Abstract
This study examines the ways in which liminally legal young immigrants respond to shifting policies that either legitimize or delegitimize their presence within state and national boundaries. Borne out of two larger studies that rely on ethnographic and in-depth interview data in Massachusetts and North Carolina, we primarily focus on longitudinal interviews with individuals responding to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). We examine the ways in which federal and state policies interact to affect access to membership for young adult immigrants in states with very different political climates. In Massachusetts, young adults felt more legitimacy and were more optimistic in their abilities to redirect their life pathways after DACA. In contrast, in the more hostile environment of North Carolina, state policies continued to impede mobility pathways and differentiate previously undocumented youth as outsiders even after the passage of DACA. Instead of characterizing the transition to adulthood for liminally legal youth as a unidirectional transition to exclusion, we emphasize the interactive influence of state- and federal-level policies and illustrate how incorporation can occur on multiple levels and even in opposite directions simultaneously. Moreover, we discuss how hostile policies in one state appear to reverberate outward, suggesting spillover effects for respondents in other states.
In the absence of comprehensive federal immigration reform, individual states have increasingly enacted policies to address burgeoning populations of immigrants within their borders (Gilbert, 2009; Rodríguez, Chishti, & Nortman, 2010; Varsanyi, 2010; Varsanyi, Lewis, Provine, & Decker, 2012). Several scholars have noted that the devolution of immigration enforcement has created more exclusionary contexts of reception for immigrants, particularly in conservative states and new destinations (Olivas, 2007; Pham, 2004; Ramakrishnan & Wong, 2010; Rodríguez et al., 2010; Varsanyi, 2010; Varsanyi et al., 2012; Wishnie, 2001). Because of the proximate impacts of state policies on immigrants residing within state borders, state policies can exacerbate or mitigate perceptions of exclusion. Nonetheless, state policies do not act alone to frame immigrants’ experiences within the polity. Instead, immigrants’ feelings of membership or exclusion are framed within national contexts that interact with state and local contexts at particular political conjunctures.
In contrast to the mounting anti-immigrant legislation at the state and local levels, the 2012 memorandum of prosecutorial discretion announcing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) moved federal-level policies in a more inclusive direction, at least for a subsection of young unauthorized immigrants. While maintaining barriers to public resources and benefits, DACA offered conditional temporary status to previously undocumented immigrants who had resided in the United States since childhood and met certain educational and moral requirements. Provided that these young immigrants had been educated in U.S. schools, had earned GEDs or served in the military, and were law-abiding residents, they were granted temporary reprieve from the threat of deportation and access to work permits.
While DACA offered temporary status to beneficiaries throughout the country, impacts of DACA varied by state. Because DACA did not comprehensively address policies of institutional incorporation, state legislators were tasked with creating state-level applications of the policy. Resulting policies reflected political climates at the state level and created very different contexts of reception for DACA recipients from state to state. Some states, for example, granted in-state tuition for higher education and driver’s licenses to DACA beneficiaries while others maintained barriers to these institutions. Thus, while DACA sent a clear message to previously unauthorized youth that they merited at least partial membership in the United States, state policies that restricted the benefits of DACA curtailed the inclusionary impacts.
In this article, we examine how young adults responded to DACA in Massachusetts and North Carolina. Through this comparative analysis, we advance theory on how federal and state policies interact at particular historical conjunctures to affect perceptions of belonging among 1.5-generation immigrants. By focusing on the lived experiences of youth and foregrounding the conflicts between federal- and state-level policies, our analysis underscores the theoretical and practical importance of not treating the state as a uniform entity. Indeed, DACA and its applications at the state level resulted in a “multilayered jurisdictional patchwork” of policies (Varsanyi et al., 2012) wherein immigrant youth experienced concentric contexts of reception at local, state, and federal levels. We argue that these layered contexts of reception complicate DACA beneficiaries’ lives, as they simultaneously experience inclusion on one level and exclusion on another. By acknowledging variations among overlapping contexts, we demonstrate how state policies not only filter federal-level policies but also reverberate upwards to influence perceptions of membership beyond individual state borders.
Literature Review
Constructing Membership, Maintaining Exclusion
Discussions of membership within the nation-state often invoke the idea of nationhood as an “imagined community” of people united by a shared culture (Anderson, 1991). Indeed, President Obama relied on this idea of a unified imagined community when he announced DACA, saying, These are young people who study in our schools, they play in our neighborhoods, they’re friends with our kids, they pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. (June 15, 2012
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Echoing arguments of immigrant youth activists (Pérez, 2009; Vargas, 2012), the President classified young unauthorized immigrants as deserving of authorization because of their feelings of national identity and their connections to American values. He argued that unauthorized youth should be given a pathway to membership via DACA because they were already socially and culturally “American.” Implicit within this argument was the idea that extending membership to undocumented youth who were raised in the United States would not be disruptive to the established authorized population.
By evoking the idea of a cohesive imagined community, the President’s announcement of DACA placed qualifying unauthorized youth into partial membership positions without challenging the nation-state’s rights to control its borders and access to membership. In some ways, the arguments put forth by the President in the announcement of DACA parallel the thoughts of political scholar Michael Walzer (1983), who argues that nation-states, like clubs, should have the right to control entrance and membership. Indeed, Walzer emphasizes the importance of national social cohesion as he warns that nation-states would fracture into “petty fortresses” or disparate communities if they were to relinquish control over their borders and cease restricting membership.
Walzer concedes, however, that all residents of a nation should receive equal protection under the law; otherwise, they are subjected to political and social “tyranny.” Drawing on Walzer, Bosniak (2007) argues in favor of “ethical territoriality,” or the extension of membership rights to all persons territorially present based on liberal democratic grounds. Although lively scholarly discussions about membership and citizenship exist, unauthorized youth are not often the focus of these conversations because they are generally regarded as “citizens in training,” and are excluded from voting (Ríos-Rojas, 2011, p. 67). Nonetheless, their connections to American institutions are often stronger than those of their parents due to their socialization experiences. Moreover, their presence in elementary and secondary schools is largely protected under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1982 Plyler v. Doe decision, which ruled that unauthorized youth deserved equal protection under the law by virtue of their residence and personhood.
While unauthorized youth are incorporated as students in schools throughout the United States, their senses of membership vary depending on their community or state of residence, as well as their life course stage. Previous research has demonstrated how political, historical, and social contexts at both the local and national levels can shape feelings of membership and ease or obstruct opportunities for various ethnic, racial, and immigrant groups (Brubaker, Loveman, & Stamatov, 2004; Ríos-Rojas, 2011; Smith, 2014; Wimmer, 2008). In his examination of racial and ethnic identity formation among Mexican-origin youth in New York, for example, Robert Smith (2014) illustrates how “conjunctural ethnicities,” or ephemeral ethnic identities, can emerge and recede in response to overlapping institutional and historical contexts throughout the life course. Similarly, unauthorized immigrants may form conjunctural, or fragmented and impermanent, membership identities in response to shifts in various local-, state-, and national-level social and political contexts. Thus, if we are to understand lived experiences of young unauthorized immigrants—including their material opportunities and feelings of belonging—we must understand how immigrant youth are embedded in multiple political and institutional contexts. Furthermore, we must acknowledge how these layered contexts change over the life course and in different historical moments, especially given the shifting legal landscape.
Transitions to Adulthood in Layered Political Contexts
Because DACA, an action of prosecutorial discretion, did not alter the lawful immigration status of DACA beneficiaries, state legislatures could continue to enact policies limiting their benefits, provided that these actions were consistent with established statutory laws within state boundaries (Arellano, 2012). Without lawful permanent residency and a pathway to citizenship, DACA recipients were essentially placed into what Menjívar (2006) terms liminal legality, a gray area of legal membership. In these “liminally legal” positions, 1.5-generation immigrant youth have access to more government-issued documents (e.g., work permits) and rights than their undocumented peers without temporary authorized presence, but still suffer from much of the same social stigma and insecurity (Cebulko, 2013, 2014). Yet experiences are not uniform for those in liminal legality. DACA beneficiaries, for example, face very different opportunities and access to membership depending on the political climate of their state of residence. Thus, although DACA opened up opportunities for beneficiaries in all states, differences in state climates endured or, in some cases, were exacerbated after the implementation of DACA.
Regardless of state context, research has long shown that undocumented youth experience acute feelings of exclusion as they transition out of high school (Abrego, 2006; Cebulko, 2013; Gleeson & Gonzales, 2012; Gonzales, 2011; Silver, 2012). Yet states and communities offer variable in-state tuition policies and support apparatuses which shape the difficult stages of early adulthood in qualitatively unique ways (Cebulko, 2014; Flores, 2010; Flores & Chapa, 2009; Silver, 2012; Gonzales & Ruiz, 2014). For example, youth in states with longer histories of migration often have better access to in-state tuition and scholarship opportunities for higher education than their peers in southern new destination areas (Abrego, 2006, 2008; Flores, 2010; Flores & Chapa, 2009; Gonzales, 2011). Meanwhile, youth and young adults in new destinations and more rural areas may be exposed to more restrictive immigration policies and/or more aggressive immigration enforcement than their counterparts in more traditional migrant destinations (Gonzales & Ruiz, 2014; Silver, 2012; Wong & García, 2015). Nonetheless, social and institutional connections at the local level can mitigate the impacts of restrictive state policies (Silver, 2012; Wong & García, 2015). Similarly, actions at the federal level can interact with state policies to frame immigrant experiences. In other words, immigrants can simultaneously experience movements toward inclusion at the federal level while they face exclusionary policies at the state level, or vice versa.
Although recent research has highlighted the importance of state and local contexts, relatively little attention has been paid to the interactive influences of state- and federal-level policies for unauthorized youth. Given the aforementioned movement toward partial inclusion for DACA beneficiaries at the federal level, and the variable state-level interpretations of the policy, this understanding is particularly timely and important. While DACA offered unauthorized youth more protection from deportation and facilitated work opportunities for beneficiaries in all states, the extent of the benefits of the policy varied drastically by state. Relying on rich in-depth interview data in Massachusetts and North Carolina both before and after the implementation of DACA, our study examines the ways in which state- and federal-level policies interact to shape the transition to adulthood for DACA beneficiaries.
More Hospitable States of Inclusion and Hostile States of Exclusion: Massachusetts and North Carolina
Despite its reputation as a progressive state, Massachusetts has not been one of the nation’s most receptive contexts for unauthorized youth. At the time of DACA’s announcement in 2012, Massachusetts did not offer in-state tuition (unless youth had work permits), unlike 13 other states around the country, including many of its neighboring states (i.e., New York, 2002; Connecticut, 2011; and Rhode Island, 2011). 2 While Governor Deval Patrick (D), first elected in 2006, continuously expressed support for in-state tuition, he asserted that that under current federal law, he did not have the power to pursue in-state tuition or driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants (Sacchetti, 2010).
Yet, in contrast to North Carolina, Massachusetts has been a more favorable context for DACA recipients. In November 2012, just a few months after DACA went into effect, Governor Deval Patrick announced that DACA recipients would be eligible for in-state tuition rates in Massachusetts. The Patrick Administration emphasized that allowing DACA beneficiaries to qualify for in-state tuition did not require a change in policy at the state level, but rather, enforced existing policy in Massachusetts. According to then-Education Secretary Paul Reville, Massachusetts had been allowing residents with work permits to qualify for in-state tuition since 2008. Thus, from the Patrick administration’s perspective, DACA beneficiaries had the necessary qualifications for in-state tuition eligibility (Sacchetti, 2012). Importantly then, for DACA beneficiaries in Massachusetts, DACA not only brought temporary relief from deportation and work permits, it also brought long-sought changes in the educational landscape in the form of access to in-state tuition. Additionally, and once again in contrast to North Carolina, DACA beneficiaries were now eligible for in-state drivers’ licenses that did not differentiate them from their peers.
North Carolina, however, was among the states aggressively implementing new measures to limit access to resources for unauthorized immigrants. It was an early national leader in its ability to train local law officials to enforce immigration law through the 287(g) program (Weissman, Headen, & Parker, 2009), and it was the 10th state in the nation to adopt the federal Secure Communities program statewide in 2011. Specifically targeting undocumented youth, several bills were introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly to ban undocumented students from both community colleges and state universities and colleges. 3 Although none of the bills banning access to education passed in North Carolina, similar bills were passed in the nearby states of South Carolina and Alabama, and by the Board of Regents in Georgia (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2013).
Moreover, the North Carolina Community College Board (NCCCB) passed a resolution barring undocumented immigrants from attending community colleges in 2008. The ban was overturned in 2009, but the NCCCB stipulated that undocumented students were required to pay out-of-state tuition and could not supplant legal residents in overcrowded classes (Gonzales, 2009). While the North Carolina state government, unlike its regional neighbors, did not ban undocumented youth from institutions of higher education, it also did not pass legislation to facilitate entry into college for undocumented students. Even after the enactment of DACA, North Carolina denied in-state tuition rates to DACA recipients despite ranking within the top 10 states of potential DACA beneficiaries (Batalova & Mittelstadt, 2012).
North Carolina’s policy on driver’s licenses followed a similar trajectory to the community college policy, as the DMV temporarily revoked licenses and ceased issuing new licenses to DACA beneficiaries. Eventually, the DMV followed the state Attorney General’s recommendation to issue licenses to DACA beneficiaries, but only after considerable debate surrounding the design. Initially, the North Carolina DMV designed vertical licenses with a magenta stripe across the top and the words, “no lawful status” and “limited term” included on the bottom and side of the licenses in red font. After much protest, the Department of Transportation modified the licenses to appear in horizontal format and without the magenta stripe. Even after the modification, however, the licenses continued to bear the phrasing, “LEGAL PRESENCE NO LAWFUL STATUS.”
North Carolina’s driver’s license debate stood out in a national context, which generally saw driver’s licenses for DACA beneficiaries as a logical outcome of the federal action. Although driver’s licenses fall under state purview, the National Immigration Law Center (2013) deemed DACA recipients as fitting well within the general guidelines of state requirements for driver’s license eligibility. Only Arizona and Nebraska denied driver’s licenses to DACA recipients while 45 states made driver’s licenses available to DACA recipients immediately after the policy was enacted, including Massachusetts.
Method
Data for this article come from two larger, separate studies. Although the participants in both studies differed along important ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, both samples stressed government policies as central to their lived experiences within the United States and their home states. Thus, while acknowledging the important differences between the Brazilian-origin sample in the Massachusetts, and the Mexican and Central American–origin sample in North Carolina, we focus on the comparable experiences of both samples.
Cebulko began field research with the Brazilian community in Massachusetts in the Summer of 2006. After the Chinese, and possibly Dominicans, Brazilians are the second or third largest immigrant group in Massachusetts, and are much more likely to be unauthorized. Marcelli et al. (2009) estimate that approximately 71% of Brazilian adults in the Boston metro area were unauthorized as opposed to an estimated 7% of Dominicans.
Beginning in 2006, Cebulko began working with local Brazilian organizations and conducting interviews with 1.5-generation Brazilians in young adulthood. In 2007, she sat on a grassroots higher education taskforce for immigrants and worked as the Development Coordinator for a Brazilian nonprofit organization. Additionally, since 2007, she has served a grant consultant for a Brazilian grassroots organization and attended many Brazilian community events. These connections with immigrants’ rights advocates and local Brazilian leaders helped build rapport in the Brazilian community, served as additional entry points for interviews throughout the years of data collection, and provided valuable insight into the shifting political and legal context in Massachusetts, including the outreach efforts by grassroots organizations following DACA.
Forty-seven 1.5-generation Brazilian young adults participated in in-depth semistructured interviews between 2006 and 2014. These interviews not only took place with respondents from Boston but also with young adults from Boston suburbs, smaller towns, and the cities of Taunton and Fall River. A snowball technique was used to recruit participants with sources at local Brazilian organizations providing the initial contact for recruitment. As Cebulko’s engagement in the community deepened, however, referrals expanded to include restaurant workers, nannies, nutritionists, and law office clerks. The in-depth interviews lasted between 60 minutes and 3½ hours and covered a range of migration and incorporation experiences. Thirty of the 47 respondents had been unauthorized for some period during the transition to adulthood, and 16 of these 30 respondents participated in longitudinal interviews. Data for this article primarily come from the longitudinal interviews conducted with those 16 respondents and from interviews conducted with an additional 4 respondents who participated in one interview each after the announcement of DACA.
