This chapter asks what happens when transnational migrant families own homes, plant trees, and es... more This chapter asks what happens when transnational migrant families own homes, plant trees, and establish businesses in small-town America but still lack a viable path to legal residency. Based on extensive fieldwork in small, rural Arkansas communities with Salvadoran transnational migrants, the author explores the contradictory dynamics between a growing identification with local geographies and continuing legal exclusion. Most Salvadoran migrants are caught between categories of national belonging; classified as either “illegal” or “temporary,” they lack rights to political participation either in the United States or in El Salvador. These legal exclusions create a mobile space of exception around the body of the migrant, which facilitate the exploitation of migrants' labor. Legal exclusion also contributes to social exclusion through the contradictory production of both invisibility and hypervisibility. Despite this, transnational migrants continue to put down roots in their new places of settlement.
In a globalized world, place and policy continue to matter. While theories of transnationalism em... more In a globalized world, place and policy continue to matter. While theories of transnationalism emphasize the ways in which migrants’ social ties and cultural imaginaries transcend boundaries, this transcendence is structured by the geographies of economic production and state policies. Particular sites of settlement in the United States, often determined by emergent labor markets, also profoundly shape the experiences of particular migrant communities. Rather than an incidental backdrop, place exerts an influence through specific contexts of cultural practice and historical heritage as well as emergent configurations of racial and ethnic identities. In light of this, the recent trend of Latin American settlement in rural areas of the Heartland requires a reexamination of theories of transnational migration that have primarily been formed with reference to either urban areas or the border region. The particular histories and cultural identities embedded in these rural Middle American landscapes inform the process of Latin Americanization or “tropicalization” of the landscape (Davis 2001). Given the high proportion of migrants in new destinations lacking in full legal status, these sites can also shed light on the cultural logics and concrete impacts of deportability and legal marginalization.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1079/thumbnail.jp
This chapter presents a case study of an experiential learning project where undergraduate studen... more This chapter presents a case study of an experiential learning project where undergraduate students conducted interviews with leaders and representatives of local immigrant and refugee communities and with people in local organizations involved with these communities. This community-engaged project leads students to see the inherent interconnections of local to global issues. The open-ended process fostered opportunities for growth in cultural humility and a sense of critical global citizenship, while the design of the project remained very accessible to students and manageable for faculty workloads. Students become aware of the numerous local immigrant and refugee communities and their contributions to the well-being of the larger community, and often developed relationships and skills that carried them into other experiences of emergent cosmopolitan citizenship. Students went on to community organizing, documentary work, policy advocacy, further research, and on-campus activism around refugee and immigrant rights. We believe that this project has fostered cultural humility and critical cosmopolitan perspectives among students, as well as contributing to practices of solidarity and insurgent democratic citizenship (Majka and Longazel in Public Integrity, 19[2]:151–163, 2017; Leitner and Strunk in Urban Geography, 35[7]:943–964, 2014) that are transforming the local community.
Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 2010
Asignificant proportion of El Salvador's citizens live outside the Salvadoran national territ... more Asignificant proportion of El Salvador's citizens live outside the Salvadoran national territory, and the Salvadoran economy is built on migrant remittances. Economic significance and symbolic elevation to the level of national heroes has not translated into political empowerment for migrants; rather, migrants find themselves in a doubly marginalized position vis-a-vis both home country and receiving nations. Calling their campaign "suffrage" for the diaspora, a number of Salvadoran transnational migrant activists have mobilized a cam paign for voting rights for citizens living abroad, staking a claim to belonging and political participation rights. At the same time, many Salvadorans who remain in the national territory, including both
President Donald J. Trump’s executive actions expanding immigration enforcement and reproducing s... more President Donald J. Trump’s executive actions expanding immigration enforcement and reproducing stigmatizing discourses about immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers are not a new direction in immigration enforcement. While the racist dimensions of the approach are more unmasked in his rhetoric, current enforcement is merely the expansion of an entrenched project of state violence. The current panic, in other words, is the culmination of the buildup of the deportation regime (De Genova and Peutz 2010), an interconnected web of systems of incarceration and exile that serves as a broad mechanism of social control and repression. In the U.S., this system has been built over the past several decades and expanded during the past four presidential administrations, including President Barack Obama’s tenure. This regime “disappears” migrant bodies and enacts state violence on them in a way that resonates with past state repression and terror regimes facilitated by U.S. military aid to Lati...
This panel presents research from the new edited volume Migration and Mortality (edited by Longaz... more This panel presents research from the new edited volume Migration and Mortality (edited by Longazel and Hallett, Temple University Press, 2021). Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of their ability to live fully. As laws and policies create ripe conditions for the further extraction of money, resources, and labor power from the dispossessed, the contributors to Migration and Mortality examine immigration policies as not only restrictive, but extractive. The work pr...
