Migrant Street Vendor Legal Consciousness Under Multiscalar Immigration Enforcement in New York City

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 6: Migration and Belonging

Abstract

In New York City, public infrastructure is often imagined as neutral terrain—spaces of circulation, commerce, and encounter. Yet for migrant street and subway vendors, these environments function as sites where multiple regimes of governance converge. This paper examines how immigration enforcement operates across scales—federal deportation policy, municipal vending regulation, transit policing, and discretionary quality-of-life enforcement—and how these layered regimes shape migrant legal consciousness in everyday urban life. Drawing on sustained ethnographic observation in and around a major subway station in Jackson Heights, participation in know-your-rights outreach with community organizations, and interviews with vendors and organizers, I argue that immigration enforcement does not appear solely through spectacular raids or formal removal proceedings; instead, it is experienced as a dispersed and infrastructural condition. Vendors navigate overlapping authorities—NYPD officers, MTA police, licensing agents, and the looming possibility of ICE—often without clear boundaries between them. Enforcement is understood as discretionary, unpredictable, and relational, producing a mode of legal consciousness attuned to reading spatial cues, assessing risk, and calibrating presence. Attention to infrastructure reveals how deportability becomes spatially organized. Decisions about where to stand, when to vend, whether to enter the subway system or remain on surrounding street corners, and how to interpret uniforms or patrol patterns are shaped by an awareness that enforcement operates across jurisdictions. Legal consciousness emerges through anticipation, collective/co-ethnic knowledge-sharing, and the embodied management of exposure. By situating immigration enforcement within urban infrastructure, this paper demonstrates how border logics diffuse into everyday governance, restructuring mobility, labor, and belonging well beyond the territorial border.

Author

• Manjeet Kaur, City University of New York