The Rights of Noncitizens in the United States

Abstract

Over the past three decades, sociolegal scholarship on the rights of noncitizens in the United States has sought to explain rights and exclusions while incorporating new theory regarding racialization, biopolitics, neoliberalism, risk, and states of exception. Early work in this period distinguished between legal and illegal immigration, with a focus on assimilation, ethnicity, and new ethnic enclaves in the case of the former, and an examination of the relationship between membership and movement in the case of the latter. Large-scale restructurings of the immigration enforcement regime have made the distinction between citizens and noncitizens more important than before. Thus, scholars have coined such terms as "crimmigration" to describe the unprecedented convergence of criminal and immigration law, "rescaling" to refer to shifts from national to local enforcement efforts, and "securitization" to denote the infusion of antiterrorist measures within immigration policymaking. 289

Immigration, Crime, and Victimization: Rhetoric and Reality

“…And, we would add, law and legality are also implicated in the greater vulnerability of immigrants to violence and exploitation. Consistent with Coutin's (2011) and De Genova's (2002) analyses of the everyday makings of migrant illegality, we have suggested that there is an everyday nature to immigrants' susceptibility to the excesses of law and to the enforcement practices that make them particularly vulnerable.…”

“…Throughout, we draw from but do not repeat excellent reviews of the interweavings of immigration, law, race, and identity by Calavita (2007); global restructuring, immigration, and the rights of noncitizens by Coutin (2011); illegality and deportability as experienced in everyday life by De Genova (2002); and immigration and crime by Lee & Martínez (2009) and Martínez & Lee (2000). In addition to these comprehensive review essays, we refer readers to recent collections on immigration, crime, and victimization edited by Martínez & Valenzuela (2006), McDonald (2009b, and Kubrin et al (2012).…”

Emphasizing the ‘Complex’ in the ‘Immigration Industrial Complex’

“…Similarly, enforcement expands US capital at and beyond the US-Mexico border (Sassen, 1999). As the state retreats 'as a source of support and guarantor of rights', it simultaneously promotes free trade and guest worker programs that affect capital on both sides of the border (Coutin, 2011). These forms of capital accumulation include both US employers, such as agribusiness, and maquilas located well beyond the border.…”

1 Migration, Gender, Social Justice, and Human Insecurity

“…Centred on segmented integration, this body of work focuses on migrants whose social lives are situated in a zone of legal ambiguity and their ways of struggling for residency under tighter immigration policies based on an anti-immigration stance. Coutin (2011) especially highlights the trends in the USA towards a conflation of immigration and criminalization as a result of a process of securitization of the homeland following the attack of 11 September 2001. This perspective is applied and explored in Part V of the book.…”