Racialized Political Fields: The Case of Immigration Advocacy

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Seven: Racial Formation as Reified through the Social Structure, Cultural Experiences, and Multi-Media Consumption

Abstract

It is clear that the law operates as a key technology for the production of racist racial projects, or “interpretation[s], representation[s], or explanation[s]… [to] organize and distribute resources” (Omi and Winant 2014:125) through differentially allocating membership and rights. However, less attention has been given to how racialization impacts the work of actors who mobilize to expand immigration rights, and it is less empirically clear how race, as a political structure, impacts political opportunities for immigration reform. In this paper, I use the case of advocacy in support of temporary protected status (TPS), a liminal legal category (Menjívar 2006) to examine how immigration advocates perceive and mobilize racial projects in support of their political goals. Using semi-structured interviews with 60+ civil society advocates and state actors, legal documents across several litigation proceedings, and ethnographic observations at advocacy events and meetings from July 2025-present, I find that immigration advocates perceive the political field in which they operate as patterned by racialized opportunity structures, which impacts their decision-making in strategic ways. While previous scholarship has demonstrated how organizations are racialized structures (Ray 2019), I build on this work through analyzing an entire political field as racialized–that is, the relationships between organizations, and between civil society and state organizations, are also structured by race. Advocates simultaneously (1) strategically leverage this reality through conducting what I call “racial rehabilitation work,” (2) challenge this reality through mobilizing legal claims of racial animus against the state, and (3) understand racism as a political barrier to legislative reform that would provide TPS-holders a pathway to lawful permanent residency. Ultimately, I find that race shapes the political process through demarcating opportunities and shaping strategies in multiple fronts of advocacy, including administrative, legislative, and judicial mobilization.

Author

• Neha Lund, Brown University