Threat Of Deportation Research Articles

Living in Permanent Temporariness: The Multigenerational Ordeal of Living under Germany’s Toleration Status

AbstractToleration status (temporary suspension of deportation) has been Germany’s hesitant answer to providing humanitarian relief for Palestinians escaping the dismal conditions of refugee camps and the civil war in Lebanon in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time, the status has subjected families to years, even decades, of insecurity and uncertainty through constant threats of deportation and restrictions on work, travel and higher education. Based on 19 months of ethnographic research, the article shows the story of one family during their 16 years on toleration status and their experiences after gaining permanent residency. The family’s experiences illuminate the insecurity and uncertainty large communities on toleration status in Berlin-Neukölln experienced, all sharing the fate of constantly wavering between hope, fear and disillusionment. Their struggles also show how the permanent temporariness of long-term toleration status affects both the parents who fled the conflict and their children, most of whom were born and raised in Germany. I argue that toleration status limits the capabilities of children stuck in the stagnant realities of their family’s insecure status, along the lines of gender and birth order. Moreover, toleration status as a multigenerational ordeal persists long after the legal insecurity has ended.

Unauthorized Immigrants, Reasonable Expectations, and the Right to Regularization

This article brings an account of reasonable expectations to bear on the question of when unauthorized immigrants have a right to be regularized—that is, to be formally guaranteed freedom from the threat of deportation. Contrary to the current literature, which implicitly relies on a flawed understanding of reasonable expectations, this article argues that only those unauthorized immigrants who have both been tacitly permitted by the state despite lacking formal authorization and have remained long enough to develop deep social roots in the state have a right to regularization.

Using Concept Mapping within a Community-Academic Partnership to Examine Obesity among Mexican Immigrants.

Weight gain is common following migration to a new country. Mexican immigrants have a disparate prevalence of overweight/obesity and food insecurity. Social stressors, such as unemployment, discrimination, and the threat of deportation, may fuel both food insecurity and weight gain in this population. We sought to (1) examine community-defined causes and correlates of obesity among Mexican-Americans; (2) determine how current social stressors, policies, and programs impact food insecurity and obesity; and (3) identify community-defined priorities for preventive interventions. Group concept mapping (GCM) was used in a community-academic partnership (CAP) to describe the factors contributing to weight gain and obesity among Mexican immigrant families. Activities included community brainstorming, sorting and rating, multivariate statistical analysis, and community interpretation of results. Eighty statements were generated in the brainstorming sessions. These statements were sorted into nine clusters, which were organized into three regions: (1) intrapersonal factors; (2) community-level factors; and (3) social policy-related barriers. Statements reflecting the impact of immigration-related stressors were found in all three regions, addressing participants' fears of deportation, and the prioritization of resources away from healthy eating, resulting in food insecurity. Community members identified five priority areas for intervention planning: (1) lack of exercise; (2) lack of knowledge of a healthy diet; (3) expense of healthy foods; (4) "junk" food; and (5) stress management. Results suggest high levels of social stress are contributing to food insecurity and obesity among Mexican immigrant families. Areas identified for intervention planning reflect the need for a multifaceted approach toward obesity prevention.

Legacies of Marginalization: System Avoidance among the Adult Children of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States

The threat of deportation shapes the way that unauthorized immigrants and their families interact with social institutions. For example, the adult children of unauthorized immigrants might avoid institutions that keep formal records (“surveilling” institutions) because such institutions could potentially expose their families to deportation. Using intergenerational data from the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles survey, we examine the relationship between immigrant parents’ authorization status and their adult children’s institutional participation ( n = 3,283). Results from Poisson and propensity-weighted regression models suggest that the adult children of unauthorized immigrants were more likely to avoid surveilling institutions, such as formal employment, than those with authorized parents. In contrast, parental immigration status was unrelated to their attachment to non-surveilling institutions, such as community groups or religious organizations. This finding suggests that the adult children of unauthorized immigrants are not systematically disengaged from all institutions but may avoid surveilling institutions in particular due to fear of their family’s deportation. This type of system avoidance may have long-term consequences for their social and economic mobility.

