Through an ethnography of unauthorized migration from El Salvador to the United States, I explore “clandestinity” as a hidden, yet known, dimension of social reality. Unauthorized migrants who are en route to the United States have to make themselves absent from the spaces they occupy. When they become clandestine, such migrants embody illegality; in some cases, they literally “go underground” should they die and be buried en route. Because their presence is prohibited, unauthorized migrants do not fully arrive even when they reach their destinations. There are parallels between the ways that migrants are present in yet absent from nations, and the ways that ethnographers are present in yet absent from the field. This ethnography of migrants en route therefore suggests how anthropological knowledge practices also produce realities that are hidden, yet known.
The new field of deportation studies emerged at the intersection of immigration and security studies in the early 2000s. Focusing on deportation raises new questions about migration and enforcement tactics, but reproduces assumptions about the nature of movement and the centrality of the state in enforcement efforts. Through ethnographic work on deportation in various regions of the world, this volume questions these assumptions and emphasises important themes, including the role of emotions, the agency of migrants, the technicality of law and the variability of law. These themes also suggest several new and not-so-new directions for further research.
The legalization strategies pursued by Salvadoran immigrants and activists from the 1980s to the present demonstrate that migrants’ and advocates’ responses to policy changes reinterpret law in ways that affect future policy. Law is critical to immigrants’ strategies in that legal status is increasingly a prerequisite for rights and services and that immigration law is embedded in other institutions and relationships. Immigration law is defined, however, not only when it is first formulated but also as it is implemented, enabling the immigrants who are defined according to legal categories to shape the definitions that categorization produces. Immigrants and activists also take formal legal and political actions, such as lobbying Congress and filing class action suits. Through such formal and informal policy negotiations, immigrants seek to shape their own and their nations’ futures.
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