Beholden to Employers

Abstract

Chapter 3 investigates the ways in which the workplace and the family lives of migrant workers are intertwined and heavily tied to their visa status. The visa regimes that shape these immigrants’ lives create a legally liminal status for migrants and their families. Because both work and dependent visas are tied to the employment of the lead migrant and therefore control the ability of these families to reside in the United States, losing the job would mean losing residential rights as well as financial resources. This puts migrant workers and their spouses in an in-between status of legality that makes them beholden to their employers through the visa regime. This status of liminal legality is extended indefinitely when employers sponsor the workers for legal permanent residency. Quitting means killing any chance of gaining residency in the United States, which is what many of my participants called the “carrot-and-stick” approach. Legal liminality intersects with the racialization and gendering of the workers to produce a complex web of dependence for the families in the study. This chapter is an exploration of that particular structure of dependence embedded in the visa regime.