Spanish) to keep dialing his mother, to let her know that the man had called authorities, and to get there as quickly as possible. Within minutes, firefighters arrived and all the Latino neighbors commented that they hoped that the kid’s mother would be safe from authorities: “Who knows if instead of helping her, he is putting her into more trouble.”

What the concerned white man had interpreted as a lack of neighborly solidarity, when seen through the lens of illegality, was quite the opposite. The neighbors, uncomfortable asking the child about his parents’ legal status, instead acted on the possibility that they may be undocumented. Rather than calling for an ambulance, the fear associated with illegality forced them to a type of solidarity that required doing everything they could to help without getting the authorities involved. To someone who has not had to view the world through this lens, this scene did not make sense. Why wouldn’t people go through the proper channels for aid? The neighbors’ reactions, however, are a reflection of the wide reach of illegality. In mixed-status communities, attempts to build solidarity are difficult because it is unclear who can be trusted and official authorities cannot be called in, even when dealing with matters that require their assistance.

Mainstream media’s portrayal of undocumented immigrants as criminals who have no rights further impedes the development of solidarity. In one incident, for example, an elderly woman with a thick foreign accent was about to get a parking ticket for leaving her car in a passenger loading zone in front of an elementary school where she was picking up her grandchild. When she saw the parking enforcement officer’s intention, she ran to him and successfully stopped him from giving her a citation. She returned to the entrance of the school and stated loudly enough for everyone to hear, “I am a full citizen here. I am not hanging by a thread like others. They can’t do that to me. I will demand them to stop.” Implicitly noting that others around her do not speak up against such injustices because of their illegality, she highlights her own validated sense of membership – as a “full citizen” – that allows her to authoritatively make claims. Emphasizing these distinctions, however, breaks down the possibility of building solidarity when others feel offended that she must emphasize their exclusion to uphold her own full membership in this society. In these ways, documented and U.S. citizen members of mixed-status communities may also internalize illegality as a hierarchy that benefits them while distancing them from undocumented and potentially undocumented immigrants.

In such a context, it is difficult to build solidarity. As Agustín, a first-generation Salvadoran immigrant, shares:

Most undocumented immigrants feel deeply disconnected from descriptions of themselves as criminals. They came to the United States in search of work for the sake of survival for themselves and their families. Ironically, many describe this as a positive alternative to a life of crime that is structurally the only other realistic option for people in similar dire straits. But in trying to counter illegality, and particularly the criminalization of undocumented status, they are unsure whom to trust. In this way, illegality and the cloud of distrust around undocumented status can chip away at human relationships with loved ones, coworkers, and neighbors. Even in the act of trying to prove that undocumented status does not make him criminal, Agustín, like others, fears about how people will react to his message. This barrier to developing trust with friends, coworkers, and neighbors can impact individuals and communities when they cannot work together to achieve common interests.

For all of these reasons, undocumented immigrants often experience illegality as a feeling of helplessness in the face of the law. Society has made it clear that they are unwelcome and targeted for expulsion. Illegality, particularly for undocumented immigrants who arrived as adults, is about coming to terms with the perceived reality that no matter how much they may try, the U.S. public will exclude them from rights, protection, and even dignity, so they live in fear of the moment when they will be deprived of all these things at once and they will simply be helpless and unable to defend themselves, their families, or their possessions. As evident in the previous examples, even efforts to build solidarity across mixed-status communities can be fraught with fear when people who want to be helpful also know that despite good intentions, involving authorities could lead to neighbors’ detention and deportation.

In this context of negative portrayals, constant insecurity, and barriers to solidarity, many undocumented immigrants discuss their experiences of illegality in ways that underscore their sense of exclusion in a society in which they feel they should belong. The inability to earn inclusion can make them feel vulnerable and afraid. With information about record numbers of deportations filling the airwaves, many do live in fear of being detained and eventually deported. However, this is not the full story. Not all undocumented immigrants experience illegality in this way and certainly not at all times. In the following section, I briefly describe instances in which illegality can be framed and manipulated to empower people to collectively demand inclusion.

Conclusion

Contemporary Latino immigrants in the United States are criminalized en masse and dehumanized through labels, such as, “illegal aliens.” Blamed for all social ills, undocumented immigrants are stripped of their rights and their humanity through these portrayals. Even when not fueled by negative intentions, many journalistic representations implicitly suggest that illegality pertains inherently to undocumented persons, as if immigrants individually created the problems and consequences associated with this legal category (see, e.g., Preston Reference Preston2011). These journalistic representations are problematic for numerous reasons – most blatantly that they overlook the legal structures that create the categories conferred upon immigrants – but also because they mask the diverse array of consequences. The stories in this chapter challenge these decontextualized processes of criminalization by demonstrating the diversity of experiences and the wide-reaching consequences of “illegality” in immigrants’ daily lives. Emphasizing their sense of exclusion and their inability to meet social expectations, I begin to unpack some of the ways that Latino immigrants – documented, undocumented, and liminally legal (Menjívar Reference Menjívar2006) – experience immigrant illegality in their day-to-day lives.

I argue that the effects of criminalization and exclusion are varied and far reaching. Illegality – the U.S. public’s common understanding of immigrants’ legal status and deportability – and its associated repercussions affect the lives not only of those immigrants who can be unequivocally categorized as “undocumented” in this country, but also the lives of undocumented immigrants’ relatives, neighbors, coworkers, and friends. This is an important point that merits further attention because undocumented immigrants live within mixed-status families and communities (Fix and Zimmerman Reference Fix and Zimmerman2001; Suárez-Orozco et al. Reference Suárez-Orozco, Yoshikawa, Teranishi and Suárez-Orozco2011), and they attend school and work alongside people who are not undocumented (Abrego Reference Abrego2006; Coutin Reference Coutin2000; De Genova Reference De Genova2002).

Undocumented immigrants experience illegality largely as exclusion. Contrary to their portrayal on television and in print media, immigrants do not see themselves as criminals; instead, they feel excluded when they are limited from fulfilling various social expectations. The exclusion can take many forms depending on who they are and what spaces they inhabit. Documented immigrants and U.S. citizens who share families and communities with undocumented immigrants also grapple with illegality, as several authors in this volume demonstrate. Contingent on how illegality is understood and contextualized around them, it can lead to a strong collective sense of solidarity or it can create a fractured community stratified along legal status lines.

Future Research

Immigrants’ settlement experiences involve multiple and diverse processes (Hondagneu-Sotelo Reference Hondagneu-Sotelo1994, Reference Hondagneu-Sotelo2003; Menjívar Reference Menjívar2000; Portes and Rumbaut Reference Portes and Rumbaut1996, Reference Portes and Rumbaut2001). Age at migration, context of exit, context of reception, gender, level of education, and social networks – among other factors – all help determine how immigrants fare and the degree to which they are able to develop a sense of belonging in the United States. Although scholars have long recognized the need for an intersectional approach to study documented immigrants, research has only begun to examine some of these distinctions for the millions of undocumented immigrants and their families (see, e.g., Abrego Reference Abrego2011). In this chapter, I examined a few categories that are worth exploring further to better understand the diversity of experiences associated with illegality: immigrant generation, gender, and spaces or local contexts. Undocumented immigrants’ and their families’ experiences differ most prominently along these axes. Further research, however, is necessary to continue to unpack how illegality mediates the daily lives and long-term integration of immigrants in contemporary U.S. society. Does a migrant’s context of exit, for example, help shape her and her family’s understanding of the role of legal status in their lives? Or do highly educated migrants interpret illegality differently than immigrants with few years of schooling? In each of these cases, it is likely that experiences also vary by gender and generation, further supporting the call for examining an intersectional approach to illegality.

For Esperanza Rivas, one of the young people we have been following through the course of our research, community and political engagement have provided her the means through which to leverage her education and school experience in order to advocate for herself and others.¹ Now at the age of thirty and running out of legal options she has maximized that potential and worries about what the next several years have in store for her. She has long finished college, having graduated from the University of California with a degree in journalism in 2006. However, the years after college have been particularly challenging, as legal options have dwindled considerably. During a conversation in early 2008, she articulated her growing frustration:

Many of Esperanza’s friends have moved on to start their careers. Esperanza, however, has felt stuck in the world of low-wage “immigrant jobs.” The disconnect she sees between her educational achievements and Americanizing experiences, on one hand, and her life as an undocumented immigrant, on the other, is, at times, debilitating.

Yet, her outlook has also been buoyed by her participation in community and political activity. Unlike many of today’s undocumented activists, Esperanza attended college several years before the undocumented youth movement became a national force. After spending more than three years at her university, isolated and not knowing other undocumented immigrant students, Esperanza happened upon a local community-based support group for those like her. During her senior year, she met the group’s cochair who introduced her to the others. Inspired by his commitment to the issue, Esperanza ultimately joined the group. As she described in 2006: “I have been in so many clubs and organizations, especially the ones where you are helping other people, but this one is special. [Our group] is a mix of people affected and not. I can actually help myself and others. I can change others’ lives as well as my own.”

Esperanza went on to become a leader in the organization, responsible for giving workshops at high schools and training others on how to speak with the media, particularly during protests.

While Esperanza represents an older generation of undocumented young leaders, her location between belonging and illegality offers some important insights into the ways in which her life has become narrowly circumscribed as an adult and the limited yet important experiences she draws from in making claims about membership. Esperanza’s experience also highlights the varied ways in which educational institutions, as spaces of inclusion, can become sites of mobilization and power for undocumented young people.

This chapter aims to tease out some of the nuances that frame the 1.5 generation as either (or both) members of a discardable, criminal group of outsiders or as a separate, discernible exception to that group. As many others in this volume effectively argue, illegality is experienced in diverse ways – across geography, age, and level of education or assimilation. For those born abroad, but who come to the United States as children, most of the consequences of illegality are temporarily suspended, then activated at a time when those in their age group are expected to take on increasing roles and responsibilities. This early process is facilitated by their legal inclusion in the American educational system. Whereas their parents are integrated into low-wage labor markets, they begin their American lives legally absorbed into a defining institution, the public school system. It is there where they not only meet American-born peers, but they are also taught to internalize notions of meritocracy and the democratic process. It is there where they begin to view themselves as equal members and learn to advocate for their rights. But laws do not allow them the continuity to transition seamlessly from one life stage to another. At a time when friends begin to take their first jobs, begin driving, vote for the first time, and start thinking about college, legal constraints choke off their ability to join them. For some this “transition to illegality” (Gonzales Reference Gonzales2011) compels them to use the tools available to them in order to rectify their untenable position “in-between” (see Menjívar Reference Menjívar2006).

