Examining how undocumented migrants are using film, video, and other documentary media to challenge surveillance, detention, and deportation As debates over immigration increasingly become flashpoints of political contention in the United States, a variety of advocacy groups, social service organizations, filmmakers, and artists have provided undocumented migrants with the tools and training to document their experiences. In The Undocumented Everyday, Rebecca M. Schreiber examines the significance of self-representation by undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants, arguing that by centering their own subjectivity and presence through their use of documentary media, these migrants are effectively challenging intensified regimes of state surveillance and liberal strategies that emphasize visibility as a form of empowerment and inclusion. Schreiber explores documentation as both an aesthetic practice based on the visual conventions of social realism and a state-administered means of identification and control. As Schreiber shows, by visualizing new ways of belonging not necessarily defined by citizenship, these migrants are remaking documentary media, combining formal visual strategies with those of amateur photography and performative elements to create a mixed-genre aesthetic. In doing so, they make political claims and create new forms of protection for migrant communities experiencing increased surveillance, detention, and deportation.

This open access monograph provides an overview of the everyday lives of undocumented migrants, thereby focusing on housing, employment, social networks, healthcare, migration trajectories as well as their use of the internet and social media. Although the book’s empirical focus is Finland, the themes connect the latter to broader geographical scales, reaching from global migration issues to the EU asylum policies, including in the post-2015 situations and during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as from national, political, and societal issues regarding undocumented migrants to the local challenges, opportunities, and practices in municipalities and communities. The book investigates how one becomes an undocumented migrant, sometimes by failing the asylum process. The book also discusses research ethics and provides practical guidelines and reflects on how to conduct quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research about undocumented migrants. Finally, the book addresses emerging research topics regarding undocumented migrants. Written in an accessible and engaging style the book is an interesting read for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners.

Finalist, 2020 C. Wright Mills Award, given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems Honorable Mention, 2021 Asian America Section Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association An inspiring look inside immigrant youth’s political activism in perilous times Undocumented immigrants in the United States who engage in social activism do so at great risk: the threat of deportation. In Organizing While Undocumented, Kevin Escudero shows why and how—despite this risk—many of them bravely continue to fight on the front lines for their rights. Drawing on more than five years of research, including interviews with undocumented youth organizers, Escudero focuses on the movement’s epicenters—San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City—to explain the impressive political success of the undocumented immigrant community. He shows how their identities as undocumented immigrants, but also as queer individuals, people of color, and women, connect their efforts to broader social justice struggles today. A timely, worthwhile read, Organizing While Undocumented gives us a look at inspiring triumphs, as well as the inevitable perils, of political activism in precarious times.

This book examines the adaptation experiences of legal immigrants with undocumented spouses, considering the structural limitations that they face in their private, social, and professional lives, as well as in regard to their finances and health. The first study to systematically analyze the ways in which legal immigrants are affected by federal and state policies that target their undocumented spouses, it reveals that, regardless of their immigration status, all members of mixed-status families are directly or indirectly subjected to the same intrusive and punitive laws. Based on an autoethnographic approach, Everyday Fears of Legal Immigrants with Undocumented Spouses: Under U.S. Immigration Policy also draws on additional qualitative research as well empirical evidence from existing studies and the latest quantitative data from various governmental agencies and think tanks. It thus integrates multiple approaches to ways of knowing and understanding the experiences of legal immigrants in mixed-status families and will therefore appeal to social scientists with interests in migration.

This book explores everyday lived experiences of multiculturalism in the contemporary world. Drawing on place-based case studies, contributions focus on encounters and interactions across cultural difference in super-diverse cities to explore what it means to inhabit multiculturalism in our everyday lives.

Illegalized situates undocumented youth movements' trajectories in the twenty-first century. It invites readers to explore how undocumented youth activists changed the way immigrant rights are discussed in the United States today.

