Licensing Status: Occupational Licensing and Stratified Legal Incorporation for Undocumented Young Adults

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 9) Migration, Citizenship, and Displacement

Abstract

How does occupational licensing shape the life-course transitions of undocumented migrants as they age into adulthood? How do these administrative infrastructures produce stratified levels of inequality? While scholars have analyzed passports and driver’s licenses, less attention has been paid to how under-theorized documents, such as professional licenses, can operate to structure legal personhood, participation and membership. Undocumented migrants who are unable to pursue occupational licensure and those who are working as unlicensed professionals are kept in a state of capture. This paper treats occupational licensing as an administrative site that captures undocumented workers, not by confining them, but by structuring the conditions under which their labor can exist. This shifts how we understand occupational licensing neither as a neutral, professional credentialing system nor one that regulates full exclusion, but instead as an active mechanism of legal stratification that arguably reproduces the carceral state. As unlicensed professionals, undocumented migrants are not expelled from the labor market, but instead are fixed in informal, precarious work that disciplines them through levels of risk, determining when they are able to pursue careers as unlicensed and as licensed professionals, a consequence of a changing legal landscape across the nation. In this paper, occupational licenses demonstrate that they do not merely certify workers, but actively decide who counts as a worker and the degrees to which their labor can be [administratively] legible and visible.

Author

• Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky, University of Washington