Our aim in this chapter is to both explore the particular ways in which laws frame spaces of exclusion and inclusion, and to assess how undocumented youth and young adults experience these spaces and respond. Interestingly, we find that while the state creates conditions for control, it also sows the seeds for challenge (see Chavez, Chapter 4; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ruiz, Chapter 11). For a certain cohort of undocumented youth and young adults at the intersection of belonging and illegality – between their roles as undocumented students and undocumented workers – this positioning has resulted in the growth of a national movement that has interjected its uniquely shaped perspectives into the national political debate on immigration. We draw on a rich set of data that combines more than ten years of qualitative fieldwork in Southern and Northern California to examine the ways in which (1) illegality is shaped differently for children than it is for adults; and (2) contradictory spaces of inclusion (created by educational institutions) and exclusion (due to undocumented status) provide the tools and impetus for asserting and extending membership claims.²

The Politics of In-Between: Straddling Belonging and Illegality

Over the last two decades in the United States noncitizens have experienced a constriction of rights while immigrant communities have witnessed an intensification of enforcement efforts in neighborhoods and public spaces. These trends have sown fear and anxiety and narrowed the worlds of large, settled, populations – such that even mundane acts of driving, waiting for the bus, and traffic stops can lead to the loss of a car, prison, and deportation. But immigrants, particularly young ones, have also benefited from local and national efforts to widen access. Increased educational access – concessions undoubtedly gained through the hard work of these disenfranchised youth and their allies – through state tuition laws and limited forms of financial assistance have allowed small segments of the broader population to minimize the bumpy transition from high school to college. Of perhaps greater consequence, increased access has allowed undocumented young people to establish connections, form relationships, and participate in the everyday life of their communities (see Nicholls, Chapter 10). For some of these young people, educational institutions also provide important opportunities to gain leadership experiences through their participation in student government, school-sponsored clubs, and other extracurricular activities (Gonzales Reference Gonzales2010). As the school campus has served as an important space of belonging and skills building, it has also more recently facilitated the coming together of undocumented immigrant students, through the formation of support and advocacy groups.

Given the upsurge of both of these conflicting trends in the last few years, it is not surprising that a generation of undocumented activists, born abroad, yet raised in the United States as partial citizens, has asserted itself as an important voice in the political debate and within the immigrant rights movement.

The State and the Production of Liminal legality

Increased global interdependence of capital and markets for goods, services, and workers has led to unprecedented levels of settlement of undocumented migrant populations in traditional and nontraditional receiving countries throughout the world. With little to go back to in their countries of origin, undocumented migrants are having families and establishing residences in territories where they do not have full legal rights. Their children, growing in significant numbers in receiving states throughout the world, are positioned uncomfortably between a worldwide resolve to protect children, and the growing prevalence of political agendas shaped by strong enforcement strategies and stringent immigration policies against undocumented immigration.

In the United States, the growing militarization of its southern border with Mexico has transformed long-established migration patterns. Efforts to fortify the nearly two-thousand-mile U.S.-Mexico border resulted in the construction of a longer and taller fence, a greater number of agents along the border, and increased technology to detect migrant crossings (Inda Reference Inda2006; Nevins Reference Nevins2010; see also Heyman, Chapter 5). As noted immigration scholar Douglas S. Massey has argued, these measures transformed long-established circular migration patterns into permanent settlement in the United States (Massey, Durand, and Malone Reference Massey, Durand and Molone2002). Until the 1980s, undocumented Mexicans were mostly seasonal labor migrants who left their children and families back home. But with greater militarization of the border, the act of crossing became much more difficult, costly, and dangerous. Instead of returning to families in Mexico, migrants started bringing their families with them to live in the United States (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). As these processes picked up pace throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, the number of undocumented immigrants residing in the United States grew substantially (see De Genova, Chapter 2).

While much of the political and scholarly attention has focused on adult migrants, a more quiet demographic change was taking place. The shift to permanent settlement meant that undocumented migrants were bringing with them children who would grow up in the United States (Gonzales Reference Gonzales2011). While undocumented children have been present in the United States throughout the twentieth century, never before have they constituted such large numbers. Further, given the constraints of current law, the majority of these young people do not have access to any legal remedy to their unique status.

Transitional Moments, Contested Boundaries

Despite the constraints and barriers that undeniably come along with their immigration status, undocumented children occupy a markedly different space of illegality than do their parents (Gonzales Reference Gonzales2011). The conceptual distance between being an “undocumented student” and an “undocumented worker” may be only a matter of a few years though access to a protected, albeit conditional, space of rights means that undocumented children experience their illegality in a fundamentally different way than do their parents (Gleeson and Gonzales Reference Gleeson and Gonzales2012).

The public school system has been the principal institution for the education and integration of immigrant children into the fabric of U.S. society. This is especially true today, as more immigrant children spend more waking hours in school than ever before (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, and Todorova Reference Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco and Todorova2008: 2–3). Certainly, the role of public schools is increasingly critical, as the returns on education have sharply increased over the past few decades. But public schools’ socialization mechanisms are also powerful catalysts for promoting the acculturation processes of the children of immigrants. As a result of their legal integration into the public school system, undocumented children grow up side by side with American-born and documented friends. They accumulate years of Americanizing experiences – important family events are paired with outside experiences of pledging allegiance to a flag, dating, going to school dances, trips to Disneyland and to see the L.A. Dodgers. While they retain much of their parents’ culture, they take on many of the norms, values, and expressions of their American peers. This is not to suggest that undocumented children do not experience or must navigate their illegality; their lives are marked by their status in numerous ways deeply etched in conditions of poverty and policing. And this crosses into their home lives, educational lives, and lives with their peers.

Virtually every undocumented young person with whom we spoke recalled multiple instances during which the constraints of his or her citizenship came into tension with the promise of the supposedly meritocratic educational system. Ricardo, now in college, recalls an experience in the fifth grade when he was chosen by his teacher to attend a special math enrichment summer program. His pride and excitement were quickly overshadowed when, upon showing the registration form to his older brother, he learned he would not be eligible because of his immigration status. “So the next day, he went to my school and he talked to my teacher … and she said, ‘Oh, you know, I don’t think Ricardo is gonna be eligible. I didn’t know about his immigration status. I don’t think he’s gonna be eligible.’ I was very confused, you know? And disappointed.”

The unity of these moments of inclusion and exclusion (Ricardo’s receipt of the recognition for his strong academic performance, coupled with his inability to access the opportunity that the recognition brings) comes to constitute what it is to be young and undocumented, highlighted in the educational context.

Illegality is a space that must be navigated adroitly, because, in many ways, undocumented youth have been conditioned to move through their lives in the same way as their documented peers. Eliana’s depiction of her undocumented life poignantly illustrates the overlap in spaces of belonging and exclusion: “I can do a lot of the things my friends can do. You know, there are times when it doesn’t really matter that I don’t have papers. But then there are other things that it’s like, there’s no way. And sometimes it’s hard to know, if it’s going to matter or not.”

However, as Esperanza’s experience powerfully conveys, these differences become more apparent as discussions between peers move to future plans. She explained,

New Narratives as Spaces of Resistance

The threat of moving from a space of belonging to a space of rejection and exclusion, in transitioning from the semiprotected role of a student to that of a laborer, has not only motivated political participation among undocumented young people, but has also provided them a unique identity that can serve to leverage their claims. Over the past five years, undocumented immigrant students around the country have leveraged this space of contradiction to claim their rights as social members while also demanding formal membership. To be sure, these young people face steep barriers to traditional forms of political participation. However, marginalized groups who have been historically denied access to traditional political power or whose interests have been shut out of traditional political channels, have articulated their interests and sought out change using extrainstitutional avenues. Immigrants, for example, have expanded their political voices outside of the electoral realm, practicing and asserting other forms of social and cultural membership.

Anais credited her father for facilitating her political involvement. Attending marches and rallies with him was an aspect of daily life for her and her siblings: “He always taught me that was really important because, as immigrants, ‘illegal immigrants,’ that was the only way that we can create change. Like we can’t vote or anything, so when there is a chance to go into the streets and you know, speak out, we gotta take it.”

Thus Anais’s political engagement was mediated by the reality that as undocumented residents, her family could not live up to the ideas of citizen participation and grassroots change in the same ways as their citizen counterparts. However, she also learned that there were always opportunities to make her voice heard, regardless of her immigration status. Still, even in their extrainstitutional forms of activism, the limits of and challenges to conditional membership are blatantly apparent.

Though we live in a country in a historic moment in which street protests and civil disobedience are generally tolerated, undocumented activists engaging in these sorts of activities must carefully consider the potential risks. During this political moment when Congressman Tom Tancredo can publically call for the deportation of Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act activists and the family of Arizona student leader Erika Andiola can be taken from their home and detained, undocumented activism constitutes a potentially risky action. Liliana shares, “It’s why I have been so hesitant about the situations I put myself in at protests. If I get arrested, it’s not just me that could get deported, it’s my entire family.”

By contrast, many undocumented student activists have grown tired of waiting while others debate their futures. This restlessness, coupled with an increasingly clear vision of life without the protections and benefits of membership, has motivated many to take actions they may have otherwise been unwilling to take. As Andrea Gómez explained, “This is our struggle. It’s time for undocumented students to stand up for ourselves, and if we do not do it for ourselves, we will have lost everything we’re fighting for.”

Despite their lack of citizenship status, or perhaps because of it, undocumented youth and young adults have emerged as a potent political force. Street protests, sit-ins, rallies, and marches are partially a matter of strategy and an escalation of tactics. But these forms of protest are also what are available to those barred from participation in a formal political sphere, dominated by electoral politics. While at face value we may see these acts as a willingness of young people to risk their futures, we should see them instead as a way in which undocumented youth are staking a claim to the terrain (figuratively and literally) of a body politic that has previously been thought to be the domain of citizens. As Jose Luis says:

Conclusion: Reconstructing the “In-Between” Spaces of Contemporary Membership

Silence is a fundamental part of the undocumented experience in this country because the potential consequences of discovery are so severe. Undocumented children learn, generally following the lead of their parents or older siblings, the importance of guarding information about their status. Yet as more and more young people are transitioning to new “adult” forms of illegality, they are challenging their and their parents’ lack of access to formal membership.

There is a sense, implicit and explicit, that the students’ stories have the power to effect change. Miguel, a leader of an undocumented student group, asserts: “I really think it’s something that [our group] can do – one way we can make a difference. Stressing the idea, changing the story, altering the conception of what it means to be undocumented. Hearing our stories, you know, it has the power to change the way people understand this issue.”

As we have suggested in this chapter, the lives of young people like Miguel are altering the conception of what it means to be undocumented. The traditional lens views undocumented immigrants largely as adult brown-skinned males who cross over illegally into the United States to find low-wage work. This image is perpetuated by media segments that display this image over and over, particularly during election cycles. This singular notion of undocumented life is also reflected in volumes of academic scholarship devoted to understanding the lives of undocumented immigrant workers. Undoubtedly, this work has taught us a great deal about how “illegality” and deportability have narrowly constrained the everyday worlds of undocumented immigrants (De Genova 2002). And, to be sure, the growth in the population of undocumented 1.5-generation young people is a relatively new development. But their lives are challenging traditional notions of illegality and Americanness, and teaching us more about the “in-between” spaces of contemporary membership (see Menjívar and Kanstroom, Chapter 1).