"TO ALL THE MIGRANTS IN THE COUNTRY" AND I ASK ALL MIGRANTS WHO HAVE AN IMMIGRATION STATUS UNDOCUMENTED ("UNDOCUMENTED") NOT ME GO TO FAIL, BECAUSE YOU THEIR ANCESTORS ARE FROM EUROPE, YOU ALSO ARE OF THE FAMILY OF THE AMERICAN PILGRIMS, NOW STOP ALREADY COMPARED THE UNDOCUMENTED AFRICAN. YOU SHARE DROPS OF BLOOD FROM THE REPUBLICANS, AND COULD NEVER LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE WITH THE UNDOCUMENTED AFRICAN BECAUSE TO YOU, TO US, WE LIKE TO DO THE SEX, AND NOT CAN HAVE THE INSOLENT WATCHING CREATURE FROM THE OTHER ROOMS TO COPY US ACCORDING TO, OR TO ROB US, BECAUSE MONEY IT HAS UNTIL NOW, IS PRODUCT OF ALMS THEY HAVE GIVEN YOU, AND THE EXTRABAGANTES LUXURY THAT IS STEALING, ARE WITH MONEY FROM YOU ALL AS PAYERS OF TAXES AND LUXURIES THAT NO PRESIDENT HAD TAKEN IN THE HISTORY, BUT THAT THIS UNDOCUMENTED AFRICAN IS SPENDING THE MONEY ON TO ADVERTISING AND BUYING EXPENSIVE THINGS WITH DESPAIR TO SEE IF SO IS DONE AS YOU, AS THE PILGRIMS THAT CAME FROM EUROPE TO CONQUER THESE LANDS, SOMETHING THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE, BECAUSE THE MERE CENTRE OF AFRICA IS BLACK AND MOMBASA, KENYA, AFRICA IS BLACK; AND NOBODY HAS ANY BLAME FOR THAT AND YOU, THE HISPANIC MOST AND OTHERS, NOT HAVE NO BLACK DROP, AND YOU USE DIFFERENT COSMETICS OF HIM, SO ENOUGH WITH THAT YOU INVESTIGATE YOUR OWN ANCESTORS AND YOU ONLY WILL FIND A HERNAN CORTES AND A CUAHUTEMOC. "The Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria" or "I am a descendant of Cuahutemoc, Mexican pride.

Now the most populous minority group in the United States, Latino/as increasingly need guidance on the everyday issues that affect their economic livelihood, their freedom, and their equal rights to dignity and opportunity. This comprehensive guide is organized around the three flashpoints that contribute to the unique legal treatment of Latino/as-immigration status, language regulation, and racial/ethnic discrimination. These points are examined in the venues of everyday life for Latino/as-from discrimination in housing to discrimination and language regulation in the workplace and lack of protection for immigrant labor, to classrooms where the bilingual education debate rages, to the voting booth and the criminal justice system where Latino/as confront racial profiling and language barriers.

This collection gathers a variety of scholars representing various methodological perspectives and applying diverse critical lenses to analyze the idea of borders, borderlands, frontiers, and liminal space, as they are represented in literature and philosophy. The idea of the border and frontier is perhaps more important than ever: under the siege of COVID-19, with shattered illusions of a post-racial world, when a global effort is required as a response to a crisis that does not respect national or regional borders, we need to reconsider what frontiers and borders mean to us, and how to best understand them so that they do not divide, but point to areas of common knowledge, collective experiences, and shared humanity. Drawing upon examples from different continents (Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe) and from diverse specific places (such as the Mexico-US border, or the contested Palestinian frontiers), and using a variety of critical perspectives (evoking Gloria Anzaldua, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edward Said, for instance), this volume explores the idea of frontiers and borders in order to comment on their representations in literature, philosophy, music, and cinema, and on the human condition in general.

How everyday forms of surveillance threaten undocumented immigrants—but also offer them hope for societal inclusion Some eleven million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, carving out lives amid a growing web of surveillance that threatens their and their families’ societal presence. Engage and Evade examines how undocumented immigrants navigate complex dynamics of surveillance and punishment, providing an extraordinary portrait of fear and hope on the margins. Asad L. Asad brings together a wealth of research, from intimate interviews and detailed surveys with Latino immigrants and their families to up-close observations of immigration officials, to offer a rare perspective on the surveillance that undocumented immigrants encounter daily. He describes how and why these immigrants engage with various institutions—for example, by registering with the IRS or enrolling their kids in public health insurance programs—that the government can use to monitor them. This institutional surveillance feels both necessary and coercive, with undocumented immigrants worrying that evasion will give the government cause to deport them. Even so, they hope their record of engagement will one day help them prove to immigration officials that they deserve societal membership. Asad uncovers how these efforts do not always meet immigration officials’ high expectations, and how surveillance is as much about the threat of exclusion as the promise of inclusion. Calling attention to the fraught lives of undocumented immigrants and their families, this superbly written and compassionately argued book proposes wide-ranging, actionable reforms to achieve societal inclusion for all.