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

The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.

Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times*

This paper analyzes the institutionalized production of precarious migration status in Canada. Building on recent work on the legal production of illegality and non-dichotomous approaches to migratory status, we review Canadian immigration and refugee policy, and analyze pathways to loss of migratory status and the implications of less than full status for access to social services. In Canada, policies provide various avenues of authorized entry, but some entrants lose work and/or residence authorization and end up with variable forms of less-than-full immigration status. We argue that binary conceptions of migration status (legal/illegal) do not reflect this context, and advocate the use of ‘precarious status’ to capture variable forms of irregular status and illegality, including documented illegality. We find that elements of Canadian policy routinely generate pathways to multiple forms of precarious status, which is accompanied by precarious access to public services. Our analysis of the production of...

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Institutionalizing Precarious Immigration Status in Canada

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity

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New Keywords: Migration and Borders

This article addresses the question of how to understand the relation among precarity, differential inclusion, and citizenship status with regard to Syrian refugees in Turkey. Turkey has become host to over 2.7 million Syrian refugees who live in government-run refugee camps and urban centres. Drawing on critical citizenship and migration studies literature, the paper emphasises the Turkish government’s central legal and policy frameworks that provide Syrians with some citizenship rights while simultaneously regulating their status and situating them in a position of limbo. Syrians are not only making claims to citizenship rights but they are also negotiating their access to social services, humanitarian assistance, and employment in different ways. The analysis stresses that Syrian refugees in Turkey continue to be part of the multiple pathways to precarity, differential inclusion, and negotiated citizenship rights.

Syrian refugees in Turkey: pathways to precarity, differential inclusion, and negotiated citizenship rights

mission identity, policy, and direction in the midst of two conflicting Korean responses; a relatively favorable reception of Christianity on the one hand, and a strong demand for the implementation of secular education from Korean leaders and intellectuals on the other. During initial years of the Korean mission, missionary activities were focused primarily in medicine and education due to legal restrictions against Christianity outside of these sectors. Going into the 1890s, the mission priority shifted to evangelism due largely to the strong personal commitment on the part of two leading missionaries, Horace G. Underwood and Samuel Moffett. Chapter 3 focuses on the issue of identification. Missionaries made efforts to overcome barriers of national, cultural and racial bias and superiority in light of the ideals of the Christian mission with varying degree of success. The author discovers that individual attitudes, commitment, and the nature and frequency of encounters with Koreans were significant factors in the variation. In chapters 4 and 5, the author examines the home, family, and the type of work missionaries engaged in and how these respective factors affected Korean encounters and identification. Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which conflicts are negotiated and resolved between the American missionaries’ priority on evangelism and Korean Christians’ emphasis on nationalism and modernization. Although American missionaries gradually accommodated the demands for higher education originating from Korean church leaders, the strong emphasis on evangelical activities from early missionaries worked to establish the conservative and evangelical tone of Korean Christianity that still exists today. In order to adequately understand the history of the Korean church, it is imperative to learn what these early pioneers had in mind for its nature and future direction. The strength of this book lies in the original way it deals with subjective interpretations from the key actors who formulated and modified early mission policy and vision through everevolving interactions with, responses to, and demands of Koreans. The analysis is objective and fair, free of the nationalistic biases often found in the writings of modern Korean history by Korean authors. However, the inclusion of a couple of additional key elements may have added to the overall analysis. Horace G. Underwood is known, especially to older Koreans, as Won Du-woo. Many other missionaries also had Korean names, and a more detailed explanation as to the significance of name adoption among missionaries may have provided more insight into the study of identity formulation. Methodist missionaries also constituted a significant portion of the Christian mission, and many of the medical and/or educational mission projects in Korea were jointly sponsored by Presbyterians and Methodists. At least a minor reference to the contribution of Methodist missions and their mutual influences on the formulation of the mission identity and policy would have been helpful. Overall, the book is a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of the roots of the Korean Christian phenomenon.

Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican ChicagoWorking the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago, by GenovaNicholas P. De. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 329 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0822336154.

Rodolfo F. Acuña

Papers

Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican ChicagoWorking the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago, by GenovaNicholas P. De. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 329 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0822336154.