Fundamentally different from most of their parents, undocumented immigrant children start their U.S. experiences with the legal permission to participate in a defining American institution. This legal inclusion in the public school system, at a very formative time in their lives, moves them into a greater number of spaces of belonging. As work is for adults, school is the primary institution of children. As such, schools provide undocumented youth legal access into the worlds of their peers and an environment they can openly access. Equally important, schools also provide inclusive identities for some of their students, particularly those deemed good students, and they provide the tools for these students to lay claim to and expand their social and political worlds especially when they face the transition to new forms of illegality.

Youth’s partial integration through the educational system, then, affords young people access to counternarratives and tools through which to extend claims and challenge their illegality. As Esperanza moved through the protected spaces of the educational system she accessed a claim to social membership in the nation as well as commitments to the ideals of an imagined meritocratic society. Having participated in the educational system, she could draw on this membership and on these ideals to challenge the impending transition she faced to undocumented laborer. Now, a few years out of college, Esperanza’s story reminds us that with limited avenues to regularization the democratic ideals set forward when the court’s extended educational rights to undocumented youth are far from being reached. Still, the specific liminal space that young people occupy ensures that in their existence, they stand as a challenge to the failures of the nation-state in extending them full membership. What’s more, these young people are beginning to use their unique position in relation to the state to make a broader critique and to call for the extension of rights to others. And in these actions, they are reconstructing contemporary membership in spaces in between illegality and belonging.

Future Research

Undocumented immigrant youth inhabit a very unique location – included in important institutions like the school system during their formative years, but excluded from the means through which to reap tangible benefits from their education and training. How they experience undocumented life is undoubtedly shaped by their positioning “in-between.” Future research should take into account their experiences of belonging and illegality. What happens when they become adults and shift from the status of a student to that of a laborer? Are they any different from those who have always been in adult roles? Or do they experience adulthood in a qualitatively different manner? How does this shift frame their identities? How does it impact their health and mental health? Do they draw on different sets of resources? These questions are critical to studies of illegality moving forward.

Related to this, we hope that scholarship in this area might draw parallels between the legal and educational lives of undocumented young people. As the plight of undocumented youth and young adults has elicited growing awareness among the public, scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives have sought to better understand the conflicting and contradictory spaces that frame their everyday lives. This research has viewed school as a largely positive institution that provides undocumented pupils with opportunities for social inclusion and endows them with tools with which to contest their untenable lives. While we are in general agreement that schools can provide these resources, we recognize that this is not the totality of all undocumented youth’s experiences. We want to urge scholars of illegality doing work on undocumented youth populations to problematize this conception by studying undocumented youth for whom the school experience is less liberating. Schools across the country stratify their student bodies, creating winners and losers. But by only studying the winners, we fail to grasp the important ways in which membership is created by exclusion as well as inclusion. Exclusion, for many young men and women, happens not solely through the immigration system but also within local institutions. For those who do not succeed academically, do not reap the benefits of scarce school resources, and are considered discardable by their school communities, their orientation to membership and the experience of illegality is not as a contradiction but as continuity. Methodologically speaking, we urge scholars to move beyond the school campus as a site for study, and to reach undocumented youth and young adults in their communities, in their places of work, and in their families. It is only through exhaustive efforts that we can fully explore the interlocking and overlapping spaces of belonging and illegality.

In 2011, the United States deported a record high of 391,953 foreign-born people (Preston Reference Preston2012). In the same year, Immigration Control and Enforcement detained a record number of immigrants, 429,000 (Preston Reference Preston2012). An even greater number have been returned to their country of origin through voluntary departure, which included 476,000 in 2010 and 580,000 in 2009 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2010a, 2010b). Contrary to popular perception, deportees and returnees are typically not criminal offenders (Human Rights Watch 2009). Many live in families, with spouses and children; others have family members in their home country who depend on them. More than one hundred thousand of those deported between 1998 and 2007 were parents of U.S.-born citizens (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2009.). Today, more than three-quarters of the children of immigrants are U.S. citizens and one-third live in mixed-status families (Capps and Fortuny Reference Capps and Fortuny2006; Fortuny et al. Reference Fortuny, Capps, Simms and Chaudry2009). Contemporary deportation policies potentially affect millions of children living in the United States.

They also disproportionately affect children in Mexican families. Mexicans are approximately 30 percent of the foreign-born and 58 percent of the unauthorized population (Passel and Cohn 2011). In 2010, 83 percent of the detained, 73 percent of those forcibly removed, and 77 percent of voluntary departures were Mexican (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2010b). More than seven million children living in the United States in 2009 lived with parents from Mexico (Urban Institute 2011). Half of these children are estimated to be U.S. citizens living with noncitizen parents (Urban Institute 2011).

Only a small proportion of these children may actually experience the deportation or removal of a parent. But it is not merely an act of deportation that affects the lives of children growing up in Mexican immigrant households. With deportations at an all-time high, it is the threat of deportation, or a migrant’s deportability, that is most salient in the everyday lives of members of immigrant communities (De Genova Reference De Genova2002, Reference De Genova, De Genova and Peutz2010). Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with 111 children ages five through fifteen and parents in eighty-one Mexican immigrant families, in this chapter I explore how children experience illegality in two different types of coethnic communities. Only a handful of the children I met directly experienced a parent’s deportation. But nearly all, in both sites, have been affected by the threat of deportability and a political atmosphere in which increased enforcement is viewed as the panacea to the nation’s immigration problems.

In what follows, I briefly review the rise in what De Genova (Reference De Genova, De Genova and Peutz2010) calls the “deportation regime” over the past few years and how this coincides with changing patterns in Mexican migration to the United States. Specifically, the militarization of the border has resulted in an increase in settlement, and family formation, among Mexican migrants living in new destinations throughout the country. Although the threat of deportation affects children nationwide, it is the way these national policies are manifest at the local level, where children go about their everyday activities, which are particularly important to shaping children’s experiences. I then turn to the stories of the children I met in two different new destination sites. In one site the Mexican community is small and dispersed. In the other it is large and concentrated. I describe first how the threat of deportability and illegality is manifest in children’s lives across the two sites, and then outline variations in children’s experiences in each site. Doing so shows how national- and local-level enforcement policies in different community contexts have a series of unprecedented indirect and unintended consequences for young children in Mexican families.

The National Context

Today, the United States, among other countries around the world, has become quite nearly obsessed with border control and the deportation of noncitizens (De Genova Reference De Genova, De Genova and Peutz2010). Concerns with the removal of criminals and political threats to U.S. sovereignty have been around since the founding of this nation (Kanstroom 2007). Yet the rise of the “deportation regime” of the modern era, more fully described in the introductory chapter (Menjívar and Kanstroom, Chapter 1), can be traced, in part, to the passage of the 1996 immigration laws as well as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that prompted recent efforts to crack down on illegal immigration (Peutz and De Genova Reference De Genova, De Genova and Peutz2010). The nearly four hundred thousand who have been deported each year since 2009 represent more than twice the 189,000 who were deported in 2001 (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2010b). Previously, the most extensive deportation campaign in U.S. history in the 1930s forcibly removed a total of 458,000 Mexicans from the United States over a nine-year period (Massey, Durand, and Malone Reference Massey, Durand and Malone2002: 34). Although ideologically today’s deportation campaign aims to protect U.S. citizens from national security threats like 9/11, just like in the 1930s those most adversely affected by recent deportations are Mexicans. In 2010, Mexicans accounted for the highest percentage of any nationality in apprehensions, detentions, removals, and returns (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2010b).

The rise of the “deportation regime” coincides, not incidentally, with a major shift in patterns of Mexican migration to and from the United States. Since the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, Mexicans have often moved back and forth across the border to work in agriculture, railroads, and expanding urban centers in the United States (Sanchez Reference Sanchez1993). Before the deportation campaigns of the 1930s, many Mexicans moved as families; settlements were concentrated in the Southwest and also followed the railroad lines up into Chicago (Hondagneu-Sotelo Reference Hondagneu-Sotelo1994; Sanchez Reference Sanchez1993). After the economic crisis of the Great Depression, the Bracero Program (1942–64) recruited Mexican laborers, with no provisions for families, to work seasonally in agriculture (Martin Reference Martin1998). Bracero contracts were short; most braceros spent a few months each year with their family members in Mexico (Hondagneu-Sotelo Reference Hondagneu-Sotelo1994). Families, and entire rural communities in a handful of states in Mexico, became dependent on male laborers working abroad for part of the year (Massey et al. Reference Massey, Alarcon, Durand and Gonzalez1987). Even after the Bracero program ended, a pattern of seasonal male sojourners continued (Massey et al. Reference Massey, Alarcon, Durand and Gonzalez1987; Massey et al. Reference Massey, Durand and Malone2002). Mexicans who did settle in the United States lived in the Southwest and California (Hondagneu-Sotelo Reference Hondagneu-Sotelo1994). U.S. communities outside of the Southwest were not typically aware of, or highly alarmed by, Mexican migrants. Working in a segmented labor market, farmworkers often remained invisible to the wider community.

Starting in the 1990s, these patterns changed. Most significantly, the circular nature of Mexican migration declined, and Mexican settlements proliferated throughout the United States (Leite, Ramos, and Gaspar Reference Leite, Ramos and Gaspar2003; Massey et al. Reference Massey, Durand and Malone2002). There are numerous reasons for this change. Labor markets, especially in the Midwest and Southeast, drew workers to places outside of traditional Mexican settlement communities in the Southwest (Marrow Reference Marrow2011; Schmalzbauer Reference Schmalzbauer2009; Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2005). Sending regions within Mexico diversified, including marginalized places in southern states farther from the border and with less entrenched patterns of return migration (Cortés Sanchez 2003). With the Mexican debt crisis of the 1980s, broader sectors of Mexican society, including members of the middle class and especially urban residents, joined migrant streams (Cornelius Reference Cornelius, Gonzalez de la Rocha and Escobar Latapi1991). More recently, highly organized and violent drug cartels have taken over smuggling operations, making border crossings much more perilous (Slack and Whiteford Reference Slack and Whiteford2011). Finally, female migration rates have risen considerably since the 1990s (Chavez Reference Chavez1992; Donato Reference Donato1993; Kanaiaupuni Reference Kanaiaupuni2000). More than ever before, Mexican migrants are choosing to raise their families in the United States.