Silver began conducting research in 2007 in the small community of Allen Creek, North Carolina. 4 North Carolina experienced one of the fastest rates of growth for new immigrants in the country, and its Latino population grew by 508% between 1990 and 2008 to a total population of 800,000, or 8.4% of the state population (Fortuny, 2010). As manufacturing plants closed in traditional migrant destinations, migrants arrived in the Southeast to fill labor opportunities in construction as well as textile and food processing plants (Griffith, 2008; Hagan, Lowe, & Quingla, 2011; Kandel & Parrado, 2005; Mohl, 2003). Allen Creek was one of several towns in the state that saw a dramatic shift in its demographic make-up due to several poultry processing plants in the area. At the time of the study, more than 50% of Allen Creek’s approximately 8,000 residents were Latino and approximately 75% of Allen Creek’s Hispanic population was foreign born (American Community Survey, n.d.).
In April of 2007, Silver began ethnographic field research at the public high school and the Latino Outreach Center in Allen Creek. After 1 year in the field, she began conducting in-depth interviews in April 2008 with youth and adults in the local high school, on the soccer teams, and in the community Latino Outreach Center. From these initial contacts in key sites of institutional incorporation for immigrant youth, she used snowball sampling to diversify the sample and gain more respondents from the community.
The youth interview sample comprised 38 Latina/o young adults (20 undocumented and 18 documented), 11 African American young adults, and 13 White young adults. The Latino respondents primarily came from Mexico and Guatemala, the two largest immigrant groups in North Carolina, but there were also respondents from Colombia, Honduras, and El Salvador. All the young adult interviews were conducted with individuals between the ages of 16 and 25 years at the time of the initial interview. An additional 16 adults, who interacted with youths in the community, including teachers, parents, and community leaders, completed the remaining interviewed sample. In-depth semistructured interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 2½ hours, with most lasting approximately 1 hour. Follow-ups with respondents included visits, email correspondence, and formal interviews with 16 individuals both before and after DACA was announced. This article draws primarily on longitudinal interview data with respondents who were interviewed both before and after the enactment of DACA, allowing us to capture their responses in real time.
Findings
After the implementation of DACA, respondents in both Massachusetts and North Carolina noted a change in their sense of belonging as state policies shifted to adapt to the federal action. While research has shown that local context, race, and ethnicity also shape immigrant incorporation (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Portes & Zhou, 1993), our respondents emphasized state policies in the wake of DACA as directly affecting their feelings of membership. In other words, the two samples experienced different contexts of receptions prior to the passage of DACA because of distinct ethnic identities and local contexts of reception. Yet, after the implementation of DACA, respondents emphasized state-level responses as being paramount to shifting their sense of belonging. Moreover, these shifts were qualitatively different as respondents in North Carolina interpreted DACA as a more inclusive policy against the backdrop of a more hostile state climate, while respondents in Massachusetts found state-level policies to be more inclusive in the face of an insufficient federal-level action.
We explicitly examine access to education, work, and driver’s licenses as these benefits were most salient for our respondents. Our data highlight differential access to opportunities in Massachusetts and North Carolina, but also underscore similarities in the sense of exclusion from full membership, which persist for respondents in both states despite national-origin, age, and state and local context differences. Furthermore, we also find that exclusionary state-level policies in North Carolina influenced the ways in which DACA recipients in Massachusetts perceived the treatment of immigrants in the United States in general. Our data thereby demonstrate that more hostile policies in one state can spillover to affect perceptions of belonging even in more welcoming states.
Hopes for Educational Attainment and Forward Momentum
One of the most consistent findings in the literature on unauthorized youth is the pain that unauthorized youth feel on discovering that their dreams of higher education are on hold (Abrego, 2006; Cebulko, 2013; Gleeson & Gonzales, 2012; Gonzales, 2011; Pérez, 2009; Silver, 2012). Indeed, this was true for many of the unauthorized respondents in both North Carolina and Massachusetts when we interviewed them prior to June 2012. Deferred Action, however, facilitated educational opportunities for some respondents in Massachusetts in ways that continued to be closed in North Carolina.
In North Carolina, young adults were quickly disappointed with state policies that stymied the ability of DACA to open up pathways of mobility through education. Krisali, a 20-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who had lived in North Carolina since the age of 4 years, explained her reaction to DACA: What would have been even better is if we had in-state tuition. It’s extremely hard for me to get funding for my second year [of college] because [the scholarship] only gave us $7,000 for the whole year. So we went from getting $23,000 from [the private funding agency] to only $7,000. At least now I know that if I can’t get the money then I can work and maybe go back to school later, or go to community college.
Krisali highlighted the work benefits of DACA but was bitterly disappointed by the enduring financial barriers to higher education in North Carolina. She had managed to secure funding, prior to DACA, for her first year at a private 4-year college from a nongovernmental, merit-based scholarship. In her second year, however, the funding organization only offered her a partial scholarship and she was therefore unable to remain enrolled in spite of her newly received “legal presence.” Krisali dropped out of school and worked while saving money in the hopes of eventually returning to school. She saw this as a step backwards and lamented the loss of her scholarship and the prestige that came with it. Over 2 years after receiving DACA, she was still working to pay off the debt to the 4-year college that she incurred when her scholarship fell through. Moreover, she had not yet enrolled in community college. Because Krisali saw her own educational opportunities restrict, rather than expand, she therefore felt the impacts of her outsider status even more strongly after the implementation of DACA.
