From Refugees to Immigrants: The Legal Strategies of Salvadoran Immigrants and their Advocates

This paper examines the strategies used by undocumented immigrants (and their advocates) to negotiate and redefine their legal status in the U.S. within the context of existing legal categories and policies. Focusing on the experiences of Salvadorans who have entered the United States since the early 1980s, a period during which U.S. immigration law was generally being toughened, it demonstrates that it is sometimes possible for immigrants to influence U.S. immigration law to their own advantage. It is shown that the strategies used by Salvadoran immigrants derive largely from the ways that immigration law --defined as a set of categories, practices, and relationships that pervades the lives of both citizens and non-citizens-- is implicated within daily life. This paper raises questions about current approaches to immigration policy by showing how laws designed to close "loopholes" in existing immigration law may be serving primarily to change the terms in which legal status and identities will continue to be negotiated

Transnational alienage and foreignness: deportees and Foreign Service Officers in Central America

The literature on transnationalism has emphasised the ways that citizenship practices can transcend borders, for example, enabling migrants to use resources acquired outside of their country of origin to engage politically within it. This literature has not, however, addressed how migrants fall outside of rather than transcend national boundaries. To analyse this condition, we develop the concepts of transnational alienage and foreignness and apply them to the experiences of two groups: (1) US Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) stationed in Central America and Mexico and (2) long-time US residents who were deported to El Salvador. Though positioned quite differently, there are also surprising intersections in FSOs' and deportees' social locations. These intersections shed light on the forms of citizenship and alterity created by the transnational security regimes in which both FSOs and deportees are situated. Our analysis draws on interviews conducted in the US, Mexico and Central America between 2008 and 2010. © 2013 Taylor & Francis