The Limits of Deservingness and Law: A Temporary Protected Status Story

• In Event: Dysfunction and Exclusion in the Development of Migration Regimes and Policy

Abstract

Who deserves rights? This paper investigates how notions of deservingness have been a part of the efforts of Haitian temporary protective status (TPS) recipients to advocate for rights in Miami, Florida. Instead of justifying the necessity of more substantial legal provisions because of the circumstances of displacement, such as the 2010 earthquake,TPS recipients have been encouraged by activists to highlight their contributions to the United States. Inspired by Fassin et al’s ethnographic study of moral economies and subjectivities (2015), this paper compares the process of the making (and renewals) of the TPS with the advocacy efforts to propose comprehensive immigration reform in the United States. I argue that we should be wary of grounding political projects of resistance in desert. Notions of deservingness have been ingrained in the legal mechanisms that have operated the exclusion of Haitians and brought legimicacy to legal hierarchies among non-citizens. Deservingness is marked by ongoing negotiations of “merited” and “ascribed” characteristics or grounds where rights claimants are called to perform identities or markers of difference that can be legible to the state. Through this process of making an individual claim on limited grounds, attention is transferred from the broader structural sources of inequality and exclusion in global politics in favor of a narrow and individualized conception of political responsibility. Haitians are left out in the United States as the others of citizenship.

Author

• Nathalia Justo, Northwestern University