Civil Disobedience as Strategic Resistance in the US Immigrant Rights Movement

Abstract

AbstractUndocumented immigrants are removable from the nation at any time and their participation in political activism heightens this risk. Yet, undocumented organisers have been at the forefront of the immigrant rights movement. This article demonstrates how through their use of civil disobedience tactics, undocumented activists are in fact working to re‐conceptualise citizenship to include those who are not legally present in the country. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chicago, IL, we develop a three‐part framework—double vulnerability, extending/expanding risk, and including the excluded—to analyse the role of civil disobedience in the contemporary US immigrant rights movement. We then compare the use of civil disobedience in the US immigrant rights movement with the US Civil Rights and Indian Independence movements. In our analysis of civil disobedience, we demonstrate that activists can simultaneously be complicit with and directly challenge mainstream depictions of deservingness for citizenship.