Legal Status Fluidity: Theorizing Legal Status Transitions and How Filipinos Navigate Immigration Pathways

• In Event: 4252 - Critical Migration Studies and Under-explored Intersectionalities: Racialization, Global Geopolitics, and Indigenous Peoples’ Mobilities

Abstract

The focus on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and its effects on undocumented immigrant youth ignore the larger problems of U.S. immigration policy. The racialization of undocumented immigration as a “Latino” issue also ignores the diversity of undocumented immigrants. While discussions on legal status are inseparable from citizenship, I argue that the two are theoretically distinct. That is, immigration scholars need to explore legal status and the movement in between legal statuses as a separate phenomenon from citizenship.
To further our understanding, I propose a new framework that I call “legal status fluidity.” This framework theorizes movement in between statuses and how immigrants navigate the U.S. immigration system. I draw my analysis from 54 in-depth interviews and more than 100 hours of multi-sited participant observation with Filipino and Filipino Americans immigrants from the Greater New York metropolitan area. To capture how legal status transitions occur, I recruited respondents from four different legal status groups: U.S. citizens, Legal Permanent Residents, visa holders and undocumented immigrants. To access these immigrant pathways, immigrants need to a) acquire immense amounts of social and financial capital necessary to change immigration statuses pre- and post-migration b) access to varied immigrant pathways through family and employment and c) utilize their historical relationship with the receiving country. I argue that legal statuses are mutable rather than static aspects of immigrants’ lives. It is through this fluidity that immigrants fall out of status or remain in status, and how certain undocumented immigrants can regularize their immigration status despite the heightened immigration enforcement.

Author

• Daniela Pila, University at Albany