The Transformative Effects of Multi-layered Precarity: Experiences of Liminally Legal Central American Immigrant Workers

• In Event: Precarity and the State in Latin America

Abstract

The current U.S. legal framework has produced a multiplicity of temporary, precarious, uncertain legal statuses for immigrants seeking relief while at the same time restricting paths for more permanent statuses. Meanwhile, economic conditions post-recession have given way to new forms of work precarity, such as increases in temporary or part-time work, decline in benefits, and a general erosion of workers’ rights, conditions that are particularly accentuated for immigrants. This paper examines the subjective experiences of immigrants who experience this "multi-layered precarity," shaped by the legal framework that creates multiple legal statuses and the shifts in the economy that produce new forms of labor precarity. Both of these macro conditions create a specificity of experiences for immigrants in liminal legality: Immigrants who enter the process to regularize their legal status and those who hold temporary legal statuses also have a tenuous foothold on the labor market. This muli-layered precarity shapes their worldviews, minds, attitudes, interactions with their families and with institutions and, fundamentally, the constitution of the self. This paper aims to capture these immigrants’ experiences and transformations of the self by focusing on interactions within families and beyond families, with formal institutions and communities.

Author

• Cecilia Menjivar, University of Kansas