Susan Bibler Coutin

Contesting criminality Illegal immigration and the spatialization of legality

As a field, criminology has paid insufficient attention to societal processes that obscure the distinction between legality and illegality, decriminalize formerly objectionable behavior or redefine law-breakers as deserving members of society. An analysis of undocumented immigrants’ efforts to redefine themselves as legal residents highlights ways that the category of the criminal is rendered unstable, suggests that logics of social control create opportunities to challenge exclusion and shows how law and illegality are entangled. For instance, individuals who are deemed socially dangerous can argue that they are low risk, or can redefine risk, highlighting the social costs of situating offenders exclusively in a domain of illegitimacy. Through such arguments, the licit can seep into and reconstitute the illegal, and vice versa

From refugees to immigrants: the legalization strategies of Salvadoran immigrants and activists.

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.

“Your friend, the illegal:” Definition and paradox in newspaper accounts of U.S. immigration reform

The U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) created a new legal category, “illegal immigrant eligible for amnesty.” Media coverage of IRCA provides an opportunity to analyze the connections between the legal and cultural discourses in which identities are created and contested. From our analysis of media images of amnesty applicants, citizens, and illegal alines in 283 news articles, we find that journalists not only debated the categorization of certain individuals belonged, but also the meanings of immigration categories themselves. To clarify the new category created by IRCA, journalists used “legalization narratives:” accounts of immigrants’ geographical, social, and legal journeys from illegal aliens to proto‐citizens. Images of immigrants that journalists constructed were complexly determined, multivocal, sometimes paradoxical, and occasionally subversive.

Remitting subjects: migrants, money and states

Abstract Scholars’ and policy-makers’ interest in the remittances that migrants send home to relatives has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Focusing on remittances from the United States to El Salvador, we examine how academic studies, public discourse, and state accounting practices simultaneously produce and reveal the nature of this phenomenon. By treating the money that migrants send home as both national resource and foreign currency, central banks and international financial institutions define remittances as a ‘cost-free’ source of national income. Further, debates about remittances’ social and economic impact focus on whether remitting promotes or undermines particular values associated with neoliberalism, such as self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship and empowerment. Our analysis thus sheds light on new configurations through which money, states and migrant citizens are linked.

Deportation Studies: Origins, Themes and Directions

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.

Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence

In Exiled Home , Susan Bibler Coutin recounts the experiences of Salvadoran children who migrated with their families to the United States during the 1980–1992 civil war. Because of their youth and the violence they left behind, as well as their uncertain legal status in the United States, many grew up with distant memories of El Salvador and a profound sense of disjuncture in their adopted homeland. Through interviews in both countries, Coutin examines how they sought to understand and overcome the trauma of war and displacement through such strategies as recording community histories, advocating for undocumented immigrants, forging new relationships with the Salvadoran state, and, for those deported from the United States, reconstructing their lives in El Salvador. In focusing on the case of Salvadoran youth, Coutin’s nuanced analysis shows how the violence associated with migration can be countered through practices that recuperate historical memory while also reclaiming national membership.

Place and presence within Salvadoran deportees’ narratives of removal

Based on life history interviews conducted with 1.5 generation Salvadorans who were raised in the United States and then deported to El Salvador, this article examines the displaced subjectivities being produced through intensified deportation regimes. Current theorizations of deportation are extended by examining the transition to illegality experienced by youth who may have thought their place in the United States was secure. Youths’ narratives of removal construct alternative measures of belonging and suggest that the inscription of places within persons cannot be undone merely by removing a person from a particular territory.

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.

Reconceptualizing Research: Ethnographic Fieldwork and Immigration Politics in Southern California

With the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski set the standards for ethnographic research for decades to come. His advice to ethnographers was straightforward. Know the natives. Live among them. Adopt their point of view. Learn their language. Spend a long time in the field. Take copious fieldnotes. Locate and interview key informants. Produce data-driven accounts. While the authoritativeness of ethnographic texts has recently been questioned1 and while most anthropologists no longer regard their research subjects as “natives,” these fieldwork practices remain central to ethnographic research on legal and other topics.

Migrant Narratives and Ethnographic Tropes Navigating Tragedy, Creating Possibilities

Tragic stories of border crossings are often central to accounts of migration, and as ethnographers we are privy to stories of clandestine crossings, painful separations, and unspeakable loss. In the process of writing, ethnographers make these stories central to their own arguments and in so doing, those crossings, separations, and losses become knowable, imaginable, and part of a larger story of global interconnectedness and inequality. Ethnographers of migration write about those who cross borders, who become stuck within borders, or who are forcibly moved across borders because of deportation. Ethnographers thus position themselves at the crossroads of being activists, storytellers, and academics, even as they also locate their informants’ narratives along trajectories of tragedy and possibility.