Abstract
Over the past few decades, immigration has become a central issue in scholarly and policy debates. While scholarship has worked to uncover underlying mechanisms, the public debate has been too often informed by questions of assimilability and the rule of law drawing distinctions that hold up certain subgroups within a community as deserving and others as undeserving. This introduction to the special issue briefly outlines the theoretical and public debates while describing the articles in the special issue.
Over the past few decades, immigration has become a central issue in scholarly and policy debates. Empirical studies in the area have moved beyond the linear and positive assessments that characterized earlier studies of assimilation toward a perspective that shows immigrant incorporation to be a segmented endeavor shaped by historical processes and structural contexts that bestow advantages to some while disadvantaging others. As scholars argue, the contexts that make up immigrants’ everyday worlds affect their educational pursuits, workplace experiences, relationships, and their physical and mental health. More recently, scholarship has focused on questions of citizenship, rights, and belonging, and the ways in which membership is politically, socially, and culturally constructed. While scholarship has worked to uncover underlying mechanisms, the public debate has been too often informed by questions of assimilability and the rule of law drawing distinctions that hold up certain subgroups within a community as deserving and others as undeserving. These public characterizations have also influenced policies and shaped access.
The articles in this special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist interrogate notions and perceptions of worthiness using the tools of rigorous social science analysis. Irene Bloemraad, Heidy Sarabia, and Angela Fillingim draw from 54 in-depth interviews with 40 teenagers from mixed-status families to understand how parents’ immigration status influences the second generation’s political and civic engagement as well as their notions of citizenship. They find that the Mexican American second-generation, regardless of parental immigration status, are politically and civically engaged. They also find that notions of “good” citizenship encompass a range of characteristics. Yet the majority of Mexican American teens agreed that “good” citizens respect laws and “don’t rock the boat,” perhaps reflecting the broad reach of the illegality discourse in the Mexican immigrant community. In addition, young people with at least one undocumented parent redefine “good” citizenship to include their noncitizen parents’ contributions. This expanded notion of citizenship is rooted in their lived experiences and highlights the enduring tension between formal and informal definitions of citizenship for undocumented immigrants and their families.
The tension between formal and informal citizenship is shaped not only by federal law in the United States but also by state laws and policies as Kara Cebulko and Alexis Silver argue in their examination of the impact of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in hospitable and hostile contexts. Drawing from two separate studies conducted in Massachusetts and North Carolina, they show how Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients are embedded in multiple institutional and political contexts, resulting in a conjunctural membership, or a sense of belonging that is informed by their at times simultaneous experiences of inclusion and exclusion in layered political contexts, revealing the dynamic nature of belonging.
Drawing from the experiences of 30 deported Jamaicans, Tanya Golash-Boza challenges legal notions of citizenship and shows that Legal Permanent Residents, who are noncitizens and deportable, make citizenship claims based on a sense belonging to their families and communities. Ironically, this strong sense of belonging prevented respondents from completing the citizenship process and rendered their alienage as insignificant until they were deported. Golash-Boza’s piece highlights the influence of social and cultural citizenship for creating strong ties to a country even in the absence of legal citizenship. In stark contrast to Golash-Boza’s respondents, who claim citizenship based on family and community ties, Michele Statz shows how unaccompanied Chinese minors to the United States must break ties with their families in order to establish a narrative of “deservingness” for legal relief.
Examining the migration experiences of Fujianese youth and the lawyers who represent them, Statz shows how the language of the law requires a carefully scripted identity that highlights migrants’ age and vulnerability to scrupulous parents. Statz complicates this carefully selected legal identity by highlighting the agency of Fujianese youth in developing this narrative and the resultant anguish of having to choose a “paper life.” Statz also challenges national identity narratives that often seek to adjudicate between inclusion and exclusion. In her article, Sarah Spencer takes up this very issue, and maps the granting of health care and education entitlements, or the formal inclusion of undocumented immigrants across the European Union despite a concomitant increase in suspicion, enforcement, and removal of undocumented immigrants. Spencer finds that undocumented children are seen as more deserving of access to public services than adults, precisely because of their age and perceived vulnerability, and not based on meritocratic claims, which has been used in the United States. Yet in no country are they seen as equally deserving than citizens, highlighting the boundary between citizens and noncitizens. Walter Nicholls, Marcel Maussen, and Laura Caldas de Mesquita echo Spencer’s findings through their comparison of the claims made by immigrant youth movements in the Netherlands and the United States.
Pooling data, including 56 combined interviews and extensive newspaper analysis, of immigrant youth mobilizations in the Netherlands and the United States, Nicholls, Maussen, and de Mesquita show that despite very different immigration histories, and political and legal landscapes, advocates and activists in both countries employ similar discursive strategies to create legal-administrative openings that favor undocumented children and youth, who are perceived as good, deserving immigrants because they are culturally assimilated. They argue that this has not only created differences between undocumented immigrants but has also stratified undocumented immigrants in relation to advocacy resources, as well-resourced advocacy organizations pursue these more appealing cases.
We hope this special issue will spark further discussion and invigorate healthy debate. Our intent is to sharpen theoretical perspectives, enhance methodological approaches, and inform a body of work that helps us better understand the ways in which contemporary immigration regimes inform experiences of membership.