Legal Brokers: Navigating Illegality through Undocumented Resource Networks

• In Event: 2384 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Dynamics of Incorporation

Abstract

Previous research emphasizes the vital role children of immigrants play in helping their parents navigate everyday life in the United States as both language and cultural brokers. However, relatively little attention has been dedicated to understanding how undocumented status complicates this brokering process. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with Mexican-origin undocumented young adults in Southern California, this study finds that undocumented students play an indispensable role as they guide their families through a complicated and restrictive immigration system. I conceptualize the phenomenon of legal brokers to encompass the ways these young adults facilitate and transmit legal information, knowledge, and awareness for their undocumented families. I find that these young adults engage in three distinct levels of legal brokering: (1) Basic, (2) Intermediate, (3) Complex, which are determined by their embeddedness in undocumented resource networks and the level of social capital they derive from these spaces. This project sheds light on how undocumented youth are instrumental to the integration of their undocumented parents in both the federal and state-level context. This study also illuminates the negative consequences that arise when students engage in legal brokering as well as the reasons as to why undocumented youth do not engage in this form of brokering. The findings of this project demonstrate the ways undocumented young adults contribute to how their undocumented parents understand their immigration status.

Author

• Vanessa Delgado, University of California-Irvine