Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Abstract
This article analyzes how Central American immigrants in tenuous legal statuses experience current immigration laws. Based on ethnographic observations and over 200 interviews conducted between 1998 and 2009 with immigrants in Los Angeles and Phoenix and individuals in sending communities, this study reveals how the convergence and implementation of immigration and criminal law constitute forms of violence. Drawing on theories of structural and symbolic violence, the authors use the analytic category “legal violence” to capture the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of the law. The analysis focuses on three central and interrelated areas of immigrants’ lives—work, family, and schooling—to expose how the criminalization of immigrants at the federal, state, and local levels is not only exclusionary but also generates violent effects for individual immigrants and their families, affecting everyday lives and long-term incorporation processes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- American Journal of Sociology
- Topic
- Migration, Refugees, and Integration
- Field
- Social Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- UC Berkeley College of ChemistryArizona State UniversityUniversity of ChicagoHarvard UniversityGeorge Mason UniversityYork UniversitySage Foundation
- Keywords
- ImmigrationPolitical scienceImmigration lawCriminologyLawSociology
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes