Juridical Framings of Immigrants in the United States and France: Courts, Social Movements, and Symbolic Politics

Abstract

This study reexamines the engagement of U.S. and French courts with immigration politics, aiming to provide a fuller accounting of how law and immigration politics shape one another. Jurisprudential principles are placed in national and historical context, elucidating the role of rights‐oriented legal networks in formulating these arguments during the 1970s and early 1980s. The analysis traces how these judicial constructions of immigrants subsequently contributed to catalyzing a transformation of immigration politics in both countries. Immigrant rights jurisprudence is shown to be produced by, as well as productive of, broader political values, agendas, and identities.

Mobilizing Migrant Workers’ Rights in “Non-immigration” Countries: The Politics of Resonance and Migrants’ Rights Activism in Israel and Singapore

“…The institutional settings in Israel and Singapore call into question the centrality of juridical institutions and practices for advancing migrants’ rights. They are more akin to the “ad‐hocratic” policy settings that European countries developed in the earlier stages of the post‐WWII “guestworker” programs than to those documented by Kawar's (2011a, 2012) work on cause lawyering networks in France and the United States. These are settings in which (mostly unpublished) procedures and discretionary power replace clear laws; ad‐hoc decisions replace long‐term policies; committees operating behind doors adjudicate rights in ways that cannot be contested; and the enforcement of migrants’ rights in areas such as labor and healthcare is privatized.…”

“…Cross‐national studies of migrants’ rights demonstrate that institutional and ideological fields of power at the national level shape and are shaped by legal mobilizations in civil society. Based mostly on the North American and European experience, comparative scholarship shows that notions of “rights” and “migration” and the ability to advocate for them are mediated by institutionalized repertoires of legal action (Kawar ), organizational templates of the juridical field (ibid), and ideological constructions of boundaries between citizens and immigrants drawn from legacies of previous rights struggles (Bloemraad and Provine ; Kawar ). All of these factors lock legal mobilizations in the present, affecting the range of available strategies for struggle, and at times their outcomes as well (Ibid: 63).…”

“…To address the missing link between the comparative analysis of migration regimes and sociolegal mobilization studies, we rely on an emergent body of research that brings a cross‐national perspective to the institutional and cultural analysis of migrants’ rights. The comparative works of Bloemraad and Provine () and Kawar (2011a, 2012) stand out because they outline an explicit agenda for comparing migrants’ rights mobilization in “the terrain of the state” (Kawar ). These studies focus specifically on how national fields of migration policy and law interact with legal mobilizations, paying particular attention to two factors: the structure of the national legal field and ideological constructions of the boundaries between citizens and noncitizens.…”

“…Recent comparative studies on migrant workers’ rights shed light on how national fields of power shape and are shaped by legal mobilizations (Bloemraad ; Bloemraad and Provine ; Kawar 2011a, 2012). Bridging the comparative migration studies’ interest in national settings and sociolegal mobilization perspectives, this scholarship underscores the complex dynamics of rights making when activists engage in settings with varying institutional configurations and cultural repertoires.…”

“We are all republicans”: Political Articulation and the Production of Nationhood in France's Face Veil Debate

“…For example, Hollifield's 1994 historical study pointed to the impact of a “republican synthesis,” which is both universalist and nationalist, in conferring legitimacy upon legal migration to France and in explaining the continuity of French immigration policy through periods of crisis. The values embedded in republicanism have also been shown to permeate the juridical framings of French immigration, leading to the entrenchment of social rights, including family reunification, in immigration policy (Kawar 2012), and to the adoption of an assimilationist “philosophy of integration” (Favell 1998).…”