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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. The Place of Law: Subnational Immigration Laws in an Age of Mass Deportation -- 2. Undocumented and Unwelcome? California's Shifting Immigration Laws -- 3. Stay or Go? The Settlement Effects of Restrictive Subnational Laws -- 4. Everyday Anxiety: Devolution, Deportability, and the Police -- 5. Legal Passing: Changing Bodies, Behaviors, and Minds -- 6. Passing Down Legal Passing: The Diffusion of Exclusionary Logics -- 7. Lessons of the Law: Subnational Immigration Laws in the Trump Era -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Abstractcholars have long demonstrated that laws convey messages to people about how government views them and that these messages impact targeted groups' political behavior. Drawing from this insight, this study asks if and how local immigration laws shape the political lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants in US cities. The article advances a tripartite theory of political engagement to demonstrate that the design of local immigration measures impacts the political socialization, political efficacy, and political participation of immigrant communities on the ground. This multidimensional model contributes a more holistic account of undocumented immigrants' political engagement than is available in the existing literature. With a matched case comparison of undocumented life in cities with divergent immigration laws, the article shows that local opportunity structures embedded within receiving locales profoundly influence the nature of political engagement for undocumented residents.

AbstractImmigration and citizenship laws that discriminate by race, ethnicity, and national origins are increasingly illegitimate in contemporary democracies, yet laws that grant privileged access and membership to immigrants who share natives' ethnicity persist. This enduring positive selection rests upon the assumption that co‐ethnicity fosters integration. Countering this logic, this article centers on co‐ethnics' insertion into local labour markets. It draws from a case study of Aguaviva, Spain, a depopulating village in which both co‐ethnic Argentines and Romanian immigrants reside. The analysis qualifies the trend of deracialization in immigration and citizenship policy and shows that positive preferences do not uniformly foster integration. In dual labour market systems, co‐ethnics struggle because they are not different enough for secondary sector jobs reserved for immigrant "others," yet in the primary sector they enter into direct competition with natives.

Cities across the U.S. increasingly respond to undocumented immigrants through local law. These locales set parameters of inclusion and exclusion through accommodating measures intended to integrate newcomers and restrictive policies meant to marginalize them. How do the varying legal contexts of receiving locales shape these immigrants' everyday lives and future prospects? In the first comparative study of the outcomes of local immigration law, my dissertation explores the incorporation effects of accommodating and restrictive socio-legal contexts, and it does so from the perspective of undocumented Mexicans. Drawing on multi-sited and mixed methods research, I counter scholars who argue that restrictive policy environments uniformly force immigrants to margins of society. My dissertation demonstrates the unintended social consequences of legal restrictions, wherein aspects of immigrants' settlement, cultural incorporation, and political socialization flourish in response to the very laws that seek to exclude them. The first empirical chapter asks whether restrictive laws work to push undocumented immigrants out of hostile destinations. To gain leverage on this question, I focus on the relationship between settlement behavior and "attrition through enforcement" policy. Formed to trigger the voluntary exit of undesired immigrants, these laws aim to make their lives exceedingly difficult. With a twofold comparison of undocumented immigrants in three cities and two states, I use original bi-national survey data to demonstrate that such measures do not have a significant effect on the amount of time spent in restrictive locales or changes in place of residency. I draw from interview data collected from undocumented immigrants to argue that economic, social, and life course factors more prominently shape settlement decisions. Within the second chapter, I explore undocumented immigrants' navigation of daily life in cities with hostile socio-legal environments. How do every day events, like going to work and taking children to school, unfold for undocumented immigrants living legally restrictive cities, and how does this relate to incorporation trajectories? Drawing on observations and interviews, I find that undocumented Mexicans in restrictive destinations attempt legal passing, or the public embodiment of the culture of the dominant core population, a behavior not present in accommodating locales. Purposive and strategic, this daily effort to pass is primarily a protective strategy, yet over time it becomes internalized and contributes to incremental cultural incorporation. The final empirical chapter focuses on political engagement in restrictive and accommodating receiving locales. With observational and interview data from undocumented immigrants, I demonstrate that restrictive laws---while clearly contributing to social suffering---also trigger political socialization. Seeking to understand the implications of legal restrictions, immigrants forge closer ties with neighbors, sympathetic allies, and advocacy organizations and, in doing so, they develop political knowledge. Nevertheless, the oppressive nature of restrictive socio-legal contexts dampens political efficacy and limits political participation to the realm of local immigration policy. Conversely, accommodating laws make the everyday activities of undocumented immigrants far more secure and stable. Freed from the daily burden of restrictive immigration policy, immigrants in accommodating destinations become more broadly socialized in the local politics, have a higher sense of political efficacy, and participate in a wider range of political issues. The determinants of local immigration laws have been studied, but we know little about their social effects. With fieldwork in multiple sites chosen for their theoretical variation, my dissertation is the first comparative study of the outcomes of local immigration measures for undocumented immigrants themselves. By bringing immigrants into the analysis, I highlight the deep yet often counterintuitive influence of divergent socio-legal contexts. In doing so, the dissertation expands standard explanations of incorporation to include illegality and the socio-legal environments of immigrant destinations as key variables driving the adaptation process. My data also have implications for our understanding of inequality, as local immigration laws create a new axis of stratification that shapes immigrants' everyday lives and future prospects

Assimilation theory typically conceptualizes native whites in metropolitan areas as the mainstream reference group to which immigrants' adaptation is compared. Yet the majority of the U.S. population will soon be made up of ethnoracial minorities. The rise of new immigrant destinations has contributed to this demographic change in rural areas, in addition to already-diverse cities. In this article, we argue that assimilation is experienced in reference to the demographic populations within urban and rural destinations as well as the physical geography of these places. We analyze and compare the experiences of rural Mexicans who immigrated to urban Southern California and rural Montana, demonstrating the ways in which documentation status in the United States and the rurality of immigrants' communities of origin in Mexico shape assimilation in these two destinations.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted projections of economic contraction and a resulting decline in immigrant remittances, which are fundamental to many migrant household survival strategies. However, in the first year of the pandemic, remittances from the United States to Mexico and other Latin American countries remained surprisingly stable. Using novel survey and interview data, we investigate this apparent divergence, and the dynamic familial networks that sustained remittances during the first year of Covid-19. We identify patterns masked by the overall macro trend of resilient remittance flows, including heterogeneity across remitters' responses to the pandemic and household-level strain of remitting during this period. Specifically, we find evidence of an intensified expanded remittance pool, wherein remittance responsibility spread across household and extended family members—especially US citizens, authorized immigrants, and those who were more financially stable—in response to job loss and income instability within remitting households. During a period of extreme hardship, the continued need for remittances among nonmigrant family members contributed to the purposive intensification of these expanded pools. Our study of immigrant remittances during Covid-19 demonstrates the utility of examining complexity, change, and oftentimes strain at the micro-household level that undergirds apparent stability at a macro-level of analysis.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program provides temporary relief from deportation and legal work authorization for eligible undocumented youth in the United States. This study investigates the factors that help or hinder undocumented youth in applying for DACA. We focus on contexts of reception to understand the determinants of DACA applications, as studies of previous legalization programs indicate that the communities in which immigrants live help shape application decisions. Our analysis shows that more immigrant-serving organizations in a state translate into more applications, that DACA implementation rates are not statistically significantly lower in states with hostile policy climates, and that socioeconomic factors are most significantly related to DACA applications. In identifying the collective factors that influence applying to DACA, we demonstrate that the structural opportunities and barriers present in receiving locales shape undocumented youths' decisions to regularize their immigration status, which has significant implications for their resulting incorporation trajectories.