Session: Family Migration in an Era of Border Security and Criminalization (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

This symposium presents cross-national research on the effects of immigration enforcement on the rights and welfare of racialized immigrants. Within the past decade, researchers have paid growing attention to how the criminal justice and welfare systems work in conjunction with immigration enforcement to regulate and exclude immigrants from accessing substantive rights associated with citizenship and permanent residence. Furthermore, constructions of “deportability”, or the threat of deportation, enable a diversity of both state and non-state social actors to take part in policing noncitizens through overt social control and moral regulation. In an era in which immigration enforcement has been extended well beyond territorial boundaries and throughout local communities, this symposium grapples with the fundamental questions of who belongs? Whose rights are protected by the state? How can social workers advocate for the basic social and legal rights of vulnerable immigrants ?

The papers featured in this symposium examine these questions from a variety of perspectives. The first paper traces the racial and gender effects of Canada’s multiple border strategy, through a case study of conditions that are imposed on new permanent residents who entered Canada as sponsored spouses and partners. This paper illustrates how deracialized and gender neutral policy instruments continue to produce measurable forms of racial and gender inequality. 

The second paper involves a rich ethnographic study of migrant shelters across Mexico to illustrate the production of a “temporal border” for migrant individuals and families who find themselves applying for a humanitarian visa. The paper also explores how the humanitarian visa process presents challenges for care workers accompanying migrant survivors, who seek long-term legal justice while also respecting migrant survivors’ immediate needs.

The third paper draws upon semi-structured testimonio interviews with undocumented Latina migrants who are survivors of domestic violence and have at least one child who is a U.S. citizen. The paper illustrates how mixed-status families navigate public benefits for eligible family members, while avoiding the risks of family separation through immigrant detention and deportation.

The fourth paper presents a cross-national comparison of public policies in the United States and Sweden where welfare systems are increasingly entangled with the criminal justice system. The authors present comparative empirical data to document the persistence of penal-welfarism in both the United States and Sweden, where punitive policies are mobilized to manage marginalized populations, particularly the foreign-born.

The fifth paper shares findings from in-depth interviews with key members of the Bhutanese refugee community who live across the United States. This paper conceptualizes access to citizenship as a negotiated space of exclusion for elderly refugees from Bhutan. Though many are denied citizenship due to language and citizenship testing requirements, the author illustrates how elder refugees perform acts of resistance and claim rights through community mobilization.

These five research papers and moderated discussion offer a unique opportunity for social work researchers to consider transnational dimensions of immigrant regulation, criminality, and the lawful suspension of basic rights associated with citizenship and permanent residence in democratic nations.