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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Temporary Protection, Enduring Contradiction: The Contested And Contradictory Meanings Of Temporary Immigration Status, Miranda Cady Hallett Jul 2014

Temporary Protection, Enduring Contradiction: The Contested And Contradictory Meanings Of Temporary Immigration Status, Miranda Cady Hallett

Sociology Faculty Scholarship

In the construction of immigration status categories in law and social practice, the power of the nation-state to define migrants' status is pervasive but far from absolute. In this article, I examine the conditioned legality known as Temporary Protected Status ( TPS) in US immigration law through a discussion of legal structures, historical frames, local discourses, and Salvadoran migrants' lived experiences with liminal legality in rural Arkansas in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I argue that migration policy, though fraught with ambiguity and contradiction (see Coutin 2007; Coutin and Yngvesson 2008), functions both to reproduce and to mask …


"Better Than White Trash": Work Ethic, Latinidad And Whiteness In Rural Arkansas, Miranda Cady Hallett Jan 2012

"Better Than White Trash": Work Ethic, Latinidad And Whiteness In Rural Arkansas, Miranda Cady Hallett

Sociology Faculty Scholarship

Diverse sites in the US South are being transformed by "new Latino immigration." Rather than being a homogeneous process, experiences of migrant settlement are shaped by the racialized social worlds of particular historical social communities -- and may in turn transform local racial formations (Winders, 2005). In one small town in rural Arkansas, Latina and Latino migrants perform boundary work (Lamont, 2000; Hartigan, 2010), constructing their identities as "good" workers and neighbors. Although migrants assert belonging and dignity by framing themselves as "better than White trash," nonetheless this belonging is predicated on the reproduction of racial and class hierarchy as …