Migrations, Precarities and Illegalizations in the Americas, Panel II

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.

Sub Track

• Migration and Latin American diasporas

Session Organizer

• Luin Goldring, York University

Chair

• Tanya M Basok, University of Windsor

Individual Presentations

• Institutional precarity and arbitrariness: federal norms, local contexts and the recognition of migrants in Santiago, Chile - Luis Eduardo Thayer, Universidad de Los Lagos

• De movilidades y violencias emergentes: el tránsito migratorio irregular como problema público - Juan Carlos Narváez Gutiérrez, Investigación Multidisciplinaria Aplicada: Laboratorio Social (IMA-LAB SOCIAL)

• Tracking and boundary work: Trajectories of precarious legal status and precarious work among Latin American and Caribbean newcomers in Toronto - Luin Goldring, York University

• Reproducing Temporariness: The Making and Unmaking of Precarious Settlement in Mexico - Martha Luz Rojas-Wiesner, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur