“From TPS to Residency”: How TPS and DACA Recipients Make Claims on the State

• In Event: Racial Policy Determines Racial Politics

Abstract

In late 2017, the Trump administration announced that it was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program, which was signed into law by President Obama in 2013, granting temporary deportation relief to an estimated 800,000 young undocumented immigrants. Since that announcement was made, newfound attention has been placed on temporary immigration statuses and the estimated 400,000 immigrants who benefit from them, including DACA and TPS (Temporary Protected Status) recipients. Many of these immigrants have resided in the U.S. for decades, establishing roots in their communities, contributing to the U.S. economy, and raising U.S.-born children. However, as the policies of the current administration have made clear, these temporary statuses do not confer permanent residency, or any right to ongoing immigration status, creating a condition that some scholars have referred to as “permanent temporality.”

While in the past most undocumented, or liminally documented immigrants have remained “in the shadows,” in recent years, they have become increasingly visible, engaged, and assertive. This paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on temporary/uncertain legal statuses by examining how DACA and TPS designations impact recipients’ conceptualizations of citizenship rights and belonging. In particular, it asks: lacking formal citizenship rights, what frameworks do immigrants with temporary/uncertain statuses rely on in order to make claims on the state? The analysis draws from political ethnography, an interdisciplinary research strategy that seeks to generate contextual knowledge claims by engaging in reasoning from within social practice. I rely on 32 qualitative interviews I have conducted with DACA and TPS recipients in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey, as well as participant observation data I have collected while attending events, rallies, teach-ins, and advocacy days organized by immigrant rights organizations in these states. All data was coded and analyzed using Nvivo.

I find that TPS and DACA recipients have followed the example of other minority groups and relied on a discourse of rights to make claims on the state. These findings were consistent across individuals, regardless of their nation of origin and length of stay in the United States. However, immigrants’ length of stay in the U.S. impacted their sense of national belonging, and their expectations of rights –including the right to continue to reside in the U.S. Syrian TPS recipients (the latest group to be granted temporary deportation relief under the program) were the most likely to view the U.S. as a temporary home and express a desire to return to their home-country.

Author

• Emily Cury, Northeastern University