Perhaps the primary reason for a shift toward settlement, however, has been the change in U.S. immigration policy since the mid-1980s (Massey et al. Reference Massey, Durand and Malone2002). After an amnesty program passed in 1986, a series of measures have become more punitive toward unauthorized immigrants. Currently, for example, there are nearly no legal pathways to permanent residency for Mexicans who have lived in the country illegally for a number of years. Instead there are bars to admission to “penalize” immigrants for their unauthorized status. Moreover, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border has made it more difficult and expensive for migrants to come and go from the United States. Even before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the cost of a border crossing tripled between 1995 and 2001 (Cornelius Reference Cornelius2001). Death rates on the border skyrocketed as migrants attempted crossings in places that were more isolated and physically dangerous (Cornelius Reference Cornelius2001; Eschbach et al. Reference Eschbach, Hagan, Rodriguez, Hernandez-Leon and Bailey1999). Although such policies are intended to deter Mexicans from working in the United States illegally, they have had the opposite effect. Mexicans continued to seek work north of the border, but because the stakes of doing so are so high, they have stopped returning to their families in Mexico periodically. Instead, they have begun to settle their families in the United States (Massey et al. Reference Massey, Durand and Malone2002).

Today the Mexican immigrant population is no longer one of sojourners. Instead, it consists of various types of settled families. In 2008–9, three and a half million U.S. citizen children had noncitizen Mexican parents (Urban Institute 2011). An additional 755,000 were noncitizen Mexican children who may have few pathways to citizenship if their parents are also noncitizens (Urban Institute 2011). Finally, a shocking seventy-nine thousand children with Mexican parents are estimated to be noncitizens with citizen parents (Urban Institute 2011). Some of these children might be on backlogged waiting lists to naturalize, while others may be permanently stuck, without a pathway toward legalization. In one family I interviewed, for example, the parents and eldest child had naturalized, but the four younger siblings were unauthorized because when the father initially applied for a visa, they had not yet been born. Years later, his wife’s application was approved. She migrated without her children, but could not bear the separation and brought them with her illegally across the border. Now the children cannot regularize their status despite their parents’ U.S. citizenship.

The economic recession has decreased the flows from Mexico as jobs in the United States have dried up (Passel and Cohn Reference Passel and Cohn2010). Nonetheless, because settlement has increased substantially over the past decade, the Mexican American population continues to grow despite the leveling off of new Mexican immigration. In the 1980s and 1990s, most growth in the Mexican population in the United States was due to immigration; between 2000 and 2010, the Mexican American population in the United States primarily grew as a result of new births (Pew Hispanic Center Reference Passel and Cohn2011). This attests to the increase in settled Mexican immigrant families. It also attests to an unprecedented number of young people who are likely to be affected by the U.S. enforcement policies and deportation tactics that target their parents, neighbors, or other relatives.

The Local Context

Over the past twenty to thirty years, the growth in settled Mexican communities throughout the United States has led to significant tensions at the local level in communities that have seen an increase in the number of unauthorized residents in their midst (Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2005). Some have felt frustrated that the federal government has not done more to enforce the immigration policies to restrict unauthorized migration. As of September 2011, sixty-nine communities had signed § 287(g) agreements with the federal government, which – as described in Chapter 1 – enables local law enforcement to carry out the duties of federal immigration officials (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2011). This is contentious. Some point out that community trust is necessary to fight crime, but that trust is undermined if community members fear the police. Others claim racial profiling results. Disputes over § 287(g) agreements illustrate the local tensions that have accompanied broad changes in Mexican migration. Yet reactions have also gone in the other direction, with other localities rejecting what they view as inhumane and impractical federal policies. More than 148 communities have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” (Salvi Reference Salvi2011). And in 2011, officials in Cook County, Illinois, refused to hold suspected unauthorized immigrants accused of minor offenses at the local jail for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials (Olivo Reference Olivo2011). County officials estimated that these detentions cost the county $15 million per year, which is not reimbursed by the federal government. Immigration law is federal, but the consequences are manifest at the local level.

Between 2009 and 2011, I did an ethnographic study designed to explore children’s experiences growing up in Mexican immigrant households in two different local contexts. In the first, in northeast Ohio, the Mexican community is relatively small and dispersed. In the second, in central New Jersey, it is large and concentrated. Neither site has been plagued by the overt tensions fueled by a specific controversy over unauthorized migration. That is, neither locality had signed a § 287(g) agreement nor had declared itself a sanctuary city. New Jersey quietly implemented Secure Communities across the state at the beginning of 2012 (Gottlieb Reference Gottlieb2012), after the majority of the data collection for this project was complete. At the time of the study, Ohio’s implementation of Secure Communities was still sporadic. Moreover, neither Ohio nor New Jersey had passed state-level initiatives specifically targeting the unauthorized population, as has been done in Arizona, Arkansas, and Nebraska, for example. This makes them good places to explore the impact of federal deportation policies and illegality on the everyday lives of children who we might otherwise expect to be relatively immune to public controversy over immigration. Both sites are also new destinations for Mexican migrants; neither had significant Mexican populations prior to the 1990s.

This is, perhaps, where the similarities end. Northeast Ohio is an economically depressed region that has suffered severe job loss with deindustrialization. However, in 2012, the local economy was relatively stable, with the unemployment rate slightly below the national average. Most Mexicans I interviewed worked in the food service industry or area factories. Some men worked in construction and some women in domestic service. In contrast, in the more bustling site in Central Jersey just a little more than an hour from New York City, the declining industries of the 1970s and 1980s were replaced by growths in manufacturing as well as a vibrant service sector (especially landscaping and construction) that attracted many Mexican migrants throughout the 1990s and 2000s. By 2012, however, national economic woes had taken a large toll locally; many I interviewed – especially men – faced periodic unemployment.

There are also major differences in the characteristics of the Mexican population in each site. In Ohio, the Mexican community is small and has remained relatively invisible. Many families come from traditional sending states in Mexico (including Guadalajara, Jalisco, and Michoacán), and they live dispersed throughout the city and surrounding suburbs. Small businesses catering to Latinos are scattered, often located in strip malls. Because it has historically been an economically depressed region, Mexicans in the area enjoy relatively low housing costs. Most rent their own homes or apartments on minimum-wage incomes. Many mothers I interviewed choose not to work, a decision they described as more affordable than child care. The children I met attended schools with very few other Latino children. Most were the only Mexican children in their grades, if not their schools.

The Mexican population in central New Jersey is much larger and also highly concentrated. Of the approximately fifty thousand city residents, 33 percent are foreign born and 39 percent are Hispanic. One area of the small city is called “Little Mexico” by many residents as nearly every store boasts Spanish names. Most Mexicans have come directly from relatively poor southern states in Mexico, which are new sending regions (Dreby Reference Dreby2010; Smith Reference Smith2006). In New Jersey, Mexican migrants typically become low-wage workers surviving in a community in which the cost of living is quite high. More often than not, they share their homes and apartments with friends or relatives, doubling up two or three families per housing unit. In many families, both mothers and fathers work, often at alternate shifts so they do not have to pay for child care. At one district elementary school, the school superintendent estimated that a full 80 percent of students have Mexican immigrant parents.

The social service infrastructure offers Mexicans in each site a different set of resources. In Ohio, there are also few full-time Spanish speakers employed at area social service agencies. Local hospitals hire out interpreters or find church volunteers to translate. Public transportation is not easily accessible, making it difficult for families to get to service providers without the help of others (or without driving without a license). In New Jersey, the city is walkable. City residents regularly use public buses and the train that runs through the city. Social services are well developed to meet the needs of Spanish speakers, mostly because Puerto Ricans and Dominicans migrated to the city prior to Mexicans. Thus many agencies have bilingual staff. In Ohio I never met or heard about bilingual, Latino police officers; in New Jersey a handful of bilingual police officers worked for the small city.

Differences in local law enforcement agencies are particularly important to assessing the impact of deportation and enforcement policies on children. For a number of years in the late 1990s, the police chief in the site in New Jersey was Latino and on the board of a local social service agency. Although members of the Mexican community have occasionally felt targeted by local police, in general most families seemed to feel relatively safe in going about their daily activities. Some of the women I met had positive interactions with the police through a domestic violence response team. The deportation stories I heard in New Jersey most often started with severe encounters with the law such as a burglary conviction, a driving under the influence citation, or a speeding ticket. This is not to say that Mexican residents were not wary of police; but more often than not they described fears of the police officers outside of their immediate community. At times rumors of police checkpoints on the major routes to job sites outside of the city kept residents in their homes.

Families in Ohio had very different experiences with police, with many stories of deportations starting with arrests for minor traffic infractions. One mother, for example, had been reported to ICE after being arrested as a passenger in a vehicle. A father was deported when police officers stopped him in the middle of the night while driving home from work; one of his back lights had been out. His wife told me that one of the police officers was ready to let him go, when the other stepped in and decided to report him to ICE. Horror stories like these were peppered, however, with those of much more amicable interactions. One man who was an alcoholic had been arrested multiple times for drinking in public but was sent to rehabilitation rather than jail. A number of women talked about being caught driving without a license. Fearing the worst, they were pleasantly surprised to be released with traffic tickets that they dutifully paid. In Ohio, interactions with police officers were highly unpredictable. Community members spoke glowingly of the “good cops” they had met. But the “bad cops” detained them in the local jail for minor offenses – at times for days – until ICE picked them up. Volunteers at the church told me that detainees were not listed on jail rosters. Unless someone stopped by when an amicable officer was on duty, it was impossible to confirm a detention. Whereas in New Jersey residents often complained about variations in law enforcement across communities, in Ohio Mexicans were much more likely to describe variations among individual officers.

Given the very different characteristics of the local Mexican community and experiences with local law enforcement, how do children respond to the threat of deportation in each site? How is legality salient in their everyday activities? Similarities in children’s experiences across the two sites point to the ways that enforcement policies at the national level affect children regardless of the dynamics of the local community. Differences in children’s experiences point to the ways that characteristics at the local level affect children’s lived experiences of illegality.

Unintended Consequences of Federal Deportation Policy

Many of the 111 children I interviewed talked about the possibility of a deportation even if it had not directly impacted their immediate family. Although few children provided me with precise details about immigration law, most of the thirty-one unauthorized children I interviewed were aware that they lacked a legal status. Even the seventy-one U.S.-born children described the possibility of their families being split due to enforcement practices. Moreover, a widespread misconception among the children I interviewed was that immigrant was synonymous with illegal. Fears of deportation are common for children regardless of their own legal status, or that of their parents (see also Abrego, Chapter 6).

The Local Context and Children’s Experiences with Legality

Children across the two sites expressed fears of family separation and also various misunderstandings about legality. Beyond these similarities, there were some differences in the extent to which legal status seemed to affect children’s everyday lives. In Ohio, children’s concerns with legality were typically confined to the realm of the family. In New Jersey, children’s fears about legal status were manifest, to some extent, in their activities outside the home.

