Precarious immobility: DACAmented and long-term unauthorized immigrants in the Bronx, Queens and Long Island

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 10. Migrant Youth

Abstract

In this paper I analyze how certain institutions and practices in local ecosystems offer community support for DACA recipients and long-term undocumented immigrants living in family-households –including protection, guidance or help–, as formal non-for profit organizations and informally around a street food vendor. These individuals were living in family households and experiencing what I call “precarious immobility” rather than atypical or unusual “unauthorized upward mobility” identified only among only a few cases. The takeaway here is that even when a vast majority of the almost 80 Mexican ‘DACAmented’ and unauthorized immigrants I followed over three years did not seem upwardly mobile, they benefited from nonprofits and a food truck to get advice on jobs, housing, or health and immigration issues related to their immigration status. I also provide descriptions of how immigrant illegality is experienced and lived by people living in mixed immigration status families in two different local ecosystems in New York State: one more welcoming to the foreign born in the City –specifically in the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx–, and the other one more hostile towards international migrants and ethno-racial minorities in suburban areas and towns in the East End of Long Island in Suffolk County.

Author

• Guillermo Yrizar Barbosa, CUNY Graduate Center