Going Back Home Us Deportation Law Return Migration And Migrant Belonging In The Us Mexico Region

The United States has deported more than four million noncitizens in the last twenty years largely because of changes to immigration law in 1996 via the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Taking the case of the U.S. and Mexico, my dissertation is a binational ethnography that examines the social impacts of current U.S. deportation laws and policies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Tracing the process of deportation from detention centers to immigration courts to hometowns of undocumented return migrants in Mexico, the dissertation examines how these laws shape the experiences of noncitizens placed in deportation proceedings as well as the socioeconomic reincorporation and transnationalism among deportees and other returnees in Mexico. I conducted participant observation and in-depth interviews over a 22-month-period between 2010 and 2014 in Mexico and the U.S. I engaged in participant observation at deportation hearings in immigration courts and privately-run men’s and women’s immigration detention centers in Texas. In Mexico, I gathered participant observation and interview data in 10 towns. I conducted 83 formal and informal interviews with return migrants (33 with deportees and 50 with voluntary returnees) and 41 formal and informal interviews with non-migrants including family members, community members, researchers, government officials and others. Building on Menjívar and Abrego’s concept of “legal violence” (2012), I ask: How does legal violence, as a reflection of state power, reify and transcend the sovereign borders of the state? And how do non-citizens subjected to legal violence resist, escape, and cope with it within and beyond the state’s sovereign borders? I conclude that legal, state-sponsored violence produces legal, subjugated individuals. However, kinship networks mitigate such state violence. I use the term precarious citizenship to describe the tenuousness individuals experience between state-sponsored violence and their participation in kinship-based gift economies