Managing Legality in an Immigrant Community

This contrasts quite sharply to the experiences of children in New Jersey who were surrounded by peers who were often Mexican or Latino. I asked all the children I interviewed if they wanted their friends to know they (or their parents) spoke Spanish, were Mexican, or were immigrants. Ohioan children seemed proud of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds, often saying they wanted other children to know they spoke Spanish or were Mexican; New Jersey children laughed when I asked this, explaining that everybody already knew that they were Mexican or that they spoke Spanish. At face value, it seemed a silly question for children who attended schools primarily with other Latinos. However, fewer children in New Jersey than in Ohio reported that their peers know, or that they wanted their peers to know, about their linguistic and cultural heritage. Children in New Jersey seemed more eager to deemphasize key aspects of their ethnic identity in peer group settings (see Table 8.1).

Table 8.1. Children’s Reports of Peer Awareness of Key Identity Indicators

I was especially surprised to learn that children in New Jersey much more often reported the preference that other children not know that they or their parents were immigrants than did children in Ohio. Their explanations are revealing. Because they equated immigration with illegality, quite a few explained that if this information got out, it would be a problem for them at school. A ten-year-old boy told me he didn’t want people to know “because then it spreads around the whole school, they start rumors.” An eight-year-old girl said she needs to be careful about who she tells. “Would you want your friends to know your Mom is an immigrant?” I asked. She responded, “Not every, every single friend, but some of them.” I asked, “How come?” She said, “They are like mean because I was born in a different place from my mom.” When I asked her if she ever felt scared that her mom is from another country, she answered, “Because I feel a little bit nervous and scared. Because people are mean. They are so mean. They make you think, and make you mad and be scared.” In New Jersey children did not want others to know about their family members’ legal status for fear of being teased.

In Ohio and New Jersey I accompanied twelve children (ages 6–8) to their schools to observe them in their classroom settings for three days. In Ohio I did not witness any teasing first hand, although the children I observed seemed more isolated at school than those I observed in New Jersey. I also did not observe any incidents in which children’s legal status was salient on a daily basis. In New Jersey, legal status was not blatant in children’s experiences either. However, with time I realized why children feared that their legal status, or that of their parents, could affect them in their schools. Legality, it seemed, was an underlying, often unspoken facet of peer group culture that occasionally cropped up in different social interactions.

Ironically, it was in the school I visited with the highest percentage of children of immigrants where this was most evident. The most memorable exemplifying incident occurred during recess. Every day, students ran around for about a half hour before lunch on the blacktop with no jungle gym equipment. Two different large groups of boys typically organized soccer games, while smaller groups of girls or boys milled about playing with toys they had brought from home. There was also always a cross-gender chase game of cops and robbers. One day, and only once (I don’t think this was normal play as I questioned some children later about it), my heart dropped when I heard a boy who was a “police” chase a couple of girls shouting, in English with a strong Spanish accent, that he was “immigration” there to take them to jail.

In this school, most of the children were of Mexican descent. However, recently there had been an influx of legal Dominican migrants, quite noticeable in the bilingual and newcomer classrooms I visited. I often heard these recent arrivals chat about their hometowns in classroom discussion. One day, for example, the teacher was talking about geysers, which caused a furor among the Dominicans who all wanted to tell stories about the hot springs and waterfalls back at home. In contrast, I never heard Mexican children refer to their hometowns in Mexico, partly, I assumed, due to the fact that many had been born in the United States. One day in the lunchroom I decided to find out if my assumption was correct. When a couple of Dominican girls next to me started talking about their schools back home, I asked them who else in the class had been to school in the Dominican Republic. Sandy, the girl next to me, pointed up and down the row of girls and boys to my left and right and named each child who was born in the Dominican Republic. “How about kids who’ve been to school in Mexico?” I asked her. She looked back at me blankly, and finally shrugged her shoulders and referred to Suraya, another Dominican girl next to her, who couldn’t tell me either. Karla, the most social of the Mexican girls in the classroom sat across the table from us and was listening in, so I asked her. “I was born at St. Peters [the local hospital],” she told me in perfect Spanish. “I don’t know about the others,” she said looking around. Finally, a light-skinned girl sitting right next to her who had been listening to us all along said she had been in school in Puebla, and was born there. “Are there others in your class?” I asked her. She too shrugged her shoulders, unsure. Later that day I asked the school social worker to check for me; of the class of twenty-five, six children were born in Mexico and six were born in the Dominican Republic.

It seemed strange that the girls who knew so many details about each other’s lives, including which children were born in the Dominican Republic, could not tell me which children were born in Mexico. If in Ohio children often were quiet about their Mexican, and Spanish-speaking background, in New Jersey, the Mexican children – but not the Dominicans who mostly came to the United States with visas – were noticeably silent about their place of birth. The vast majority of the Mexicans in this community are unauthorized; children seemed to know if they revealed their place of birth they might be accused of being “illegal.”

For children in New Jersey, the threat of deportability was much more palpable than it was for children in Ohio. In this site, children carefully monitored the disclosure of their legality and nativity to others. Not only could this information potentially threaten their families, but children felt it could be a point for exclusion from their peers. Attesting to the sensitivity of children in New Jersey to legality, six children in New Jersey grew visibly upset during our interviews when I broached on the topic of immigration, whereas none in Ohio did. Illegality, and the threat of deportability, has greater social proximity for children living in New Jersey.

Conclusion

In the absence of a systematic federal response to a failing immigration system in which a growing number of individuals live in the United States in an unauthorized status, legality and the threat of deportability affects millions of children, especially those with Mexican parents growing up in the United States. Although immigration law is federal, its consequences are dependent on features of the local context. In some sites, like in Ohio, Mexican families feel quite targeted by, and vulnerable to, the individual whims of police officers. In other sites, like in New Jersey where there are many Mexican families, it is the entire community, not just individual families, that feels the threat of the current emphasis on enforcement.

In this chapter I have looked specifically at how children, most of whom are U.S.-born citizens, react to the threat of deportability in two different local contexts. Despite few having direct experiences with immigration officials, most of the children I interviewed and spent time with across the two sites were affected by the current “deportation regime” of the United States. Children in Ohio and New Jersey described fears that such policies would separate their families. This is despite parents’ attempts to protect their children from such issues by not talking regularly about legality and parents’ claims that children were too young to understand. Children seemed quite aware that legal status, to some extent, differentiated them from either their peers or the other members of their families (see also Gonzales, Heredia, and Negrón-Gonzales, Chapter 7). However, children also often misunderstood the details of immigration. Most notably, they often equated police with ICE and immigration with illegality. They associated stigma with immigration, as Abrego (see Chapter 6) also found in her interviews with children in California. These are the unintended consequences of national policies that criminalize immigrants and target Mexicans in their enforcement activities.

Deportation policies also have indirect consequences for children that vary by local context. In Ohio, where the Mexican community is small and the infrastructure to support members of the community is underdeveloped, legality is mostly salient in children’s experiences within their families. Unless their family has experienced a deportation directly, legality does not affect children’s daily lives. Instead, children described teasing and exclusion based on their racial or ethnic background as Spanish speakers or Mexicans (see Gonzales, Heredia, and Negrón-Gonzales, Chapter 7). In a new destination site with a small and disperse Mexican community, children are aware that for many in Ohio, Mexican is synonymous with illegal. Children experience stigma related to their racial or ethnic backgrounds as Mexicans.

In New Jersey, a new destination site with a large and concentrated Mexican community, children carefully monitor their and their parents nativity for fears that legality will become the means for exclusion from their peers. In a local context with a highly visible Latino and Mexican community, the threat of deportability affects children’s neighbors and other community members. Children are aware of this; among their peers, nativity has become a social status marker that potentially differentiates children from each other. In New Jersey, more so than in Ohio, the threat of illegality is quite salient in children’s everyday experiences.

Future Research

Bill Corsaro has suggested that kids create their own unique peer group characterized by children’s desire “to create and share emotionally in the power and control adults have over them” (2003: 115). My evidence suggests that under circumstances in which children become what Menjívar (Reference Menjívar2011) describes as “hyper-aware” of illegality, legal status differentiation may become a salient feature of children’s peer group culture.

Under what social settings does legal status become an important social status marker for children? To understand the impact public policies have on children’s everyday experiences, future research should focus on the specific factors that shape children’s awareness of illegality. This includes looking at (1) the types of circumstances under which legality is conflated with ethnicity (as in Ohio); (2) the types of circumstances under which children enact legal status differences among local peer group cultures (as in New Jersey); and (3) the specific features of national immigration policy that trickle down into children’s experiences (in this case the current emphasis on enforcement).

It seems likely, for example, that my findings are the product of a particular historical moment, in which enforcement activities in the United States are at an all-time high. Future research can further illuminate by delving into the ways that children have understood and reacted to legal status differentiations at other historical periods in the United States when immigration policy focused less on enforcement and more significantly promoted Americanization. Future work can also explore children’s understandings of – and enactments of – legal status awareness under other types of national immigration regimes. Comparisons of children’s experiences with illegality/legality in situations in countries where immigration policy and regulation is both more restrictive and more lenient can provide insight into the threshold at which point legality mutates from being an adult concern over paperwork to a salient feature of childhood imagination and culture. In this way future immigration policy can be crafted in more humane ways, with fewer unintended consequences for the next generation of U.S. citizens.

O’Ryan came to the United States from Jamaica as a small child. He qualified for citizenship when he was eleven years old, but his mother did not seek out naturalization on his behalf. Instead, he applied on his own soon after he turned eighteen. His application for naturalization was delayed due to a technical issue with his fingerprints, and took five years to be processed. By the time the application was ready to be approved, it was too late: O’Ryan had been arrested on drug charges and no longer qualified for naturalization. Moreover, he faced deportation.

O’Ryan grew up as a legal permanent resident (LPR) of the United States. He completed all of his education in this country and came of age feeling as if Brooklyn was where he belonged. A transgression of the law when he was in his early twenties, however, changed everything. O’Ryan’s drug conviction transformed him from an LPR into a criminal alien. In addition, O’Ryan lost the right to remain in the United States and was deported to Jamaica. Drawing from interviews with O’Ryan and other former LPRs who have been deported from the United States, this chapter considers the transformation of LPRs into criminal aliens, shedding light on the vulnerability and potential illegality of all noncitizens residing within U.S. borders. These stories render it evident that all noncitizens face marginalization because of their “deportability” (De Genova 2005). Whereas most scholarly writings on “illegality” and “deportability” focus on the marginalization faced by undocumented migrants (Abrego, Chapter 6; De Genova 2005; Gonzales Reference Gonzales2011; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ruiz, Chapter 11; Parker Reference Parker2001), the stories of these deported LPRs render it evident that all noncitizens are potentially deportable.

Citizenship, Belonging, and Deportation

Every person in the United States who is not a U.S. citizen faces the possibility of becoming “illegal,” as the laws governing the presence of noncitizens can change at any time. Citizenship signifies the official recognition of a relationship between a person and the government. All persons living on U.S. territory have some relationship with the government: we pay taxes, are subject to sanction if we violate U.S. laws, attend government-sponsored schools, and benefit from government services. Only those who are citizens, however, have the legal recognition that gives us the chance to shape the laws that govern society, and only citizens are safe from deportation.

Although citizenship is usually defined positively in terms of membership in a formal polity, some scholars contend that citizenship also functions as a barrier to territorial rights, and that this barrier is a strategy to prevent noncitizens from making claims on the polity. Kunal Parker, for example, contends that the “permanent withholding of territorial rights from those resident within [U.S.] territory without its permission – the millions of so-called ‘illegal aliens’ – should be seen as part of a wider strategy of denying such individuals’ claims to social citizenship, … and therefore of maintaining a relatively large population in a condition of permanent degradation” (Parker Reference Parker2001: 639). Parker’s (Reference Parker2001) analyses overlook the reality that LPRs can also be denied territorial belonging – the right to live within the borders of a country.

Citizenship serves as a mechanism of formal exclusion through provisions that mandate that only noncitizens can be deported. U.S. citizens have the right to territorial belonging in the United States. As citizens, this right cannot be revoked. To do so would be banishment, and banishment is not among the punishments the United States metes out to people convicted of crimes. In stark contrast, an LPR can be deported, even for minor infractions of the law. A LPR is a foreign national who has been granted the right to reside permanently in the United States. This right, however, can be revoked at any time, and the rules governing the right of LPRs to be in the United States can change at any moment. In many deportation cases, an LPR’s social, cultural, and economic ties to the United States can be ignored. Thus, although citizenship signifies belonging and many LPRs feel a strong sense of belonging in the United States, these ties can be disregarded in deportation cases.

In the contemporary United States, we have both citizenship as political belonging and full citizenship – the realization of a wider range of rights. In this chapter, I will argue that LPRs have access to some aspects of full citizenship, yet can still be subject to deportation – the stripping away of the most fundamental citizenship right of all: territorial belonging. We are accustomed to thinking of citizenship rights in a hierarchical fashion, with civil and political rights being the most basic, followed by social and then cultural rights (Jenson 2001; Marshall Reference Marshall1950; Pakulski Reference Pakulski1997). However, as I will demonstrate, in the case of deported LPRs, many had access to social and cultural citizenship, without the security of the most basic civil and political rights. As we will see in their stories, the result is devastating.

1996 Laws: From Legal to Illegal

In 1996, Congress passed two laws that fundamentally changed the rights of all foreign-born people in the United States – the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). These laws, as described by Menjívar and Kanstroom (Chapter 1) and by De Genova (Chapter 2), eliminated judicial review of some deportation orders, required mandatory detention for some noncitizens, and introduced the potential for the use of secret evidence in certain cases. Six years prior, the Immigration Act of 1990 had expanded the definition of who could be deported for engaging in criminal activity, and made many immigrants deportable for having committed aggravated felonies. The 1996 laws further expanded the definition of an aggravated felony, and made deportation mandatory. Under IIRIRA, aggravated felonies include any felony or misdemeanor where the person is sentenced to at least one year in prison, regardless of whether the sentence is served or suspended. These crimes can be relatively minor, such as the theft of baby clothes from a department store, or the combination of two minor illegal drug possessions. These cases do not require judicial review, meaning people do not have the right for a judge to take into account the specifics of the case or the ties that person has to the United States. Furthermore, the law has been applied retroactively. This means that any LPR charged with a crime at any time during their stay in the United States could be subject to deportation. For example, a person could have come to the United States legally at age two, been convicted of attempted arson at age eighteen, and – twenty years later, after the passage of IIRIRA – could be subject to deportation at age thirty-eight. Even adopted children of U.S. citizens have faced deportation under these laws, in those cases in which parents failed to naturalize their children prior to age eighteen (Master Reference Master2003; Morawetz Reference Morawetz2000).

Immigration proceedings in the United States are civil, not criminal, in nature, and do not include all the due process protections afforded to people accused of crimes. Noncitizens can be detained without a bond hearing to assess their flight risk or danger to society. They can be deported without due process. The 1996 laws eliminated judicial review of aggravated felony cases: immigration judges have no discretion once a determination is made that a crime is an aggravated felony. The absence of judicial review in immigration cases means that LPRs who have lived in the United States for decades, have contributed greatly to society, and have extensive family ties in the country are subject to deportation for relatively minor crimes they may have committed years ago. Judges do not have the opportunity to take their family and community ties into account. Nor can judges take into account weak or nonexistent linkages to their countries of birth. The only recourse that people facing deportation on aggravated felony charges have is to hire their own lawyer (often paying thousands of dollars) to argue that the charge they face is not an aggravated felony. If the judge determines that the crime is an aggravated felony, the defendant cannot present evidence that, for example, he is the sole caregiver of a disabled U.S. citizen child. Without judicial review, the judge cannot take family ties or the needs of U.S.- citizen children into account in aggravated felony cases.

The stories of the five men mentioned in the following text render evident the consequences of the deportation of LPRs from the land they call home. These men were LPRs of the United States. They took the “permanent” aspect of their status literally. However, the passage of the 1996 laws made it such that their permanent status could be taken away. The 1996 laws transformed these men from LPRs to deportable aliens. By reducing the threshold for crimes that may be considered grounds for deportation, these laws made these men, and many other noncitizens, deportable, and thus “illegal.”

As authors of several of the chapters in this volume contend (Abrego, Chapter 6; Dreby, Chapter 8; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ruiz, Chapter 11), deportation has gendered effects – the implications for men and women are distinct. My research with criminal deportees makes it clear that the vast majority of LPRs deported on criminal grounds are men – many of whom leave partners and children behind. About 85 percent of all deportees are men, and this percentage is even higher for criminal deportees (Golash-Boza 2013; Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013). In this chapter, I focus exclusively on men, because of the 150 deportees I interviewed in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guatemala, and Brazil, nearly all the LPRs who had been deported on criminal grounds were men.

Each of the men introduced in the following text failed to formalize their political relationship with the U.S. government, although they each qualified for U.S. citizenship. Two of them – Hector and O’Ryan – did seek citizenship to ensure their right to territorial belonging in a country in which they felt as if they belonged already. However, the long process of naturalization meant that they were deported before it concluded. Another man – Caleb – did not seek out citizenship because he, a law-abiding person and military veteran, thought his right to territorial belonging would never be put in jeopardy. Vincent, born in Guatemala, thought he was a citizen, as his mother is a citizen. Victor, a Jamaican citizen, qualified for citizenship as a child, yet neither he nor his mother applied. These men, like any other resident of the United States who is not a U.S. citizen, risked deportation.

Victor: Father, Son, Deportee

Victor was born in Jamaica. When he was four years old, his mother took him to the United States. As LPRs, Victor and his mother qualified for citizenship when Victor was nine years old. Had Victor’s single mother become a citizen before Victor’s eighteenth birthday, he could have become a citizen automatically. Victor’s mother never went through the naturalization process for herself or for Victor. Working as a housekeeper, Victor’s mother barely earned enough to make ends meet, and found the time and costs associated with naturalization prohibitive. In addition, there seemed to be no need to naturalize. They were LPRs, and thus seemed to be able to reside permanently in the United States. Prior to the passage of the 1996 laws, few LPRs were deported.

When Victor was twenty-four years old, he was caught selling marijuana. He served two and a half years in prison, and was deported to Jamaica because of his drug conviction. Victor was caught selling marijuana in 1996, the same year that IIRIRA was passed. For Victor, this meant he was deported upon his release from prison in 1999. Even though the laws that made Victor deportable were passed after he was convicted, the retroactive provisions in the law made it such that Victor was automatically deported upon his release from prison.

In Jamaica, Victor has no friends or family, and finds it difficult to survive. He longs to return to the United States where his mother and daughter live. Victor’s mother found a cousin in Kingston, Jamaica, who was willing to pick him up from the airport and give him a temporary home. But this was a relative they barely knew. Victor’s relatives hardly had enough to get by themselves. He quickly wore out his welcome. I asked Victor where he sleeps now. He said, “Here and there.”

Victor cannot find a job in Jamaica. He does not have any skills or connections. I asked him what he does to survive – he told me he sells whatever he can find. He burns CDs and sells them; he sells used clothes; he sells whatever he can. His mother in the United States is barely scraping by herself, and cannot afford to support him. Transplanted from Brooklyn to Brownstown, a rough inner-city neighborhood in Kingston, I am amazed he has survived this long. As I am talking to him, all I can see is a New Yorker. I ask Victor if he can speak patois. He says, “Yeah, me caan speak patwa.” He can, more or less, but he has an accent. Anyone can see he is a Yankee. Victor has been in Kingston for ten years. He is surviving, but, just barely.

Victor broke the law. As an LPR, he was a guest of the United States. But, does it really make sense to deport him to Jamaica? As the 1953 Presidential Commission charged with reviewing deportation orders pointed out, “Each of the aliens is a product of our society. Their formative years were spent in the United States, which is the only home they have ever known. The countries of origin which they left … certainly are not responsible for their criminal ways” (quoted in Morawetz Reference Morawetz2000: 1961).

Had Victor been a citizen of the United States, he would have served his time, been released, and been able to make his choices about how to better his life in America. Instead, he was deported to a land he barely knows. Victor was eligible for citizenship. At age nine, his mother could have taken him to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and naturalized him. Had she become a citizen, he may have become a citizen automatically. Victor’s mother probably did not have the extra time and money to process a citizenship application. Victor could have become a citizen himself at age eighteen, but he did not. Like many American teenagers, he had other things on his mind. Now, he is paying dearly for his lack of U.S. citizenship. I asked Victor what his plans for the future were, and he told me: “To leave here. I think about where I wanna be. I have a woman that loves me in America. I have my daughter. I have my mother. I have my brothers. I have my sisters. I have my uncles. What the hell am I doing here?” Victor’s words render it evident that his strong familial ties to the United States mean that he feels he belongs there, not in Jamaica, the land of his birth and formal citizenship.

Vincent: Citizen Mother, Citizen Daughter, Deportee

Vincent was born in Guatemala City, but moved to the United States with his parents when he was six years old. His aunt lived in the United States, and sponsored his family to migrate as LPRs. Once in the United States, Vincent rarely thought about the fact that he was Guatemalan and considered his legal permanent residence in the United States to be permanent. According to the Department of Homeland Security, “legal permanent residents (LPRs) are foreign nationals who have been granted the right to reside permanently in the United States.”¹ Vincent would learn that this right can easily be revoked.