Unlike Krisali, Sandra, age 23 years, of Massachusetts, positively redirected her educational trajectory following DACA. During interviews in 2007 and 2011, Sandra was frustrated by exclusion and obstructions to upward mobility. Her high standardized test scores had qualified her for merit-based scholarships at several colleges. However, due to her legal status, there were questions about whether she would be awarded the scholarships. Furthermore, even with partial scholarships, she would have been unable to afford tuition at most schools, without access to in-state tuition or financial aid. Thus, instead of going to college, she enrolled herself in online courses through Harvard’s extension program and worked jobs under-the-table.
In 2011, Sandra felt that her life had still not “progressed” since the first interview in 2007, largely because she still did not have a college degree. In 2013, however, a year after DACA was announced, Sandra was excited and finally expressed optimism that going to college was in her near future. As she said, “(DACA’s) exciting because it’s a step. It’s much more than we had before. You know, and it’s like a step in the right direction.” For Sandra, the “right direction” included access to in-state tuition, which allowed her to move forward with her educational aspirations. Indeed, she completed her associate’s degree in December 2012, and due to her new DACA status, was only charged in-state rates for her final semester. Furthermore, she was now talking about where—not if—she would get her bachelor’s degree. In fall 2013, Sandra began taking courses at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst. While she strongly preferred to go to a private university in Boston, she chose UMass Amherst because it was less expensive with in-state tuition. Ineligible for federal financial aid, the cost of a private education was too great. Yet even though state policies in Massachusetts could not completely facilitate her college dream, which was to attend a private university, access to in-state tuition did ease her entry into a 4-year college.
While Sandra positively redirected her educational trajectory, DACA beneficiaries in Massachusetts who were older than Sandra—in middle and later young adulthood—often did not personally redirect their educational trajectories because they felt it was too late in their lives to pursue their original goals. Yet even respondents who did not redirect their lives after an adjustment in status saw DACA as opening up opportunities for younger siblings and friends. For example, Fabiana, who was 28 years old in 2013, declared that she was “over the moon” with happiness that DACA had helped her younger sister and other immigrants with their college aspirations. At the same time, she cried during the interview, lamenting the fact that DACA had not been in place 10 years prior when her college dreams came to a halt.
In Massachusetts then, DACA facilitated opportunities for education and signaled inclusion in the state community. In contrast, Krisali and DACA beneficiaries in North Carolina continued to struggle to access higher education. In the case of Krisali, DACA could not even help her maintain her enrollment in college. Yet, in spite of the more exclusionary context of North Carolina, DACA was limiting in both state contexts. Sandra could not go to her first college of choice since she was excluded from federal and state aid, and Fabiana felt the policy had come too late in her life course as she was already married with children in 2012.
Planning for Work With Guarded Optimism
While DACA was limited in its ability to facilitate access to higher education, particularly in North Carolina, the policy illuminated a more direct pathway toward job security for young adults in both North Carolina and Massachusetts. In both states, newly obtained job security translated into a sense of legitimacy for young adults who had been working under the table or with false documents prior to the passage of DACA. While distinctions between the two states were not as pronounced in terms of access to work, additional barriers to higher education in North Carolina limited chances for DACA recipients to access upwardly mobile jobs.
Zaíra, a 21-year-old Guatemalan immigrant in North Carolina, gave up on her dream to attend a 4-year private college when she could not secure funding. Zaíra struggled with depression in her first 2 years after high school as she worked low-wage jobs with little opportunity for advancement. After working several jobs in the fast food and manufacturing industries using false documents, she acquired what she described as “really good [false] papers,” and she began working in retail. She found retail work to be less stigmatizing, and she valued the sense of normalcy it provided. When Zaíra’s immigration status became public knowledge, however, she realized that her sense of security was balancing on a very shaky foundation.
Zaíra got fired when her sister posted a message about her 21st birthday on her Facebook wall. Everyone at Zaíra’s work thought that she was 26, as she maintained a work identity consistent with her false work permit. Her unintentional outing as an undocumented immigrant upset her carefully crafted existence. She explained the shame she felt when her coworker revealed her secret to her boss who subsequently fired her saying, “I just felt so ashamed and humiliated. They all said that I had lied to them, but I never wanted to lie. They just don’t understand.”
DACA offered Zaíra an avenue to overcome the humiliation of being exposed as an undocumented immigrant. She spoke about what it meant to finally have legal presence, saying, It felt like something fell from the sky. I just couldn’t believe it. I was so relieved, and I just felt like, finally, I can do something and I can go back to school. It just feels like all of my dreams are finally opening up to me.
For Zaíra, DACA allowed her a sense of belonging and a way to present herself honestly in all spheres of her life. Furthermore, it allowed her to dream of career shifts and future opportunities that she hesitated to imagine before regularizing her status. Because Zaíra could not afford out-of-state tuition, however, she did not return to school immediately. Nonetheless, she moved from retail into the health care industry in an entry-level administrative role. She was proud of her job and felt like DACA had finally opened up doors that had been closed to her since graduating from high school.