In the construction of immigration status categories in law and social practice, the power of the... more In the construction of immigration status categories in law and social practice, the power of the nation‐state to define migrants’ status is pervasive but far from absolute. In this article, I examine the conditioned legality known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in US immigration law through a discussion of legal structures, historical frames, local discourses, and Salvadoran migrants’ lived experiences with liminal legality in rural Arkansas in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. I argue that migration policy, though fraught with ambiguity and contradiction (see Coutin 2007; Coutin and Yngvesson 2008), functions both to reproduce and to mask the benefits to the nation‐state from the ambiguous inclusion and simultaneous exclusion of migrant workers. In spite of the efficacious ways immigration policies discipline and constrain, within these limits migrants, legal practitioners, and others respond as critical agents to the policy structures shaping their lives.
The Trump administration’s executive orders and policy changes regarding refugee resettlement and... more The Trump administration’s executive orders and policy changes regarding refugee resettlement and stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions are likely to create serious human rights and humanitarian impacts. These include separation of children from their parents, denial of due process in immigration courts, lengthy incarceration in detention centers, denial or loss of employment, denial of visas to citizens of some predominantly Muslim countries, denial of entry to previously vetted refugees scheduled for resettlement, and return (refoulment) of persons with well-founded fears of persecution or torture. These actions will potentially impact key human rights areas and concerns, such as nondiscrimination, equality before the law, equal protection of the law, protection against arbitrary punishment, the right to asylum, and the special protections accorded to families. They involve the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights...
Similar to articles 23-27 of the UDHR, articles 25-31 of the 1990 International Convention on the... more Similar to articles 23-27 of the UDHR, articles 25-31 of the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families specify equal access by immigrants to educational, vocational & health/social services and equality of living and working conditions and employment contracts. Beginning in 2007, Professor Majka has involved students in his immigration classes in research on the challenges and obstacles immigrants and refugees in the Dayton area experience relevant for those areas specified by the Convention. Joined by students in Professor Linda Majka classes, students arranged and conducted interviews with representatives of Daytonarea immigrant and refugee communities and with staff of human service agencies who work with these communities. Students also helped organize and observed focus groups of specific populations. Students in Professor Hallett’s Anthropology of Human Rights class participated in the latest research beg...
This chapter asks what happens when transnational migrant families own homes, plant trees, and es... more This chapter asks what happens when transnational migrant families own homes, plant trees, and establish businesses in small-town America but still lack a viable path to legal residency. Based on extensive fieldwork in small, rural Arkansas communities with Salvadoran transnational migrants, the author explores the contradictory dynamics between a growing identification with local geographies and continuing legal exclusion. Most Salvadoran migrants are caught between categories of national belonging; classified as either “illegal” or “temporary,” they lack rights to political participation either in the United States or in El Salvador. These legal exclusions create a mobile space of exception around the body of the migrant, which facilitate the exploitation of migrants' labor. Legal exclusion also contributes to social exclusion through the contradictory production of both invisibility and hypervisibility. Despite this, transnational migrants continue to put down roots in their new places of settlement.
In a globalized world, place and policy continue to matter. While theories of transnationalism em... more In a globalized world, place and policy continue to matter. While theories of transnationalism emphasize the ways in which migrants’ social ties and cultural imaginaries transcend boundaries, this transcendence is structured by the geographies of economic production and state policies. Particular sites of settlement in the United States, often determined by emergent labor markets, also profoundly shape the experiences of particular migrant communities. Rather than an incidental backdrop, place exerts an influence through specific contexts of cultural practice and historical heritage as well as emergent configurations of racial and ethnic identities. In light of this, the recent trend of Latin American settlement in rural areas of the Heartland requires a reexamination of theories of transnational migration that have primarily been formed with reference to either urban areas or the border region. The particular histories and cultural identities embedded in these rural Middle American landscapes inform the process of Latin Americanization or “tropicalization” of the landscape (Davis 2001). Given the high proportion of migrants in new destinations lacking in full legal status, these sites can also shed light on the cultural logics and concrete impacts of deportability and legal marginalization.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1079/thumbnail.jp
This chapter presents a case study of an experiential learning project where undergraduate studen... more This chapter presents a case study of an experiential learning project where undergraduate students conducted interviews with leaders and representatives of local immigrant and refugee communities and with people in local organizations involved with these communities. This community-engaged project leads students to see the inherent interconnections of local to global issues. The open-ended process fostered opportunities for growth in cultural humility and a sense of critical global citizenship, while the design of the project remained very accessible to students and manageable for faculty workloads. Students become aware of the numerous local immigrant and refugee communities and their contributions to the well-being of the larger community, and often developed relationships and skills that carried them into other experiences of emergent cosmopolitan citizenship. Students went on to community organizing, documentary work, policy advocacy, further research, and on-campus activism around refugee and immigrant rights. We believe that this project has fostered cultural humility and critical cosmopolitan perspectives among students, as well as contributing to practices of solidarity and insurgent democratic citizenship (Majka and Longazel in Public Integrity, 19[2]:151–163, 2017; Leitner and Strunk in Urban Geography, 35[7]:943–964, 2014) that are transforming the local community.
Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 2010
Asignificant proportion of El Salvador's citizens live outside the Salvadoran national territ... more Asignificant proportion of El Salvador's citizens live outside the Salvadoran national territory, and the Salvadoran economy is built on migrant remittances. Economic significance and symbolic elevation to the level of national heroes has not translated into political empowerment for migrants; rather, migrants find themselves in a doubly marginalized position vis-a-vis both home country and receiving nations. Calling their campaign "suffrage" for the diaspora, a number of Salvadoran transnational migrant activists have mobilized a cam paign for voting rights for citizens living abroad, staking a claim to belonging and political participation rights. At the same time, many Salvadorans who remain in the national territory, including both
President Donald J. Trump’s executive actions expanding immigration enforcement and reproducing s... more President Donald J. Trump’s executive actions expanding immigration enforcement and reproducing stigmatizing discourses about immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers are not a new direction in immigration enforcement. While the racist dimensions of the approach are more unmasked in his rhetoric, current enforcement is merely the expansion of an entrenched project of state violence. The current panic, in other words, is the culmination of the buildup of the deportation regime (De Genova and Peutz 2010), an interconnected web of systems of incarceration and exile that serves as a broad mechanism of social control and repression. In the U.S., this system has been built over the past several decades and expanded during the past four presidential administrations, including President Barack Obama’s tenure. This regime “disappears” migrant bodies and enacts state violence on them in a way that resonates with past state repression and terror regimes facilitated by U.S. military aid to Lati...
This panel presents research from the new edited volume Migration and Mortality (edited by Longaz... more This panel presents research from the new edited volume Migration and Mortality (edited by Longazel and Hallett, Temple University Press, 2021). Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of their ability to live fully. As laws and policies create ripe conditions for the further extraction of money, resources, and labor power from the dispossessed, the contributors to Migration and Mortality examine immigration policies as not only restrictive, but extractive. The work pr...
In the construction of immigration status categories in law and social practice, the power of the... more In the construction of immigration status categories in law and social practice, the power of the nation‐state to define migrants’ status is pervasive but far from absolute. In this article, I examine the conditioned legality known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in US immigration law through a discussion of legal structures, historical frames, local discourses, and Salvadoran migrants’ lived experiences with liminal legality in rural Arkansas in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. I argue that migration policy, though fraught with ambiguity and contradiction (see Coutin 2007; Coutin and Yngvesson 2008), functions both to reproduce and to mask the benefits to the nation‐state from the ambiguous inclusion and simultaneous exclusion of migrant workers. In spite of the efficacious ways immigration policies discipline and constrain, within these limits migrants, legal practitioners, and others respond as critical agents to the policy structures shaping their lives.
The Trump administration’s executive orders and policy changes regarding refugee resettlement and... more The Trump administration’s executive orders and policy changes regarding refugee resettlement and stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions are likely to create serious human rights and humanitarian impacts. These include separation of children from their parents, denial of due process in immigration courts, lengthy incarceration in detention centers, denial or loss of employment, denial of visas to citizens of some predominantly Muslim countries, denial of entry to previously vetted refugees scheduled for resettlement, and return (refoulment) of persons with well-founded fears of persecution or torture. These actions will potentially impact key human rights areas and concerns, such as nondiscrimination, equality before the law, equal protection of the law, protection against arbitrary punishment, the right to asylum, and the special protections accorded to families. They involve the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights...
Similar to articles 23-27 of the UDHR, articles 25-31 of the 1990 International Convention on the... more Similar to articles 23-27 of the UDHR, articles 25-31 of the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families specify equal access by immigrants to educational, vocational & health/social services and equality of living and working conditions and employment contracts. Beginning in 2007, Professor Majka has involved students in his immigration classes in research on the challenges and obstacles immigrants and refugees in the Dayton area experience relevant for those areas specified by the Convention. Joined by students in Professor Linda Majka classes, students arranged and conducted interviews with representatives of Daytonarea immigrant and refugee communities and with staff of human service agencies who work with these communities. Students also helped organize and observed focus groups of specific populations. Students in Professor Hallett’s Anthropology of Human Rights class participated in the latest research beg...
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