Vincent’s mother became a citizen when he was fifteen. She did not apply for Vincent, likely because she assumed her citizenship ensured his as well. Later, they would realize it did not. As Vincent’s mother was still married to his father, and his father was not a U.S. citizen, he did not automatically become a citizen with his mother’s naturalization, even though his parents were no longer living together.

After graduating from high school, Vincent worked a string of jobs. To supplement his income, he sold ecstasy pills. He was caught selling ecstasy to an undercover agent in 1999, and was given a five-year suspended sentence for distributing illegal drugs. Vincent decided to straighten up and found a stable job at Whole Foods. He was doing well for himself, earning a $55,000 salary, and continuing to move up in the company. He had his second daughter in 2004, and received custody of her when he separated from her mother.

In 2007, Vincent was pulled over, and the police officer discovered he had a suspended license. Vincent was given six weekends in jail for his suspended license. On his last weekend, when he expected to be released, the police officers handed Vincent over to immigration officials. His 1999 conviction made him deportable. In October 2008, he was deported to Guatemala, leaving behind his two daughters.

In Guatemala City, Vincent moved in with his uncle and cousins. He was able to get a job at a call center in Guatemala City, where he answers calls from consumers in the United States in English and Spanish. He earns enough to survive, but not enough to bring his children to live with him in Guatemala. Vincent’s greatest regret is that he is separated from his daughters. His older daughter lives with her mother, and his youngest daughter lives with his mother. Vincent would like to raise them himself, but with his income, he cannot afford to raise his daughters in Guatemala. Vincent was deported from the land he called home because he and his mother were unaware of a relatively obscure rule in naturalization law – that if parents are legally married, both have to become citizens to confer derivative citizenship on their child.

Vincent told me that, in Guatemala, people sometimes ask him where he is from. Even the Guatemalan consulate had trouble believing he was Guatemalan because he did not speak Spanish like a native speaker and did not know enough about Guatemala. When people say to Vincent “you aren’t from here, are you?” he responds: “technically, I am from here, but no, not really.” Vincent’s statement here is telling: officially, he is Guatemalan, but he feels as if he belongs “back home.” And, back home is in the United States. I asked Vincent what he would say if he could talk to President Barack Obama. He told me:

Although Vincent lacked the formal status of U.S. citizen, he feels as if his fulfillment of responsibilities (paying taxes) and his strong relationships to U.S. citizens render him deserving of territorial belonging. As an LPR convicted of an aggravated felony, an immigration judge had no choice but to rule otherwise.

O’Ryan: Father, Son, Deportee

Talking to O’Ryan, it was hard for me to believe that he had been in Jamaica for seven years. He seemed like he had come from Brooklyn the day before. As we chatted, I thought to myself he easily could be one of my students at the University of Kansas. He is articulate, poised, and thoughtful. O’Ryan was wearing a red T-shirt and jeans. His simple tennis shoes were perhaps the best indication that he does not live in Brooklyn. He explained to me that he moved to the United States from St. Thomas, Jamaica, when he was six years old, to join his mother and grandmother who had gone a few years before. He went as an LPR.

Coming from a small town in Jamaica, O’Ryan was impressed with all of the cars and big buildings in New York City. In elementary school, the other kids teased him at first, because of his accent. “It took me years to learn how to talk like this,” he told me with a strong Brooklyn accent. By junior high, kids were no longer teasing O’Ryan. He spoke and acted like a typical kid from Brooklyn. He played sports and was very popular in school. O’Ryan graduated with honors from his junior high school, and made it into John Dewey, a competitive high school in Brooklyn. He was glad to get into Dewey; he wanted to get out of his neighborhood, as he thought that would get him away from the trouble his friends were getting into in junior high school.

At John Dewey, it turned out, he knew a great deal of people. So it was not easy to stay out of trouble. He tried out for the track team, but did not make the team. Most of his friends were not attending school, and he slowly stopped going to school. After dropping out of high school, O’Ryan earned his general education development (GED) diploma, and enrolled in Mercy College, where he was studying computer programming.

While studying for his GED, and then at Mercy College, O’Ryan worked part-time at a series of jobs. He had a good job at a trucking company, but lost his job after getting into an argument with his boss. Unable to find a new job, O’Ryan had to quit school. With nothing to do, O’Ryan began hanging out again with his friends on the streets in Brooklyn. He tried to stay out of trouble though, because he hated the look on his mother’s face whenever she heard he was getting into trouble.

One evening, O’Ryan was hanging out, after spending the whole day inside with his girlfriend. A friend called to ask him for a ride, as his car had broken down in Hudson. O’Ryan went to pick him up. On the highway, they came upon a road block. At that point, his friend told him, “Yo, I’m dirty,” meaning that he had drugs with him and had not told O’Ryan. The police found the drugs and O’Ryan was sentenced to three to nine years for drug trafficking. He chose to do boot camp, so he only spent eighteen months in jail.

On the day of O’Ryan’s graduation from boot camp, his mother, his girlfriend, and his newly born daughter came to the graduation. O’Ryan saw his daughter for the first time. He was expecting to go home with them and start over. But, immigration agents were waiting for him, and told him he was going to be deported.

O’Ryan had been in the United States for nearly twenty years, and had no family he knew in Jamaica. O’Ryan qualified for citizenship when he was eleven years old. He did not apply, however, until his green card was about to expire in 1996. At that time, LPRs had to renew their green cards every ten years. O’Ryan, his mother, and his cousin decided to apply for citizenship instead of going through the process of renewing their green cards. They submitted their applications for naturalization at the same time. His mother’s citizenship went through, and then his cousin’s. As his application was taking longer than it should to be approved, he went to check on his citizenship. The citizenship office told him he needed to redo his fingerprints. He finally received the letter saying he should go to the swearing in ceremony in 2001, five years later.

Unfortunately, O’Ryan had been arrested a few weeks earlier, and was in jail when his letter arrived. At the age of twenty-five, O’Ryan was deported to a country he barely knew. His grandmother’s sister agreed to take him in, so he went to her house to live. Back in Jamaica, it is very hard to find work. He has found work occasionally, but never a permanent position. He also has trouble making friends in the small town where his aunt lives. He feels like he really has no one in Jamaica, except for his great-aunt.

Today, he is thirty-two years old. He has been in Jamaica for seven years. Still, for him, New York is his life. He talks to his neighbors, his cousins, his mother, and his daughter, now seven, every day. He showed me his cell phone. All of the calls he had made recently were to New York. New York continues to be both an emotional and financial lifeline for O’Ryan. When we spoke, O’Ryan had been working for two months, earning U.S.$50 a week, barely enough to pay for his food and transportation. His mother sends him money when she can, and comes to visit every year.

O’Ryan says he understands he made mistakes, but finds it difficult to see it as fair that he should spend the rest of his life paying for those mistakes. He does not see a future for himself in Jamaica, where he feels like a foreigner. O’Ryan was deported because he and his mother waited too long to apply for citizenship, and then there was an unexpected delay in his citizenship application. A bureaucratic mishap turned into a lifetime punishment for O’Ryan.

It is hard for O’Ryan not to dwell on the “what ifs.” What if his citizenship application had been processed just a few months earlier? What if he did not get into an argument with his boss? What if he had not answered his phone that day to go pick up his friend? What if there was not a road block that evening? What if his mother had not moved to Brooklyn when they migrated to Jamaica?

It is difficult for O’Ryan to come to terms with the fact that he is a Jamaican citizen, not a U.S. citizen. He told me:

For O’Ryan, America, and specifically Brooklyn, is “home,” despite what his passport says.

Hector: College Graduate, Sales Manager, Deportee

I met Hector at the airport when he arrived in Guatemala along with a planeload of deportees. He seemed confident and in good spirits, and even cracked a couple of jokes. Later he would tell me he wanted to cry on the plane, but did not think it was a good idea to shed tears on a plane full of Guatemalan deportees. I asked him if I could call him in a few weeks to see how he was doing. He agreed and gave me a number where I could reach him. A month later, I interviewed Hector and heard an amazing story.

Hector moved to the United States with his mother when he was three years old, in 1984. They joined his father who had migrated shortly after Hector was born. In 1990, his parents applied for political asylum, as Hector’s mother had worked for the Guatemalan government and could be subject to persecution if they returned. They were issued work permits and waited for their cases to be heard. Hector grew up in an integrated neighborhood in San Fernando Valley, California. His parents had been middle class in Guatemala, but were not able to transfer their skills to the United States. His mother stayed home and his father worked in landscaping. They were able to earn enough to get by, but were not very well off. Hector realized at a young age that he was attracted to boys, and sought friendships in high school and college with others who shared his sexual preference and could understand the challenges he faced. Most of his friends in high school were white and middle class.

Hector and his family spent years waiting for their asylum case to be heard. Finally, in 1999, they were able to legalize under the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. This legislation enabled them to become LPRs. After being LPRs for five years, they could apply for naturalization and become citizens. LPR status, however, guaranteed them the right to remain in the United States and made it easier for Hector to attend university. As an LPR, Hector could pay in-state tuition and qualify for some scholarships. Upon finishing high school, Hector was admitted to one of the University of California schools.

When Hector finished college, he had no trouble finding employment, and quickly was promoted to mid-level management. Things were going well for Hector. He was earning good money at the company and was promoted several times. Hector was eligible to become a U.S. citizen in 2004, and applied in mid-2005. However, by the time his interview came around in 2006, he had already been charged with a felony. When he went to his interview, they told him he had to stall the process until he finished his case. Had he applied the moment he became eligible, he would have been a U.S. citizen when he was charged with a felony and would not have faced deportation.

Hector lived a law-abiding life all through high school and college. However, he became involved in a credit card fraud scheme with friends of his from San Fernando Valley after graduating from college. Hector used the extra money to buy designer clothes and shoes. Eventually, Hector was caught and convicted of possession of stolen property. He was sentenced to two years in prison. It was the first time he had ever been in trouble with the law, and he was scared. As a gay man, it was not easy to be incarcerated.

Hector spent three months in L.A. County jail, where he was in a segregated cell for gay men and did not have any major problems. When Hector got to state prison, however, there was no segregated space for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Instead, he had to choose if he wanted a cell mate who was white, black, or Mexican. He chose Mexican. In state prison, Hector soon figured out he needed protection and found it in a fellow inmate, who offered to enter into a relationship with Hector. Hector explains:

Hector explained to me that he and his partner have plans to be together once he gets out. His partner is ready to leave the gang-banging lifestyle behind and move to Guatemala to be with Hector. When Hector was released from prison, his partner still had a year left to serve. Hector went to immigration detention, and then was deported to Guatemala City.

While in prison, Hector got several tattoos. He explained that in prison tattoos are earned through various acts. And once you earn a tattoo you have to get one to avoid trouble. In Guatemala, tattoos are heavily stigmatized and Hector has to cover them up in order to avoid harassment by police and victimization by gang members. It has been hard for Hector to adjust to life outside of prison and inside a country he barely remembers. He was able to secure employment at a call center, and imagines he will move up in the company. Hector told me his deportation was America’s loss. The United States invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in his education, and now he has taken all of those skills and experience with him to Guatemala.

Hector traveled to the United States on a tourist visa on his first trip. He and his family lost their legal status as tourists when their visas expired. At that point, they applied for political asylum, and enjoyed the “liminally legal” (Menjívar Reference Menjívar2006) status of asylum seeker. Once they were granted asylum, they became LPRs. Hector’s criminal conviction, however, erased his former legal status and he became a deportable alien. Hector’s movement over time between legal and illegal statuses provides a window into the unstable nature of illegality and legality.

Caleb: Father, Veteran, Deportee

Caleb was born in 1964 in St. Thomas, Jamaica, a parish not too far from Kingston. He grew up with his grandmother, who worked as a domestic, and his grandfather, who worked for the post office. In high school, Caleb was a police cadet. He became a police officer when he graduated, and was stationed at the U.S. vice-consulate’s house as a security guard.

Through this connection to the vice-consulate to the United States, Caleb was able to get a one-year visa to travel to the United States in 1985. Once there, he married a U.S. citizen, and became an LPR in 1988. Soon afterward, he joined the U.S. Army. Caleb told me he was attracted to the idea of being in the military ever since he moved to the United States. With his law enforcement background in Jamaica, it seemed an ideal career choice. As a temporary migrant, however, he could not join the army. He spoke to the recruitment officers in town, and they told him that as soon as he became an LPR, they would sign him up. When his green card arrived, the first thing Caleb did was to join the army.

Caleb dreamed of a military career, but had to leave the army after two years of service because of an injury. He was in rapid deployment training when he was injured in a tank accident. He developed three hernias in his back, and was declared a disabled veteran. Because of his injury, the U.S. military paid for his education, and Caleb went back to school.

Caleb studied computer science at a community college in Florida from 1992 to 1996. Once he finished, he got a job with the city government. From there, he worked in several government jobs, all in the region, all in computing. In his Southern Florida neighborhood, Caleb volunteered at a local computing program in the evenings – a Head Start program for children. When Hurricane Andrew hit, Caleb signed up to volunteer with the relief effort. He also helped veterans at the hospital. Caleb considers volunteer service to be an important part of who he is as a person. Caleb told me he often stayed away from Jamaicans, because many of the Jamaicans he met smoked marijuana, and he did not condone that behavior. With his police and military background, he chose not to do anything on the wrong side of the law. He lived a quiet, family life, spending most of his free time with his two children and his girlfriend.

I asked Caleb why he never became a citizen. He told me he saw the only two benefits to becoming a citizen were that he could vote and that he could get a federal job. The cost was that he thought he would have to renounce his Jamaican citizenship. So, even though he served in the U.S. Army and wanted to live permanently in the United States, he decided he did not want to renounce his Jamaican citizenship, as a matter of principle. He knew people could be deported for committing crimes. But because he considered himself a model citizen, and someone who avoids crime at all cost, he did not think he had anything to worry about. Caleb told me that he knew he could live in the United States with a permanent residence card, and did not apply for U.S. citizenship because he was not interested in the formal benefits: voting, securing a federal job, or applying for relatives to come to the United States. He was only interested in the ability to remain in the United States. He told me:

As a former police officer, a soldier, and a college graduate, Caleb did not see himself getting into any trouble. He had never gotten into trouble with the law in Jamaica; in contrast, he was a police officer who upheld the law. Unfortunately, Caleb did end up on the wrong side of the law, more than once. The first time Caleb had problems with the law, it was while he was stationed in Germany. When he came home to visit his wife, he was arrested in his neighborhood, and charged with possession with intent to distribute cocaine. He protested the charge, insisting that it was impossible – he did not use or sell drugs. The prosecutor said they had proof of his crimes on tape. It turned out to be a case of mistaken identification. Caleb was stationed in Germany on the day the tape was recorded. Although his name was cleared, this charge stayed on his record, and would come back to haunt him.

The second time Caleb got in trouble, he was charged with aggravated assault. Caleb was out with friends, and some of his friends were involved in a fight. One man ended up injured badly and had to go to the hospital. He pressed charges and blamed his injuries on Caleb. Caleb told me he did not hit anyone, but was not willing to place the blame on anyone else either. He pled guilty, and accepted a plea bargain of two years on probation.

The third time, Caleb was driving his Lexus to his friend’s house. When he parked, a police officer pulled up behind him and asked him something about his tags. Caleb asked the officer if he was under arrest; the officer said he was not, so Caleb went into his friend’s house. When he came out of his friend’s house, the car was gone. The next morning, Caleb went to the police station, and found that his car had been impounded. The police officer charged him with resisting arrest without violence.

When Caleb went to get his car back, he found that it had been badly damaged. The police had taken off the doors and broken the glove compartment, presumably looking for drugs. They had not found anything. Caleb thinks that they did not want to be responsible for the car, so found something to charge him with. When Caleb went to complain about his car, he was placed under arrest. Caleb was held in jail for three months as he went back and forth to court. He continuously asked about his attorney, but was not appointed one. Five minutes before his jury trial, he met his court-appointed lawyer for the first time. She asked him about his case. Given the fact that the case was going to trial in the next few minutes, Caleb decided he would rather represent himself. He told his side of the story, but the jury found that he had left the scene, which is grounds for resisting arrest without violence. The jury found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to nine months in jail.

From there, Caleb had to go to court for violation of probation. The judge sentenced him to forty-six months in prison for violation of probation. After doing his time, Caleb was deported to Jamaica, the land he had left twenty years before. When I spoke to Caleb in 2008, he had two children – a sixteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl. His children had a very hard time dealing with his deportation. His daughter cried every night for two months when he was deported. Finally, the kids were able to visit him in Jamaica. When they came to visit, and saw he was okay, they felt better. His son and daughter have come to visit each summer since he was deported four years ago. Caleb spoke proudly of his children. His son had recently won an award for public speaking, and had traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet the president.

Back in Jamaica, despite his college education and years of experience, Caleb has not been able to find work. In Jamaica, the stigma of “deportee” is hard to beat, and makes it difficult for Caleb to find employment. Caleb has become somewhat of a public figure in Jamaica, telling his story on the radio and in the print media. When people meet him, a tall, slim, clean-shaven man whose military and police background are evident, they find it hard to reconcile that with their image of a deportee as a criminal and a good-for-nothing. Caleb told me it is especially hard for him to reconcile with his deportation, because he has nothing to regret. Aggressive enforcement of criminal laws led to his criminal conviction, which in turn led to his deportation.

Citizenship and Territorial Belonging

These black and Latino men had made lives for themselves in the United States. They had been born abroad, but had no intention of returning to their countries of birth. They took the “permanent” aspect of their LPR status seriously. Through their stories, we can see clearly how the formalized political status of naturalized citizen is just that – a formal political status. Four of these five men completed all of their schooling in the United States, meaning they have been socialized into U.S. society along with those born in the United States. Caleb is the only one of these men who came to the United States as an adult. He, however, joined the U.S. military out of allegiance to the United States.

Despite their lack of U.S. citizenship, each of these men feels as if their home is in the United States. While in the United States, although they were not U.S. citizens, they considered themselves to be part of the cultural and social fabric of their communities. Victor’s familial ties to the United States make him feel as though that is where he belongs. Vincent feels culturally alienated in Guatemala, because, for him, the United States is where he belongs. In Vincent’s words: “I’m more citizen than some of the people … there.” O’Ryan also feels as if Brooklyn is home, because he completed his schooling there, he grew up there, and all of his friends and family are there. Hector, like O’Ryan, had his citizenship application in process when he was deported. Now, Hector is dealing with the major life adjustment that his deportation brought as he struggles to get used to living in the country where he was born. Caleb planned to live permanently in the United States and thought his permanent residence card would ensure he would be able to do so.

The stories of these men shed light on how a person can have access to social and cultural citizenship, even in the absence of formal citizenship. Their deportations also demonstrate that it is not always the case that civil and political rights precede social and cultural rights. These men felt as if they belonged in the United States. As LPRs, they had access to nearly all of the same benefits as U.S. citizens. Many of them would gladly return to the United States illegally, even though that would require them to live in the shadows. Victor, for instance, has tried to return illegally several times, as his primary objective is to return to his community in Brooklyn where he can be with his family.

Linda Bosniak (Reference Bosniak2006) argues that noncitizens’ outsider status shapes their experiences and identities within the national community. She points out that “aliens are denied the vote and most significant welfare benefits, and, notwithstanding the ties they may have developed in and with the community, they are always potentially subject to deportation by the state” (Bosniak 2006: 9). Because of the ways that citizenship status shapes the lives of noncitizens, Bosniak contends that alienage should be added to the list of key social identities that affect our lives such as race, gender, class, religion, and sexual orientation. In each of the cases I present, deportees’ status as noncitizens did not shape their lives until they faced the prospect of deportation. As LPRs, they were able to participate fully in U.S. society. It was only when they were placed in deportation proceedings that their political status as LPRs took on importance. Their stories point to the importance of territorial belonging, of being able to stake claims on the right to remain within a country, when one feels as if one belongs there.

Each of their lives has been dramatically altered because of their deportation. They have been separated from their families and placed in environments in which survival is challenging. In Jamaica, Victor, O’Ryan, and Caleb have found it exceedingly difficult to earn enough money to survive and depend on remittances from their family members in the United States. Hector and Vincent have been able to use their English skills and U.S. education to secure employment in call centers in Guatemala. All of these men must deal daily with the emotional cost of being permanently separated from their loved ones in the United States. Although not members of the U.S. political community, they perceive themselves to be members of U.S. society, and consider their deportation to be one of the worst punishments imaginable.

Future Research

Scholarly endeavors in the area of immigration law and its social consequences have an obligation to be socially and politically relevant. To state that immigration laws in the United States are unjust is not simply a moral stance: international human rights tribunes have consistently found the United States to be in violation of a host of international treaties with its immigration laws (Golash-Boza 2012). Despite being a nation that upholds justice and the rule of law, and being a nation of immigrants, immigrants facing deportation from the United States have surprisingly few rights. Thus, when I reflect on future research in this area, I envision interdisciplinary collaborations among sociologists, human rights and immigration lawyers, anthropologists, political scientists, and philosophers who come together to figure out how we can fix this broken system of immigration adjudication and create more humane laws. The role of future researchers in this area must be to (1) inform the public about the lack of due process in immigration proceedings; (2) produce works that can be used in courts of law to adjudicate immigration cases; and (3) collaborate with immigrant rights activists to design studies that benefit their communities.