Like Zaíra, Leila, age 30 years, of Massachusetts, saw DACA as a pathway toward legitimacy. Prior to DACA, Leila had achieved more educational success than many of her undocumented peers in Massachusetts, having graduated from UMass Amherst. Moreover, she also had more success in the labor market than nearly all of her undocumented peers, even those who had overcome obstacles to higher education, as they were often restricted from using their bachelor’s degrees, nursing degrees, or medical certifications. Leila had found work as a bookkeeper, making more than $50,000 a year before deciding to buy her own housecleaning business. Yet DACA had a profound impact on her sense of legitimacy. After receiving her approval for DACA, she exclaimed, “[DACA] changed everything for me!” Specifically, the work permit was something “tangible” that gave her “confidence” to plan for the future as she had more “certainty” that her vision and goals might come to fruition.
For some respondents in Massachusetts who had overcome barriers to postsecondary education, DACA allowed them to finally reap the benefits of their education. For Leila, DACA did not facilitate a change of occupations, as she was happy to own her own business. Yet she stated that DACA allowed her to “think about her business totally differently.” DACA removed fear and legitimized her presence, instilling confidence to grow her business.
I can have the confidence that I can take the steps without feeling the fear of “is this going to—you know, when I am filing my taxes,—Oh my God, am I going to get audited? And will bad things happen? No! I’m totally legit! Like I can take all the deductions that (are) written in the law and that I’m allowed to take! I don’t have to fear anything. . . . My idea is to grow the business. And hire people. And have a legitimate business. . . . So (DACA) just gives me the confidence to run this business like anybody else would. And not feel like, you know, maybe I have to keep it a smaller operation. Or I have to try and be as underground as possible. Or you know, have a low profile.
Leila used the terms “legit,” “legitimate,” and ‘legitimacy” throughout the interview when speaking about how DACA affected her. Indeed, she talked at length how she was now in the “same circle” as everybody else and could present herself honestly. She stated, “I don’t lie to people anymore. If anybody asks me ‘what’s your status?’ I say, ‘I have a work permit.’” For Leila, DACA’s legitimizing power affected much more than her professional career. Like Zaíra, Leila felt that she no longer had to lie about her status, as she had in the past. She could answer truthfully and with confidence, rather than shame, that she had a “work permit.”
Respondents in both Massachusetts and North Carolina were excited about their newfound sense of legitimacy, and they celebrated the work opportunities that came with DACA. Although the work contexts between North Carolina and Massachusetts were not as immediately apparent in comparison to the educational contexts, the two contexts are of course related. Because Massachusetts facilitated educational opportunities through in-state tuition, DACA recipients in Massachusetts could leverage educational gains into upwardly mobile jobs more effectively than their peers in North Carolina. Nonetheless, respondents in both states saw DACA as providing job security and legitimacy that had previously eluded them.
Government-Issued IDs: A License to Become “Somebody”
While DACA recipients talked about educational access and work permits as providing them with avenues toward upward mobility and security, they also consistently mentioned driver’s licenses as necessary to facilitate a sense of legitimacy. Prior to the passage of DACA, one of the primary stressors affecting the feelings of security for unauthorized young adults was the lack of a government-issued ID. Respondents in both North Carolina and Massachusetts mentioned driver’s licenses as one of the key benefits of DACA. The licenses issued by the two states, however, powerfully illustrated the stark contrasts in the context of reception from state to state.
For Rodrigo, 25 years, of Massachusetts, not having a driver’s license was one of the most frustrating aspects of being undocumented. Even in Boston, with fairly good public transportation, a lack of a driver’s license signified his exclusion as he was unable to “pick a girl up at her house” before prom or a date. After DACA, his driver’s license provided him with “more freedom than (he) imagined.” Specifically, he was able to play more soccer as he was no longer dependent on rides or public transportation and he was finally able to engage in traditional dating norms: “I finally experienced the long awaited date where I pick a girl up at her house and not at a train station! . . . Life’s good!”
Similarly, Roberta, 26 years, from a mid-sized city in Massachusetts, noted distinctions in her life pre- and post-DACA. For example, she was finally able to work as a nurse, rather than a grocery cashier, allowing her to reap the benefits of her schooling. Yet Roberta emphasized that a driver’s license was a “bigger thing” as it gave her a sense of being “somebody” in society. She stated, I think, without, like, an I.D. here, you feel like you’re nobody really. So I think, you know, we were joking with one of my friends too. She said, like, “The driver’s license is a bigger thing than even like the work permit, you know?” That’s what you carry around with you all the time and show and like, you feel like you’re somebody here by having that.
For Roberta, finally having access to a driver’s license was tantamount to gaining an identity and emerging from the shadows.
Respondents in North Carolina also saw driver’s licenses as one of the primary benefits of DACA. Although several North Carolina respondents discussed the differentiated license as maintaining exclusion, others nonetheless also saw it as a powerful rite of passage. Mariano, a 21-year-old unauthorized immigrant from Guatemala, for example, explained his reaction to having access to a driver’s license, saying, I think it’s going to be really powerful. I mean, I do have a sense of an identity, but this is going to make it much more official. I think that it’s going to make me (pauses), I’m going to actually have a face in terms of (pauses), I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I think it’s just going to be really powerful to have an ID that says my name and says who I am and that I can use for basically anything.
Similar to Roberta, Mariano saw DACA as an opportunity to come out in the open and claim his “official” identity.
In contrast to Roberta and Mariano, Alonso, a 20-year-old Mexican immigrant in North Carolina, was one of several respondents who discussed the problems with North Carolina’s differentiated license. When the DMV released the description of the license for DACA recipients with the magenta stripe, Alonso immediately took issue with it, saying, About the license, I don’t like the fact that they’re going to put a pink stripe on the license so that they know that we’re not from here, that we’re not legal. We already know that, so I don’t like that. So whenever a police person stops you, they’ll already know that you’re illegal. It just makes me mad and disappointed. What does that have to do with a license for driving? They don’t have to put all of your business out there.
