Differentiated legality: understanding the sources of immigrants’ deportation fear

Abstract

ABSTRACT All non-citizens face risk of deportation, but a variety of factors unequally stratify this risk. To capture the range of formally unequal statuses produced by migration control systems, we introduce the concept of “differentiated legality.” This paper applies this framework to analyze perceived deportation risk reported by 1,976 immigrants from a range of origin countries in the 2016–2017 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Survey. Findings show that unauthorized immigrants and immigrants with temporary authorized status worry more than naturalized citizens about being deported. Respondents who know someone who has been deported and who were interviewed in a language other than English express greater fear of deportation, even in models with controls. In addition, system embeddedness – i.e. perceived legibility to the state – may increase deportation fears, even among those with comparatively secure legal statuses. This paper is a significant contribution to understandings of citizenship, legality, and how immigrants experience deportability.