Between Two Worlds: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge in the Era of Chinese Exclusion

Between Two Worlds: Chinese Immigrant Children and the Production of Knowledge in the Era of Chinese Exclusion

Mobile sanctuary: Latina/o Evangelicals redefining sanctuary and contesting immobility in Fresno, CA

ABSTRACT Scholars have examined how illegality operates spatially to constrain immigrants’ movements and how immigration laws spark new tactics for immigrants’ survival and resistance. This paper examines how undocumented Latina/os strategically enact their religious practices to spatially navigate illegality. Building on ethnographic research and interviews conducted across two Latina/o Evangelical religious organisations in Fresno, California, I advance the concept of mobile sanctuary to capture the process of how immigrants embody, perform, and negotiate their religious commitments and practices to mitigate the ongoing threat of deportation. Taking a new direction towards theorising sanctuary, this paper shows how religious organisations enable a mobile sanctuary that immigrants carry within their bodies and psyches as a strategy to disperse anxieties and fears related to deportability. In the process of enabling mobile sanctuary, I argue that Latina/o Evangelical immigrant churches reinforce and socialise immigrants into problematic ideologies about immigration law, deportation, and spatial mobility. Ultimately, mobile sanctuary intervenes in recent scholarship on social illegality, crimmigration, and deportability by documenting how the US deportability regime influences Latina/o immigrants’ spiritual practices, and by theorising sanctuary beyond a static space of refuge, and instead, as an embodied and collective process of surviving spatial captivity and immobility.

Pervasive refusal syndrome in asylum-seeking children: Review of the current evidence.

This study reviews the current evidence in pervasive refusal syndrome (PRS) in asylum-seeking children. Refugees can experience a variety of traumas throughout the process of migration. Children can be exposed to multiple traumas such as experienced or witnessed physical or sexual violence, loss and bereavement, parental separation and the threat of persecution and/or kidnapping. The third stage of the migration journey can add further stress; children and families may experience multiple rejections of asylum application effectively living in limbo with the constant threat of deportation. High rates of mental health disorder are well documented in young asylum seekers, particularly depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PRS is less frequently described but nonetheless a severe and life-threatening condition affecting young asylum seekers. Traumatisation, cultural factors and hostile asylum processes are specific moderating factors seen in asylum-seeking children. Asylum-seeking children normally make a full recovery from PRS. This study suggests a link between prolonged asylum processes and hostile foreign policy in developing and maintaining illness; similar cases are now being reported in other countries with hostile foreign policies. These findings are therefore relevant to clinicians and politicians working with this vulnerable group.

Undocumented Motherhood: Gender, Maternal Identity, and the Politics of Health Care

ABSTRACTUndocumented Mexican immigrants have had to regularly confront a prohibiting health care system despite alienation, marginalization, and the threat of deportation. In this article, I explore the impact of political exclusion and alienating discourses on the health habitus of undocumented Mexican mothers through the narrative of one mother, Marta Garza, who finds herself at the painful intersection of political and medical alienation. Marta’s narrative reflects an analytical framework that centers undocumented motherhood as a space of necessary resilience and strain, wherein she is forced to advocate for her children’s health despite prohibitive barriers and dangerous potential consequences.

Under the Cloud of Deportation Threat: Testimonios Reveal Impact on Mixed-Status Families

Stress associated with the threat of deportation is not a new facet of daily life for undocumented immigrants in the United States. An upsurge in antiimmigrant rhetoric and policy has contributed to ever-present anxiety and fear regarding apprehension, detention, and deportation. In this qualitative study of mixed-status immigrant families, the stories (testimonios) of parents and young adult recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) are explored. Their testimonios reveal conflicted feelings about life in America and the relentless strain of living with fear and uncertainty. A portrait emerges of life in small-town America during these troublesome times of mass deportations and family separation. The testimonios, explored through a LatCrit lens, reveal the human side of immigration policy and compel us to contemplate the lived reality of immigrant families with American dreams.

Humanitarian capital: how lawyers help immigrants use suffering to claim membership in the nation-state

ABSTRACTThis paper explores how humanitarianism operates within the nation-state, asking: what strategies do lawyers employ to help undocumented immigrants access membership rights in the United States though humanitarian policies? I identify three concurrent evaluations that lawyers undertake to determine legalisation strategies. First, attorneys carry out an assessment of threat of deportation because not all undocumented immigrants are equally at risk. Second, they determine eligibility by matching migrants’ complex lived experiences to narrow, formal eligibility criteria, which often exclude individuals arbitrarily. Third, attorneys determine whether each case is ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ (more/less likely to acquire status) by identifying instances of migrant suffering to transform them into what I call ‘humanitarian capital’, a symbolic resource legible to adjudicators in the immigration bureaucracy who grant legal status on the basis of compassion to limited numbers of exceptional cases.