Alonso was disappointed by the social stigma that the differentiated driver’s license carried, and he further noted that the license would make him vulnerable to harassment and discrimination on the part of the police or state officials and authority figures. Although the license was eventually redesigned to omit the pink stripe, the message that DACA beneficiaries maintained “NO LAWFUL STATUS” remained prominently displayed in red, or scarlet, capital letters. Having witnessed various police check points in Latino neighborhoods in the community, Alonso was not comfortable driving with a differentiated license.
In contrast, respondents in Massachusetts were much less fearful of interacting with police after the passage of DACA. Prior to DACA, Sandra had been driving on a license she received in another state. But despite the other state license being a “real license,” the Massachusetts license provided her with a new sense of security. Less than 24 hours after receiving her (temporary) Massachusetts license, Sandra was in a car accident. She felt little trepidation having to meet with police. Speaking of the accident, Sandra said, You want to know what’s funny? I had—had my license for one day. I had had my temporary license—a paper—and I got into an accident. It’s ridiculous. Like, I didn’t have an accident before. Like 24 hours, I didn’t even have my temporary license for 24 hours and I get into an accident leaving my house. I was like “Ok.” It wasn’t my fault so I got a nice rental. It’s fine. I’m okay with it. I’m okay with having a license and getting into an accident. Had it been 24 hours before.
Sandra discussed the accident while clearly contrasting her life before and after having access to a Massachusetts driver’s license. Thus, licenses in Massachusetts were powerful in increasing respondents’ sense of legitimacy as they no longer had to use differentiating forms of IDs (such as licenses from other states). Having a Massachusetts license made them “somebody” and eased their sense of security during interactions with police and others.
Of course, some of the difference between the perceptions of police in North Carolina versus Massachusetts could stem from distinct experiences of racialization for Mexican and Guatemalan versus Brazilian youths in small town versus urban settings (i.e., Sandra’s anxious willingness to drive with an out-of-state license while Alonso was reluctant to drive with a differentiated, but valid North Carolina license). Nonetheless, both Alonso and Sandra clearly discussed the actual driver’s license as the cause for their concern while interacting with law enforcement. The differentiated driver’s license continued to highlight DACA beneficiaries’ outsider status while the Massachusetts license facilitated a more official membership in the state of Massachusetts.
Discussion
Limitations of DACA, “A Crappy Piece of Duct Tape”
DACA was undoubtedly a key turning point for many of the beneficiaries. As previously seen, some respondents redirected their educational and occupational trajectories. Moreover, it provided beneficiaries in both contexts with much needed relief and peace of mind. Yet, as much as DACA had changed some people’s lives, respondents in both contexts reiterated its limitations. In this way, our data confirms and bolsters previous research noting the limitations of DACA (Gonzales & Terriquez, 2013). For example, respondents continued to lament their inability to travel internationally, the lack of protection extended to undocumented family members, and the temporary nature of DACA, which prevented some of them to truly plant “roots.”
But while DACA was clearly limited in its ability to legitimize the presence or remove the feelings of liminality in the lives of youth in both states, state policies were significant in filtering the impacts of DACA. The context of reception fostered by the more inclusive state of Massachusetts was poignantly described by Elisabete, age 25 years. Although Elisabete called DACA a “crappy piece of duct tape,” mostly because it had not reunited her with her husband, a British citizen who lived in Great Britain, she did not blame Massachusetts for the difficulties she faced. Like other Brazilians, she viewed Massachusetts favorably, especially compared to other states. Explicitly comparing North Carolina to Massachusetts, Elisabete said it would “piss her off [if there was a separate license for DACA recipients] because “[I] would know what the intent is: ‘We don’t really want you here.’” She continued, [It is] one more legitimate way they can create barriers. They get to follow the law, but still separate and get their point across. It’s “we’re doing this because we have to, but we don’t want to” Why would anyone live in the south? Why not move to Massachusetts? It’s wonderful. I could be the poster girl for Massachusetts.
While Elisabete calls herself the “poster girl for Massachusetts,” she does not identify as American. When asked why not, she responded, “Because they don’t want me. So screw them.” Elisabete perceived Massachusetts as a welcoming environment, especially in the wake of DACA, but her intense frustration with continued exclusion from full membership in American society remained.
In stark contrast to Elisabete, Dalia, of North Carolina, saw the federal context after DACA as more inclusive than her home state. As state officials debated how DACA would affect beneficiaries in North Carolina, Dalia expressed her intense frustration with the proposed policies in her state. She explained her reaction to DACA and its applications at the state level saying, I’m excited. It’s exciting because I feel like it’s a step closer for me to actually be a citizen here. The only thing is, like, it’s still a little confusing to me because I don’t think that we can get financial aid, and now they’ve changed it up so that we can’t get licenses in North Carolina. So now it’s kind of like, well, that doesn’t make sense if we get a work permit to work, but we can’t get licenses to drive to work, so it just doesn’t make sense at all. . . . It just seems like people are just trying to figure out a way for us to not get stuff that we need.
As she spoke, Dalia stated five times that it made no sense for the federal government to grant undocumented youth DACA status while the state government of North Carolina crippled their access to school and licenses. Despite her newfound opportunity to work legally and contribute financially to her family, she knew that she was still an unwanted outsider in North Carolina.
