This article examines the effects of an uncertain legal status on the lives of immigrants, situating their experiences within frameworks of citizenship/belonging and segmented assimilation, and using Victor Turner's concept of liminality and Susan Coutin's "legal nonexistence." It questions black-and-white conceptualizations of documented and undocumented immigration by exposing the gray area of "liminal legality" and examines how this in-between status affects the individual's social networks and family, the place of the church in immigrants' lives, and the broader domain of artistic expression. Empirically, it draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix from 1989 to 2001. The article lends support to arguments about the continued centrality of the nation-state in the lives of immigrants.

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Liminal legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants' lives in the United States

This article analyzes how Central American immigrants in tenuous legal statuses experience current immigration laws. Based on ethnographic observations and over 200 interviews conducted between 1998 and 2009 with immigrants in Los Angeles and Phoenix and individuals in sending communities, this study reveals how the convergence and implementation of immigration and criminal law constitute forms of violence. Drawing on theories of structural and symbolic violence, the authors use the analytic category “legal violence” to capture the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of the law. The analysis focuses on three central and interrelated areas of immigrants’ lives—work, family, and schooling—to expose how the criminalization of immigrants at the federal, state, and local levels is not only exclusionary but also generates violent effects for individual immigrants and their families, affecting everyday lives and long-term incorporation processes.

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Legal violence: immigration law and the lives of Central American immigrants

Feminist criminologists have helped to criminalize domestic violence in the United States and elsewhere. With this significant accomplishment, scholars also have critiqued the intended and unintend...

Intersections of Immigration and Domestic Violence: Voices of Battered Immigrant Women

Many studies that link immigration and crime focus on assessing rates and explaining incidence. In this article we attempt to elucidate the immigrants’ fear of crime and their perceptions of U.S. authorities as these impinge on their relations with the police and on their own insertion in the host society. Based on sixty-one in-depth interviews with immigrants from Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico and on participant observation conducted in Phoenix, Arizona, we identify three immigrant-specific factors that affect immigrants’ perceptions of crime and the police. These are: a bifocal lens, that is, the immigrants’ former experiences with crime and their homelands’ justice system; contacts with U.S. immigration officials; and the social networks through which they learn what to expect in the United States from U.S. police authorities, as well as when and where to expect criminal activity, and who may be a potential criminal.

Latino immigrants’ perceptions of crime and police authorities in the United States: A case study from the Phoenix Metropolitan area

Feminist criminologists have helped to criminalize domestic violence in the United States and elsewhere. With this significant accomplishment, scholars also have critiqued the intended and unintended consequences of such reliance on the state for women's safety. One such critique reveals the intersectionality of social inequalities, social identities, and domestic violence. Here, the authors analyze the relationship between immigration and domestic violence based on interviews with 137 immigrant women in the United States from 35 countries. They find that immigration shapes how women understand domestic violence, their access to resources, and responses to domestic violence. This project documents observed dynamics of structural intersectionality for immigrant women as national origin and citizenship status are considered as another layer of identity politics and marginalization in relation to domestic violence.

Intersectionality, Immigration, and Domestic Violence

In this article, the authors assess the still limited literature on domestic violence among immigrant women in major receiving countries so as to begin delineating a framework to explain how immigrant-specific factors exacerbate the already vulnerable position—as dictated by class, gender, and race—of immigrant women in domestic violence situations. First, a review of this scholarship shows that the incidence of domestic violence is not higher than it is in the native population but rather that the experiences of immigrant women in domestic violence situations are often exacerbated by their specific position as immigrants, such as limited host-language skills, isolation from and contact with family and community, lack of access to dignified jobs, uncertain legal statuses, and experiences with authorities in their origin countries. The authors then examine the various responses at the national and local community levels to this issue in receiving countries.

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Immigrant Women and Domestic Violence Common Experiences in Different Countries

Undocumented-immigrant battered women in the borderlands have been pushed and pulled across the U.S.-Mexico border seeking socioeconomic advancement, maintenance of sociocultural ties, and physical security for themselves and their children. Legality and illegality play a central role in the lives of these women due to a combination of factors, such as how immigration policies linked to the needs of corporate capitalism have led to the creation of the “undocumented” population in the U.S. Southwest. Based on ethnographic research on battering among immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona, we bring a domestic violence perspective to immigration policy and an immigration perspective to domestic violence research to trace how battering contributes to illegality and how immigration policies contribute to men’s battering. We explore how border crossing and criminality can constitute survival as well as battering strategies and reflect on the place of kin and family in how immigrant women from Mexico struggle simultaneo...

“He Has Me Tied with the Blessed and Damned Papers”: Undocumented-Immigrant Battered Women in Phoenix, Arizona

In this paper we seek to contribute to a greater understanding of legal citizenship by exploring the gendered experiences of Latin-American-origin immigrants in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area as they go through the legalization process. To explore this gendered angle we rely on in-depth interviews conducted from 1998 through 2008 with women and men from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico. The data reveal that although immigration policies and procedures are presumably gender neutral, they are in fact inflected with gendered meanings and enacted in gendered social structures. Gender ideologies permeate the processes to differentially affect the legalization, permanent legal residence, and citizenship processes of immigrant women and men. This article points to key gender inequalities in immigration law.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=2333013

Olivia Salcido

Papers

Immigrant Women and Domestic Violence Common Experiences in Different Countries

“He Has Me Tied with the Blessed and Damned Papers”: Undocumented-Immigrant Battered Women in Phoenix, Arizona

Gendered Paths to Legal Citizenship: The Case of Latin-American Immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona

Gendered Paths to Legal Citizenship: The Case of Latin‐American Immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona