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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 …