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

Abstract

This 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 legalization 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 Ambivalent U.S. Context of Reception and the Dichotomous Legal Consciousness of Unaccompanied Minors

“…Compared to undocumented immigrant adults (Galli 2019) and unaccompanied teenagers (Canizales 2015) who are not apprehended and remain outside of state systems, youths categorized as UACs interact intensively with multiple state institutions since they begin their incorporation in the US (i.e. adapting to and gaining membership in the receiving state) (Brown 2011), and, in the process, their dichotomous "legal consciousness" (Merry 1990) is formed.…”

Exit as Care: How Motherhood Mediates Women’s Exodus From Violence in Mexico and Central America

“…We then coded interviews for the five forms of violence, their impacts on families, and women's decisions to migrate. Although we informed respondents that we had no government affiliation and were not lawyers or caseworkers, their interaction with legal counsel and/or staff at the shelters may have encouraged them to emphasize their roles as victims (see Galli, 2019). Nevertheless, we got to know women over multiple visits and most of them carried photos or documentation of the violence they described, increasing our trust in their stories.…”

“…Scholars of gender and forced migration show that all of these push factors are gendered (Freedman, 2015;Menjívar & Walsh, 2017, 2019. They note that women around the world face a continuum of violence tied to their social, economic, and political roles as women, especially in the contexts of organized crime or war (Giles & Hyndman, 2004;Merry, 2009).…”

“…When men get killed or couples separate, women can also become sole breadwinners. Finally, political violence underwrites the other layers, as legal and justice systems fail to protect women, sanction gendered abuse, and inflame women's vulnerability (Menjívar & Walsh, 2017, 2019. Together, these forms of violence leave mothers afraid for their children's survival and with little family or institutional support.…”

Why Physical Barriers Backfire: How Immigration Enforcement Deters Return and Increases Asylum Applications

“…There can even be disagreement within countries over what to label the same people, as Whitaker (2020) shows in the cases of Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa. Galli (2019) finds that lawyers often encourage undocumented immigrants in the United States to apply for asylum in order to gain permanent legal status. Mourad and Norman (2020) highlight the reverse status movement, from refugee to migrant, in their analysis of how institutional drift and policy layering intentionally blur migrant and refugee categories (Betts, 2010; Streeck & Thelen, 2005).…”