Humanitarian capital

How Lawyers Help Immigrants Use Suffering to Claim Membership in the Nation-State

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3606091
AutoresC Galli (0000-0001-9393-888X, University of California, Los Angeles, autor correspondente)
Ano2020
Volume46
Fascículo11
Páginas2181-2198
Data de publicação2020-08-17
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoNew Community (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369183x.2019.1582325
OpenAlexW2921885282
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas33
Referências citadas18

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

Bureaucracy · Compassion · Criminology · Demographic economics · Deportation · Economics · Geography · Immigration · Immigration law · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration