Governing Migrant “Illegality” in Cities: Categories, Instruments, and Resistances
Type: Virtual Paper
Day: 3/1/2022
Start Time: 2:00 PM
End Time: 3:20 PM
Theme: Ethnonationalism and Exclusion Around the World
Sponsor Group(s):
Latinx Geographies Specialty Group
, Urban Geography Specialty Group
, Socialist and Critical Geography Specialty Group
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Organizer(s):
Walter Nicholls
, Susan Coutin
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Chairs(s):
Walter Nicholls, Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California Irvine
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Description:
This session examines how local governments create instruments to govern “illegalized” migrants. Citizens mobilize norms and moralities to draw symbolic boundaries between “normal” and “abnormal” residents (Lamont and Molnár 2002; Foucault 2004). Elected officials pass laws to translate these boundaries into legal categories, bureaucracies administer and normalize these categories, and the police defend legality against illegality through state violence. Municipal governments employ a variety of instruments to govern illegalized migrants, including ordinances requiring local police to cooperate with federal law enforcement agencies, surveillance of day laborers and street vendors, requiring proof of legal residency for municipal services, denying language access, among others. Governing illegalized people therefore involves many different instruments to entangle migrants and render lives impossible (De Genova 2004; Foucault, 2004; Inda 2006; Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014).
Enacting governing these instruments does not result in the end of illegalized people and conduct (Coutin 2003; Nicholls and Uitermark 2016). Illegalized migrants settle in cities and navigate the constraints of illegality (De Genova 2005; Dreby 2015). Many carve out a home in the city, become enmeshed in economies, encroach on spaces denied to them, and exert equality through civic groups and social movements. As illegalized migrants become a part of their cities and gain legitimacy, it becomes harder for governments to banish them (Van Schendel and Abraham 2005; De Genova 2005; Smart and Zerilli 2014). This results in “liminal” governing categories for activities and groups occupying the “grey zone” between the legal and illegal (Menjívar 2006).
The purpose of this session is to identify the political norms underlying illegalization, the political mechanisms for translating exclusionary norms into legal categories, the technologies and instruments used to govern illegalized people, resistances to illegalization, and the governance of liminally legal people and conduct.
Presentation(s), if applicable
Juan Herrera, University of California, Los Angeles; Day Laborers as Placemakers: Rethinking the Plight of Informal Workers in the Neoliberal City |
Austin Kocher, Syracuse University; The Resurgence of 287(g): New Data and Theories on America's Most Controversial Immigration Enforcement Policy |
Walter Nicholls, ; Insurgent Bureaucrats: Governmental Struggles over Immigrant Belonging in Long Beach, California |
Natasha Sharma, ; Illegal scavenging bodies: The subterranean lives of migrant manual scavengers in India’s sewer lines |
Non-Presenting Participants Agenda
| Role | Participant |
| Discussant | Monica Varsanyi |
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Governing Migrant “Illegality” in Cities: Categories, Instruments, and Resistances
Description
Virtual Paper
Contact the Primary Organizer
Walter Nicholls - wnicholl@uci.edu
Session Sponsored By