Importantly, neither Dalia nor Elisabete understood their experience as being bound by impermeable state borders, nor did they characterize their transition out of high school as a clear path toward magnified exclusion. Dalia, like Krisali earlier, was delighted when she received a scholarship for college, but heartbroken when her scholarship money fell short in her second year of school. While searching for additional funding, she felt further disheartened when she saw scholarships exclusively available to unauthorized immigrants in California who were able to attend school with in-state tuition due to the California’s Assembly Bill (AB) 540. She stated, “I was looking everywhere to find more money . . . but most of the scholarships were California-based or for seniors in high school so it was really hard.” Looking at the opportunities available to unauthorized immigrants in California, Dalia felt increasingly frustrated by the limited support structures in her home state. Just as Dalia referenced policies in California while discussing her own experience in North Carolina, Elisabete noted policies in North Carolina while framing her experience in Massachusetts. As seen in the earlier quotation, Elisabete explicitly referenced North Carolina’s differentiated license to illustrate the limitations of DACA and the federal government. In this way, the state context of North Carolina was not contained within its state borders. Rather, the exclusionary climate in North Carolina diffused beyond its borders and reminded DACA recipients in other states of their liminal and second-class status in the nation.
The contrasting perspectives of Elisabete and Dalia illustrate how young adult immigrants constructed their sense of membership in conjunctural and layered contexts. Dalia perceived DACA as a step toward full inclusion and citizenship while noting how the state context of North Carolina obstructed momentum toward inclusion. In contrast, Elisabete saw Massachusetts as buffering the exclusion she felt at the national level even after the passage of DACA.
Conclusion
As young adult immigrants in Massachusetts and North Carolina navigated their life pathways after the implementation of DACA, their experiences poignantly illustrated how perceptions of membership and exclusion developed through various institutional frames of reference. In specific reference to DACA, the same federal policy felt far more inclusive to North Carolina residents confronting more hostile state policies than it did to Massachusetts residents who experienced a more hospitable state environment. Instead of a clear transition into “illegality” and exclusion (Gonzales, 2011; Silver, 2012), the transition to early adulthood was more complicated for youth traversing intersecting political and institutional contexts after DACA. Thus, a sense of conjunctural membership emerged as youths simultaneously felt included and excluded in a complex and layered political environment.
DACA was a limited national policy, given its partial and temporary nature, and could not erase years of exclusion for immigrants. Indeed, DACA beneficiaries in both states experienced “liminal legality” as they gained access to temporary security and some government-issued documents (e.g., renewable work permits), but were ultimately denied guaranteed lawful permanent residence, citizenship, and the rights those statuses confer (Cebulko, 2014; Menjívar, 2006). Yet, notably for young adults in both states, despite national-origin differences, DACA was a turning point that they could embrace as a movement toward legitimacy and inclusion. Abrego (2008) found that the passage of in-state tuition in California in 2001, also known as AB 540, provided unauthorized youth with access to new rights (in-state tuition) and with a legitimizing label “AB540 student” that was less stigmatizing and more socially acceptable. Similarly, DACA provided beneficiaries with tangible documents and access to rights that facilitated inclusion. They no longer felt that they had to hide their identities as they gained legitimate working papers. Nonetheless, the policy did not offer them a seamless pathway to inclusion, particularly in the more hostile state context of North Carolina.
Distinct state contexts led to gradations of legitimacy for DACA beneficiaries. For example, the granting of in-state tuition for DACA status individuals in Massachusetts suggested that immigrant students with DACA benefits were somehow more legitimate in Massachusetts than in North Carolina. Moreover, differentiated driver’s licenses further highlighted how DACA beneficiaries resided in a less valued social space in North Carolina. Thus, inconsistent and unequal state-level policies directed toward unauthorized immigrants illustrated how individuals’ opportunities were embedded within flimsy political and social structures. Walzer’s (1983) predictions of “petty fortresses” in some ways came to fruition after the enactment of DACA, but not because the nation-state sacrificed its right to control membership. Instead, because individual states maintained control over institutions that granted access to rights associated with the new “liminally legal” form of membership from DACA, the lived experience of liminality differed based on respondents’ states of residence.
Nonetheless, state context did not exclusively define immigrants’ feelings of belonging, and state policies reverberated upwards. In other words, more inclusive policies in more welcoming states magnified the exclusionary experiences of youth in the more hostile state of North Carolina. Moreover, immigrants in Massachusetts were aware of more exclusive policies in other states and saw those policies as limiting their access to membership at the national level. While perceptions of belonging are intangible responses to institutional and social contexts, feelings of insecurity and exclusion in one state based on policies of another state are grounded in tangible threats. Indeed, restrictive policies in one state can incite contagion in others as policies introduced at the state level tend to emerge and increase in waves (Olivas, 2012; Rodríguez et al., 2010; Varsanyi, 2010). Even while some state governments work to better incorporate immigrants, the simultaneous creeping outwards of restrictive policies from state to state increases feelings of liminality everywhere. Thus, stop-gap policies like DACA at the federal level, although offering some support, are clearly insufficient to create inclusive contexts for immigrants in any state. What is needed to avoid spillover effects is a comprehensive attempt toward inclusion at the local, state, and federal levels.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Cedric De Leon and Tanya Golash-Boza for helpful feedback on previous drafts of this article.
Authors’ Note
The authors are listed in alphabetical order and both contributed equally.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research is supported by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (4832912), the Department of Sociology at Indiana University, the Committee on Aid for Faculty Research Grant (510481) at Providence College, the Center for the Study of the American South and Department of Sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Faculty Support Award at Purchase College, State University of New York.