Although US political discourse suggests otherwise, no simple dichotomy separates "documented" from "undocumented" immigrants

This article examines the enduring alterations in behaviors, practices, and self-image that immigrants' evolving knowledge of and participation in the legalization process facilitate. Relying on close to 200 interviews with immigrants from several national origin groups in Los Angeles and Phoenix, the authors identify transformations that individuals enact in their intimate and in their civic lives as they come in contact with U.S. immigration law en route to and as a result of regularization. Findings illustrate the power of the state to control individuals' activities and mind-sets in ways that are not explicitly formal or bureaucratic. The barriers the state creates, which push immigrants to the legal margins, together with anti-immigrant hostility, create conditions under which immigrants are likely to undertake transformative, lasting changes in their lives. These transformations reify notions of the deserving immigrant vis-à-vis the law, alter the legalization process for the immigrant population at large, and, ultimately, shape integration dynamics.

This article investigates how lawyers manage legal and bureaucratic uncertainties associated with humanitarian immigration law by examining their representation of undocumented crime victims petitioning for U Visa status. Immigration attorneys craft dual narratives to persuade adjudicators that their clients qualify for and deserve this new legal status, but representing migrants well creates moral dilemmas. I explore how lawyers elicit and script narratives of "clean" victimhood to demonstrate that their clients qualify for U Visa standing. Next I argue that attorneys construct narratives articulating migrants' civic engagement to position their clients as contributing members of society who deserve legal status. The final section illustrates how the production of these narratives generates a range of professional and ethical dilemmas for lawyers. This examination of how law is developed within a confining legal framework that is at the same time not totally institutionalized extends the "law in action" paradigm, which has been animated primarily by analyses of how legal actors tailor the idiosyncratic details of discrete cases to match existing precedents.

To apply for U Visa status, a temporary legal standing available to undocumented crime victims who assist law enforcement in investigations, immigrants must obtain validation of their experiences from police via a signed “certification” paper. This article investigates the challenges lawyers and immigrant crime victims face in translating and documenting victims' experiences into legal form. By analyzing interactions between Los Angeles attorneys and female undocumented immigrants, I explore how immigrant victims of violence prepare to approach police certifiers. Attorneys arbitrate between accounts of violence and immigrant‐police encounters and the legal cases they can develop, offering retrospective and prospective advice to immigrants about how to make effective pleas to police. Drawing attention to the devolutionary dynamics of an inclusive immigration policy, I show how nonfederal bureaucrats shape immigrants' eligibility for legalization remedies. In turn, I expose detrimental consequences of mixing street‐level administrative discretion with federal visa eligibility determinations.

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