Self-Preservation Amidst Rising Threats: Immigrant Internalization of Anti-Immigrant Narratives and its Effects on Community Solidarity

• In Event: 1464 - Immigrant Communities/Families

Abstract

In this original conference paper, I analyze ethnographic and interview data tracing the lives of one immigrant community in Chicago as they respond to the election and first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. This project reveals how political discourses about who deserves to live in the U.S. are reproduced on the ground, as individual immigrants struggle to cope with feelings of vulnerability in the face of aggressive immigration enforcement. I argue that individual migrants utilize different moral frameworks to evaluate their own and others’ legal irregularities, and to justify why some people are targeted for deportation while others are not. The construction of moral hierarchies can comfort individual immigrants as they try to anticipate their own risk of being apprehended (and frame themselves as not vulnerable), yet these social divisions also disrupt networks of social support and harm community solidarity. At the same time, as the federal government broadens its definition of “criminal aliens”- from law-breakers to all undocumented immigrants- this rhetorical shift is motivating changes within the immigrant community by sparking criticism towards established narratives about immigrant criminality, ultimately breaking down the distinctions between criminal and illegal drawn during the Obama presidency. These ideological shifts provide new opportunities for solidarity by motivating interest in a more inclusive social justice framework among people who were previously disengaged from politics. This paper contributes to sociological literature by showing how cultural narratives about illegality shape the way networks of support operate within the immigrant community by shifting collective understandings of who belongs in the community and who deserves to be removed.

Author

• Carly Offidani-Bertrand