Session Submission Summary

Migrations, Precarities and Illegalizations in the Americas, Panel I

Sat, May 30, 8:00 to 9:45am, TBA

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Two panels will present analyses of the production of migrant illegality and other forms of precarious legal status from several vantage points in the Americas. Panelists will use cases from Chile, Mexico, the United States and Canada to consider how legal status precarities and exclusions are produced by various institutional actors, at several levels, in the course of journeys and in sites of destination and settlement. The papers offer several contributions. Three papers draw attention to spatialized variation and discontinuities in the production, experience, and even possibilities of precarious status and illegalized existence in three national contexts. Two papers address Central American migrants in Mexico; one analyzes the production of temporary precarious status and social exclusion; the other investigates how these migrants are represented in the context of transit migration. One paper examines the corporeal implications of migrant illegality understood as structural violence by examining health outcomes. Another paper analyzes the intersections of migrant legal status trajectories and employment using the concepts of boundary work and conditionality. The proposed panels aim to generate a comparative dialogue about the processes, institutions and scales implicated in the production, representation and experiences of non-citizen precarious status and illegalities for mobile populations in the context of shifting and somewhat variable immigration and citizenship regimes in the Americas.

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