Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Migrant Illegalization and Minoritized Populations

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity

Abstract

This entry reviews literature on the production of migrant illegalization – the identification of immigrants/migrants and those imagined as immigrant/migrant as not belonging and a threat to the nation – and the ways it affects minoritized populations. It employs an intersectional framework to connect the ways immigration status, race, gender, and class converge to define specific populations as “other” and illegalized. It also proposes moving away from binary framings of immigration status, given the multiplication of temporary and precarious statuses globally that produce temporally and spatially specific contexts of precarity. Although socially produced, migrant illegalization has material effects that define individuals as disposable through forced removal or the creation of internal borders that “deter” or produce inhospitable migration contexts. Therefore, migrant illegalization contributes to the local (internal) and transnational development of borders. Finally, the entry highlights the ways migrants and their allies mobilize to counteract illegalization and construct safer contexts of reception.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Abrego LJ (2014) Sacrificing families: navigating laws, labor, and love across borders. Stanford University Press, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson B (2013) Us and them? The dangerous politics of immigration control. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Cacho LM (2012) Social death: racialized rightlessness and the criminalization of the unprotected. Nation of newcomers: immigrant history as American history. New York University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Calavita K (2005) Immigrants at the margins: law, race, and exclusion in Southern Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Casas-Cortes M, Cobarrubias S, Pickles J (2011) Stretching borders beyond sovereign territories? Mapping EU and Spain’s border externalization policies. Geopolitica(s) Rev Estud Sobre Espacio Poder 2(1):71–90

    Google Scholar 

  • Castles S (2010) Understanding global migration: a social transformation perspective. J Ethn Migr Stud 36(10):1565–1586

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Castles S, Derya O (2014) Circular migration: triple win, or a new label for temporary migration? In: Battistella G (ed) Global and Asian perspectives on international migration. Springer, Cham, pp 27–49

    Google Scholar 

  • Chak T (2014) Undocumented: the architecture of migrant detention. Sections, The Architecture Observer, Montreal

    Google Scholar 

  • Chavez LR (2008) The Latino threat: constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation. Stanford University Press, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Coll KM (2010) Remaking citizenship: Latina immigrants and new American politics. Stanford University Press, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Coutin SB (2007) Nations of emigrants: shifting boundaries of citizenship in El Salvador and the United States. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

  • Cuadra CB (2012) Right of access to health care for undocumented migrants in EU: a comparative study of national policies. Eur J Pub Health 22(2):267–271

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De Genova N (2005) Working the boundaries: race, space, and “illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • De Genova N, Peutz NM (2010) The deportation regime: sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement. Duke University Press, Durham

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • DeChaine DR (2012) Introduction: for rhetorical border studies. In: DeChaine DR (ed) Border rhetorics: citizenship and identity on the US-Mexico frontier. University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, pp 1–15

    Google Scholar 

  • Dei GJS (1996) Anti-racism education: theory and practice. Fernwood, Halifax

    Google Scholar 

  • Dorling K (2013) Growing up in a hostile environment: the rights of undocumented migrant children in the UK. Migrant Children’s Project, Colchester

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldberg DT (2004) The end(s) of race. Postcolonial Stud 7(2):211–230

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goldring L, Landolt P (2013) The conditionality of legal rights and status: conceptualizing precarious non-citizenship. In: Goldring L, Landolt P (eds) Producing and negotiating non-citizenship: precarious legal status in Canada. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp 3–27

    Google Scholar 

  • Goldring L, Berinstein C, Bernhard J (2009) Institutionalizing precarious migratory status in Canada. Citizenship Stud 13(3):239–265

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gonzales RG (2016) Lives in limbo: undocumented and coming of age in America. University of California Press, Oakland

    Google Scholar 

  • Gonzales RG, Sigona N (2017) Mapping the soft borders of citizenship: an introduction. In: Gonzales RG, Sigona N (eds) Within and beyond citizenship: borders, membership and belonging. Routledge, New York, pp 1–16

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hondagneu-Sotelo P (2007) Domestica: immigrant workers cleaning and caring in the shadows of affluence. University of California Press, Berkeley

    Google Scholar 

  • Kubal A (2013) Conceptualizing semi-legality in migration research. Law Soc Rev 47(3):555–587

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li PS (2001) The racial subtext in Canada’s immigration discourse. J Int Migr Integr 2(1):77–97

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Light MT, Miller T (2018) Does undocumented immigration status increase violent crime? Criminology 56(2):370–401

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Longazel J (2016) Undocumented fears: immigration and the politics of divide and conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Temple University Press, Philadelphia

    Google Scholar 

  • McLaughlin J (2010) Classifying the “ideal migrant worker”: Mexican and Jamaican transnational farmworkers in Canada. Focaal J Glob Hist Anthropol 57:79–94

    Google Scholar 

  • Melamed J (2015) Racial capitalism. Crit Ethn Stud 1(1):76–85

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Menjívar C (2006) Liminal legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants’ lives in the United States. Am J Sociol 111(4):999–1037

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Menjívar C, Kil SH (2002) For their own good: benevolent rhetoric and exclusionary language in public officials’ discourse on immigrant-related issues. Soc Justice 29(1/2):160–176

    Google Scholar 

  • Mutsaers P (2014) An ethnographic study of the policing of internal borders of the Netherlands. Br J Criminol 54(5):831–848

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nevins J (2002) Operation gatekeeper: the rise of the “illegal alien” and the making of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Routledge, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Ngai MM (2004) Impossible subjects: illegal aliens and the making of modern America. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Pratt A (2005) Securing borders: detention and deportation in Canada. UBC Press, Vancouver

    Google Scholar 

  • Robinson CJ (1983) Black Marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, North Carolina

    Google Scholar 

  • Salter MB (2007) Governmentalities of an airport: heterotopia and confession. Int Political Sociol 1(1):49–66

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Santa Ana O (2002) Brown tide rising: metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse. University of Texas Press, Austin

    Google Scholar 

  • Stumpf JAUR (2006) The crimmigration crisis: immigrants, crime, and sovereign power. Am Univ Law Rev 56:367–419

    Google Scholar 

  • Torpey JC (2000) The invention of the passport: surveillance, citizenship, and the state. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Vaughan-Williams N (2015) “We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in Europe Political Geography. Polit Geogr 45:1–10

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Villegas PE (2013) Negotiating the boundaries of membership: health care providers, access to social goods and immigration status. In: Goldring L, Landolt P (eds) Producing and negotiating non-citizenship: precarious legal status in Canada. University of Toronto Press, Toronto

    Google Scholar 

  • Villegas PE (2014) “I can’t even buy a bed because I don’t know if I’ll have to leave tomorrow:” temporal orientations among Mexican precarious status migrants in Toronto. Citizenship Stud 18(3–4):277–291

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Villegas FJ (2018) “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: examining the illegalization of undocumented students in Toronto, Canada. Br J Sociol Educ 39(8):1111–1125

    Google Scholar 

  • Villegas JF, Morales A, Munoz E, Brown S, Butler M, Chung P, Lal N, Williams K (2017) The Kalamazoo county ID: recognizing a need and addressing the barriers. Kalamazoo County ID Taskforce, Kalamazoo, pp 1–33. https://reason.kzoo.edu/csjl/assets/Kalamazoo_County_ID_Report.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  • Vosko LF, Preston V, Latham R (2014) Liberating temporariness?: Migration, work, and citizenship in an age of insecurity. McGill-Queen’s Press, Montreal

    Google Scholar 

  • Willen SS (2007) Toward a critical phenomenology of “illegality”: state power, criminalization, and abjectivity among undocumented migrant workers in Tel Aviv, Israel. Int Migr 45(3):8–38

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Willen SS (2012) Migration, “illegality,” and health: mapping embodied vulnerability and debating health-related deservingness. Soc Sci Med 74:805–811

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zedner L (2016) Citizenship deprivation, security and human rights. Eur J Migr Law 18(2):222–242

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zetter R (2007) More labels, fewer refugees: remaking the refugee label in an era of globalization. J Refug Stud 20(2):172–192

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology, California State University, San Bernardino, CA, USA

    Paloma E. Villegas

  2. Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, MI, USA

    Francisco J. Villegas

Authors
  1. Paloma E. Villegas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Francisco J. Villegas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paloma E. Villegas .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Socio & Anthro, Rm 309, Univ of Canterbury Dept of Socio & Anthro, Rm 309, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Steven Ratuva

Section Editor information

  1. Pacific Studies, Te Wānanga o Waipapa, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Melani Shyleen Anae

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Villegas, P.E., Villegas, F.J. (2019). Migrant Illegalization and Minoritized Populations. In: Ratuva, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0242-8_87-1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0242-8_87-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-0242-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-0242-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Political Science and International StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation