As contemporary international migrants forge new webs of connection and social fields between distant places, transnational scholarship seeks to understand and theorize these emerging spaces. Our account of the Salvadoran transnational social field centered in northern New Jersey contributes to the development of transnational theory by considering how a particular legal provision-temporary protective status (TPS)-permeates daily life. We argue that material and nonmaterial aspects of daily life become associated with an experience of space-time relations to which we refer as permanent temporariness. Permanent temporariness limits the geographic, economic, social, and political ambitions of Salvadorans, but is increasingly resisted through acts of strategic visibility. Our article reflects on the implications of permanent temporariness for the production of scale in the particular transnational field we study, and on links to broader discussions about transnationalism, the international political economy of migration, and capitalist restructuring. To represent the experiences of Salvadorans, we use a transnational mixed-methods approach to pool quantitative and qualitative data that were collected serially at multiple sites.

The United States formulates much of its immigration and refugee policy to match economic and political circumstances. We interpret these policy shifts as a set of graduated positions on immigration and refugee flows that attempts to discipline the lives of newcomers and, in so doing, shapes immigrant identities. In this article, we analyse the interplay between the US government and Salvadoran asylum applicants negotiating procedures that grant only temporary relief from deportation via the policy of Temporary Protected Status (TPS). We find that each policy shift results in the strategic renegotiation of asylum applicants' identities so as to achieve the best opportunity for a successful outcome. Based on Foucault's ideas of governmentality and Ong's concept of flexible citizenship, we argue that what appears more superficially as a patchwork strategy of immigration laws and asylum practices may be theorized more deeply as a set of flexible responses by the state that turn on identity construction at different scales, and that aim to mediate transnational relations.

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ABSTRACT. Miami is the primate city in a system of urban settlements that make up a Cuban ethnic archipelago in the United States. The city is also a national magnet, attracting Cuban migrants from metropolitan regions across the archipelago. Four large secondary cores of Cubans outside Florida serve as major “feeders” to the Miami enclave: northern New Jersey, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Currents of migration to Miami are especially strong among older, foreign‐born, and disadvantaged Cubans, an indication of segmented paths in Cuban assimilation. Although concentration in Metropolitan Miami has been the Cuban story over the past three decades, processes of deconcentration now may well be under way.