Precarious legal status trajectories as method, and the work of legal status

ABSTRACT

Critiques of ‘fantasy citizenship’ include calls to migrantize the citizen and denationalize citizenship and migration studies. In response, this essay proposes ‘precarious legal status trajectories (PLSTs) as method’, with a focus on the work of legal status. This approach captures changes in sociolegal status trajectories, including illegalization, and builds a ‘thicker’ approach to trajectories. The work of status refers to effort, time, money, and other resources devoted to being present in a jurisdiction, and/or gain access to services and protections. The approach also considers work that does not produce changes and is not counted, and interactions with other actors. This contributes to understanding how precarious legal status trajectories are assembled and contribute to inequalities in citizenship and dynamics of differential inclusion. It migrantizes the citizen in a context where the share of citizens who were precarious noncitizens continues to rise, and when methodological nationalism occludes PLSTs.

KEYWORDS:

• Trajectory
• noncitizenship
• fantasy citizenship
• precarious legal status
• work of legal status
• methodological de-nationalism

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors for the invitation to contribute to this issue, and for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As noted in this essay, much of my research on noncitizenship and precarious legal status trajectories has been conducted in collaboration with Patricia Landolt, and earlier with other colleagues. I acknowledge and draw on this collaborative work; I am responsible for this paper.

2. These challenges build on earlier (and contemporary) anti-colonial struggles and wide range of social movements and struggles for civil rights; racial equality; gender parity; recognition of indigenous rights, autonomy and reconciliation; and other minority and group rights.

3. A review of these alternatives is beyond the scope of this essay. They include, but are not limited to, no-borders positions; Sanctuary cities as sites of exception; models of membership based on residence; and normative and social justice proposals meant to eliminate legal status and racialized legal status a vectors of inequality between citizens and non-citizens or foreigners.

4. See Goldring and Landolt (2013) and Landolt and Goldring (2016) on the conditionalities of presence and access, and Landolt, Goldring, and Pritchard (2022) on decentering methodological nationalism in surveys designed to capture precarious legal status trajectories.

5. Attention to jurisdictional variation may also be relevant for research, for example, comparing across similar jurisdictions, and variation between levels of government. The latter would include migrant experiences of access in municipalities with and without ‘Sanctuary’ or other policies at odds with federal or provincial policies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luin Goldring

Luin Goldring is a Professor of Sociology at York University. Her research interests include non-citizenship, citizenship and belonging; differential inclusion; and im/migrants and precarious work. Currently, she is involved in collaborative research on the relationship between precarious immigration trajectories and precarious work, and the experiences of illegalized migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic.