Humanitarian capital: how lawyers help immigrants use suffering to claim membership in the nation-state

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how humanitarianism operates within the nation-state, asking: what strategies do lawyers employ to help undocumented immigrants access membership rights in the United States though humanitarian policies? I identify three concurrent evaluations that lawyers undertake to determine legalisation strategies. First, attorneys carry out an assessment of threat of deportation because not all undocumented immigrants are equally at risk. Second, they determine eligibility by matching migrants’ complex lived experiences to narrow, formal eligibility criteria, which often exclude individuals arbitrarily. Third, attorneys determine whether each case is ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ (more/less likely to acquire status) by identifying instances of migrant suffering to transform them into what I call ‘humanitarian capital’, a symbolic resource legible to adjudicators in the immigration bureaucracy who grant legal status on the basis of compassion to limited numbers of exceptional cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanitarianism
• citizenship
• asylum

Acknowledgements

I thank Leisy Abrego, Sebastian Chauvin, Sarah Lakhani, Ruben Hernandez-Leon, Cecilia Menjivar, Emily Ryo, Roger Waldinger, and the International Migration Working Group at UCLA for their valuable feedback on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Chiara Galli http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9393-888X

Notes

1 CLA and all personal names are pseudonyms.

2 Other LPRs can become citizens after 5 years.

3 This study obtained IRB approval.

4 In summer 2018, Attorney General Sessions further complicated matters by barring gang and domestic violence as valid grounds for asylum. This decision (Matter of A-B-) is being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies.

5 This has been the case since 2016, when El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico hit statutory limits due to high demand.

6 Changing Obama-era policy, the Trump administration has implemented changes that also cause unaccompanied minors to age out of TVPRA asylum eligibility, if they do not apply before they turn 18.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program [grant number DGE-1144087]. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.