Restriction‐oriented immigration policies and polarizing political debates have intensified the vulnerability of undocumented people in the United States, promoting their “willingness” to do low‐wage, low‐status work. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research with undocumented immigrants in Chicago to examine the everyday strategies that undocumented workers develop to mediate constraints and enhance their well‐being. In particular, I explore how a cohort of undocumented Mexican immigrants cultivates a social identity as “hard workers” to promote their labor and bolster dignity and self‐esteem. Much of the existing literature on unauthorized labor migration has focused on the structural conditions that encumber immigrants and constrain their opportunities. By shifting the focus to workers’ agency, I seek to complement these analyses and show how undocumented immigrants actively navigate the terrain of work and society in the United States.

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Scholars of unauthorized migration have generally agreed that a lack of legal status can constrain undocumented workers’ resistance to their marginalization and exploitative treatment. Yet in recent years, undocumented workers and youth have been at the forefront of immigrant rights mobilizations and have organized around their status as undocumented people. In this article, we explore how the conferral of a conditional immigration status has affected undocumented youth activism. In particular, we show that the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012 had varied and complicated consequences for youth activism in Chicago—at once stifling the urgency of comprehensive immigration reform and galvanizing efforts to expand and strengthen protections against deportation. More broadly, we consider how prolonged states of liminal legality (Menjivar 2006) bring people more tightly under the purview of state surveillance without removing their vulnerability to deportation.

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