The deportability continuum as activist research

This essay explores the aftermath of deportation and the concept of a deportability continuum from the perspective of a transnational, activist researcher. Retracing the process of becoming an activist and researcher via the successful though measured impact of a book of first-person testimonios and photography titled Los Otros Dreamers, this article argues for the significance of the “deportability continuum” as a concept in need of dissemination and debate beyond academe. This analysis of the deportability continuum in a US–Mexico context also renders more clear and concrete the transnational connections between the threat of deportation and the aftermath of deportation. Via the work of community organizing, the connections that implicate the disciplinary investments of Latinxs Studies with Latin American Studies come alive in the ongoing articulations of Poch@ House, a new community and cultural space in Mexico City.

The search for a container in a precarious environment

This article explores the impact of the parallel process of a precarious environment on a multicultural therapy group for women survivors of torture and persecution who had sought asylum in Ireland. The environments for both therapists and group members were experienced as producing ‘unthinkable anxiety’ (Winnicott, 1962: 57). For the therapists, their context was of threatened dismissal due to organizational restructuring, and for the group members it was the threat of deportation. The impact shaped decisions pertaining to the dynamic administration of how the group should be conducted and for how long. It led to a clinical crisis when the anxiety in the group became enmeshed, provoking primitive defences which affected the capacity to think, and blocked understanding on the part of the therapists. Flexibility in the level of leadership activity allowed for a containing process to take place and the group to become the therapist (Sclapobersky, 2016: 210). This flexible approach enabled the naming of an anxiety for the group as a whole which bound together the fragmented, intense emotions, and opened up the reflective space to the contents the members wished to have contained (Hinshelwood, 1994: 102). All names have been changed and the group gave consent for the authors to write about this experience.

An Analysis of the Nature and Use of Promigrant Representations in an Antideportation Campaign

Opposition to immigration and the rejection of migrants have long been of concern to psychologists. While much is known about negative representations of migrants in politics and the media, far less is known about positive representations of migrants and immigration. In this article, we provide an examination of social representations promoting promigrant action in the context of a community campaign opposing the deportation of a woman and her young daughter. The woman, who had come to the United Kingdom from Malawi seven years prior had lost permission to remain following changes to personal circumstances and was facing deportation. Our analysis explores the ways in which the campaign’s mobilization arguments respond to and engage with antimigrant representations. It identifies the importance of categorical representations concerning the nature, norms, and interests of the local community, of the two migrants under threat of deportation, and of those seeking to deport them. Contrary to antimigrant representations, the migrants at the center of the campaign were presented as ingroup members and their potential deportation as a violation of ingroup norms and ingroup interests. Finally, we also identify points of ambivalence in the campaign’s mobilization strategy where arguments reject the ascription but not the nature of negative representations of migrants.

Raising Children Amid the Threat of Deportation: Perspectives from Undocumented Latina Mothers

ABSTRACTDespite the large number of families with at least one undocumented parent, little research has investigated mothering amid the threat of immigration enforcement. We present results of a community-based participatory study with 7 Latina mothers who describe their experiences of parenting while navigating the possibility of deportation. Undocumented mothers found meaning in caring for their children. Yet due to restrictions related to immigration status, mothers were unable to support their children as they intended and feared their deportations would leave children without care, contributing to psychological duress. We provide recommendations for practitioners working with mixed-status families.

The ethics of return migration and education: transnational duties in migratory processes

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that most prominent normative theories on immigration neglect a critical dimension of the migratory phenomenon, a neglect that blinds them to important rights that, under some circumstances, immigrants ought to have as a matter of justice. Specifically, the paper argues that these theories fail to appreciate that the children of immigrant families, regardless of whether they were born in their parents’ country or in the host country, should benefit from educational rights addressing needs that are particular to their situation. These children may be forced to move between these two countries. This situation generates an obligation for both states (‘receiving’ and ‘sending’) to act jointly to provide educational opportunities so that these children are fully conversant with both cultures and in both languages. Put succinctly, then, we argue that since children of immigrant families lack any certainty of permanent residence in the host society owing to the threat of deportation and the precarity of their legal status, host and home societies bear the duty to offer an education that allows them to be functional in both societies.

Caring for Undocumented Immigrants With Kidney Disease

The care of dialysis-dependent undocumented immigrants exemplifies a problem at the crux of 2 US national agendas: immigration and health care reform. Undocumented immigrants represent 3% of the US population and 27% of the uninsured, and an estimated 6,500 individuals are dialysis dependent. With no uniform national policy, an estimated 30% to 50% of these individuals receive treatment only in life-threatening situations (emergent dialysis). Since 2005, about 400 undocumented immigrants have received a kidney transplant (>70% living). Although the Affordable Care Act specifically excluded noncitizens, its policies have indirectly allowed more than 200 individuals to purchase insurance from a health insurance exchange and transition from emergent to thrice-weekly hemodialysis. Under the Trump administration, uncertainties with health care plans, threats of deportation, and rescinding of policies such as sanctuary city status are bound to result in unforeseen challenges for this vulnerable population. Global variation in the care accessible to migrants, refugees, undocumented immigrants, and asylum seekers argues for the need for a framework to transform advocacy into public policy to improve the lives of patients with kidney disease worldwide. Access to nonemergent dialysis is humane and cost-effective; it deserves to be espoused and advocated by leading medical organizations.

Life under threat of deportation

Social Science What is the effect on a child of having parents who are at risk of deportation as unauthorized immigrants? Hainmueller et al. developed a quasi-experimental protocol to address this complicated question. They selected mothers who had birthdates either just before or just after the cutoff for the United States' Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Children whose mothers were protected from deportation by DACA had 50% fewer diagnoses of adjustment and anxiety disorder than children with mothers whose birthdates, by coincidence, preceded the cutoff and who thus were not protected. Science , this issue p. [1041][1] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aan5893

Exploring the use of juju in Nigerian human trafficking networks: considerations for criminal investigators

This exploratory study examines a seemingly unique method of control used to psychologically bind Nigerian women and children to their traffickers. In order to manipulate the victims’ fear of spiritual retribution, they initially undergo a juju ritual whereby they swear an oath to the spirit world, promising not to escape or disclose their exploitation to the authorities. The aim of this research was to explore how this process affects the victim and what considerations this phenomena raises for criminal investigators. The methodology employed qualitative data obtained through interviews with front-line practitioners from the United Kingdom. Results suggest the oath is one of several mechanisms used by traffickers to instil fear. Others include rape, physical threats, threats of deportation and perceptions of police corruption. The main recommendations are to empathise with the victim’s fear of spiritual retribution; develop trust and rapport; take a joint-agency approach and provide access to psychological and spiritual counselling.

Dreams deferred: Contextualizing the health and psychosocial needs of undocumented Asian and Pacific Islander young adults in Northern California

There are currently 1.5 million undocumented Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs) in the US. Undocumented API young adults, in particular, come of age in a challenging political and social climate, but little is known about their health outcomes. To our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the psychosocial needs and health status of API undocumented young adults. Guided by social capital theory, this qualitative study describes the social context of API undocumented young adults (ages 18–31), including community and government perceptions, and how social relationships influence health. This study was conducted in Northern California and included four focus group discussions (FGDs) and 24 in-depth interviews (IDIs), with 32 unique participants total. FGDs used purposeful sampling by gender (two male and two female discussions) and education status (in school and out-of-school). Findings suggest low bonding and bridging social capital. Results indicate that community distrust is high, even within the API community, due to high levels of exploitation, discrimination, and threats of deportation. Participants described how documentation status is a barrier in accessing health services, particularly mental health and sexual and reproductive health services. This study identifies trusted community groups and discusses recommendations for future research, programs, and policies.

H-1B Visas, Outsourcing and Body Shops: A Continuum of Exploitation for High Tech Workers

This article analyzes the exploitation of immigrant workers under the H-1B visa program. It analyzes pure H-1B workers that work directly for the company that sponsor the visa; outsourced H-1B workers that work on a visa sponsored by an outsourcing vendor; and body shop workers who work on a visa sponsored by a labor contractor that operates outside the legal boundaries of the law. The article provides a comprehensive survey of lawsuits brought under the visa laws for prevailing wage violations, wage theft, benching, and liquidated damages. It also discusses lawsuits brought as independent causes of action under state tort and contract law; the TVPA; RICO; and employment discrimination statutes. The article argues that even perfect enforcement of existing law will not eliminate H-1B worker exploitation because the program includes systemic inequalities and subordinating structures that are modern manifestations of involuntary servitude, debt bondage and unfree labor. The unfree system of labor created by the guest worker program is based in the ways in which threats of deportation and liquidated damages prevent workers from complaining or quitting; the way in which the visa sponsor's control of the guest worker's labor parallels antebellum slave codes; the commodification of immigrant workers as part of the human supply chain; and the lack of citizenship rights guaranteed to these guest workers.