Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

By Catherine S. Ramírez, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Juan Poblete and 2 more

Precarity and Belonging examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. This collection brings mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.The editors ask: What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued or revalued when labor and social precarity impact those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? This book interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, “legal”/“illegal,” and deserving/undeserving in order to explore the fluidity--that is, the dynamism and malleability--of the spectra of belonging.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978815643

Book preview

Introduction

Toward a Politics of Commonality

The Nexus of Mobility, Precarity, and (Non)citizenship

CATHERINE S. RAMÍREZ, JUAN POBLETE, SYLVANNA M. FALCÓN, STEVEN C. MCKAY, AND FELICITY AMAYA SCHAEFFER

Nancy Silva picks clementines near Bakersfield, California. Like most farmworkers in the United States, she is undocumented. On March 19, 2020, eight days after the World Health Organization declared the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the Department of Homeland Security—the government agency Silva has spent years evading—classified her and other farmworkers as Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers. Silva keeps a letter from her employer testifying to her new status in her wallet in case she is picked up by law enforcement. The letter may protect her from deportation, but it does not protect her from the novel coronavirus.¹

Similarly, the pandemic of 2020 has highlighted Yasin Kakande’s simultaneous value and vulnerability as an essential worker. One night, while driving home after curfew from his job as a home health aide near Boston, Kakande, a migrant from Uganda, was pulled over by a police officer. The officer took one look at him, asked him if he was an essential worker, then waved him off. My skin color told him everything he needed to know, Kakande reflected.²

Kakande and Silva are two of the many migrants and people of color working on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Migrants and people of color are disproportionately represented in health care, retail, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture.³ They are also disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19, with African Americans dying at almost three times the rate of white Americans.⁴ Yet despite the growing recognition of the vital roles they play in society, African Americans and migrants, especially those who are undocumented, remain targets of the state. At the time of this writing, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Casey Goodson Jr. are but the latest, most publicized instances of state-sanctioned anti-Blackness.⁵ The grim tally of Black deaths due to COVID-19 amplifies I can’t breathe, a cry against police brutality (and some of Floyd’s last words), and the slogan Black Lives Matter.

In addition to casting light on which workers matter, the pandemic has exposed the precarity with which so many live. The ensuing economic crisis has impacted workers across sectors and income brackets, but African Americans and Latinxs have been hit especially hard.⁶ The $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the largest relief package in U.S. history, distributed $1,200 cash grants to tens of millions of Americans and, for the first time ever, expanded jobless aid to independent contractors. However, the CARES Act excluded many migrants, particularly the undocumented and their U.S. citizen and legal permanent resident relatives, even if they pay taxes, contribute to the unemployment insurance fund, and can get sick as easily as anyone else.⁷ Despite being essential, undocumented workers like Silva are still excluded, while Black workers like Kakande continue to be persecuted.

The pandemic has exposed not only disparities, contradictions, and hypocrisies but also connections between citizens and noncitizens, workers and employers, workers and consumers, and, indeed, all nations and peoples.⁸ The virus’s spread has called attention to the movement of people and goods, be they tourists or toilet paper. It has exposed some people’s immobility and inability to self-isolate—for example, in a prison, detention facility, or slaughterhouse. And it underscores the outsized role the precariat, the group of people for whom precarity is a driving force, plays in our world, from Silicon Valley to Singapore and beyond.

This volume examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity affecting both citizens and noncitizens, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. We place the subjects of migration and citizenship and the social phenomena to which they refer in the dual context of forms of social and labor precarity, on the one hand, and social and economic (im)mobility, on the other. This scope allows us to consider a panoply of issues affecting citizens and noncitizens alike. In striking contrast to global right-wing populisms that have worked to situate citizens and noncitizens as radically opposed or even as enemies, we think mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction and thus the spaces and moments for a possible politics of commonality. Instead of pitting putative insiders against putative outsiders, we consider the constructedness, arbitrariness, messiness, and fragility of citizenship and noncitizenship, reflecting on these categories’ and statuses’ predicaments and their very being as interconnected and interdependent. This, we maintain, is both a heuristically productive vantage point and an intellectually and politically empowering position.

The questions motivating our collaboration include: What does modern citizenship, a category dating back to the eighteenth century, mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens, such as undocumented migrants, guest workers, permanent residents, refugees, imperial subjects, prisoners, detainees, and stateless people? How is the concept of citizenship, based on assumptions of deservingness, legality, and productivity, challenged when people of various and competing statuses and differential citizenship practices interact with each other, revealing their co-constitutive connections? How is citizenship valued when labor and social precarity impact, however differentially, those who seemingly have formal rights and those who seemingly or effectively do not? By drawing critical attention to such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, legal/illegal, and deserving/undeserving, our collaboration explores the copresence, interdependency, and often fear-infused relationships between and among social actors and social groups as mediated by state, public, and private institutions. We are especially concerned with the dynamism and malleability of the spectrum of belonging.

The figure of the denizen brings that spectrum into relief. A denizen, in the word’s most general sense, is an inhabitant. Yet in addition to emphasizing a relationship to a particular locus, the term articulates a relationship between an individual or a people and a state. In political theory and migration studies, denizens dwell in the territory of the nation-state without formal citizenship status. Often, they are barred from becoming citizens or their citizenship has been revoked. For example, free and enslaved Blacks in the United States were denizens prior to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship, thereby rendering them denizens. Twenty-first-century denizens include Dominico-Haitians born in the Dominican Republic to undocumented Haitian migrants, the Rohingya of Myanmar, residents of the Indian state of Assam whose names are not in the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and participants in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an executive action that grants certain undocumented youth in the United States a stay of deportation and permission to work. Not unlike the Jews of Nazi Germany, Dominico-Haitians, the Rohingya, and Assamese excluded from the NRC are stateless, while the DACAmented are less illegal than undocumented migrants who do not have DACA.⁹ Differences notwithstanding, all of these groups are denizens. All challenge the binary of insider/outsider.

The very existence of the denizen and the copresence of citizens and noncitizens in a given physical, juridical, and social space call attention to the spectrum of belonging. Even when residential segregation is acute, citizens and noncitizens frequently live and work in close proximity to one another, with the latter group providing vital services to the former. Noncitizen workers play an essential role in the agriculture and construction industries in multiple regions of the world. In many countries, they also perform the intimate labor of caring for children and the elderly.¹⁰ In some cases, citizens and noncitizens live under the same roof in mixed-status families. While ensconced in the workplace and household, noncitizens are by no means inextricable social actors. Quite the opposite: many are mobile and vulnerable to deportation.

Like the concept of noncitizenship, that of denizenship brings into relief the historical, social, and theoretical bridges and gaps between citizenship and its absence. Denizenship can be approached as a negative category, as the absence of citizenship affecting those who are, nonetheless, present in the polis. At the same time, it can be positive, promising, and productive, as the minimal common denominator uniting citizens and all other inhabitants, regardless of anyone’s legal status. From the latter viewpoint, a denizen is a person who is physically here, who resides, works, studies, and loves here, and with whom others have interactions, exchanges, and relationships. Denizenship can be both the negative consequence of discrimination and the positive outcome of simple coexistence in society. People of color in the United States, even those who hold U.S. citizenship, are often reduced to some form of denizenship, as their rights are restricted by customary law enforcement and/or racism. Undocumented migrants are also denizens as they go about providing services for others, caring, cooking, cleaning, building, harvesting, and working for the citizens of their host country. Some denizens have formal rights but see those rights substantially curtailed by social practice. Others have almost no formal rights but can create the basis for claims to formal rights by their sheer denizenship, their length of stay, and their degree of imbrication with the host society.

Precarity and Belonging pairs the concepts of mobility, migration, and (non)citizenship with issues of labor and social precarity. In our volume, mobility refers as much to displacement processes impacting and enacted by migrants as it does to the social mobility (or lack thereof) affecting formal citizens whose status has been weakened or devalued by economic and social changes involving processes of labor hyperflexibility, technological automatization, and global competition. In fact, this worldwide process of (im)mobility can be said to be the heterogeneous result of global capitalism, one that impacts those who move, those who do not move, and those who experience downward or upward social mobility by moving or staying put.

To better examine tiered spaces of inclusion, marginalization, and exclusion, we use precarity as a lens for interrogating the intertwined structures and experiences of insecurity. More than a condition or status, precarity refers to an existence defined by vulnerability, unpredictability, and insecurity, be it in the realm of work, housing, health, or other aspects of life. Even in postindustrial societies before the pandemic of 2020, precarity had become a hallmark of everyday living for noncitizens and citizens alike. Where certain noncitizens—for example, DACA participants—are more enfranchised than other noncitizens, including their own undocumented parents and siblings, citizens with little or no job security or prospects for regular employment face increasing precarity and even disenfranchisement.

The term precarity emerged in the late twentieth century to describe lives and livelihoods that have become riskier and less certain and stable. Many scholars trace rising precarity to the reorganization of the economy since the 1970s. Deregulation, financialization, de-unionization, globalization, and the digital revolution have had an indelible and destabilizing impact on people’s lives.¹¹ Pierre Bourdieu has linked précarité to economic restructuring and the scourge of neoliberalism—in particular, to a retreating welfare state, privatization, unemployment, and a general sense of insecurity and social exclusion.¹² Likewise, Arne Kalleberg contends that the offloading of responsibility and risk by states and employers onto workers since the late 1970s has resulted in greater economic inequality, insecurity and instability.¹³ Indeed, insecurity may be the only thing that is well distributed in our world, as the spread of precarity is by no means limited to industrial or postindustrial countries.¹⁴ Taking a global view, Guy Standing argues that there has been a fundamental shift from societies structured by fixed and stable labor markets to a fully global system that not only creates but depends on a labor supply that is flexible, compliant, and continually in flux.¹⁵

Integrating and compounding multiple vulnerabilities and stratifications, precarity goes beyond the workplace. It links precarious work with precarious lives and livelihoods. The difference between precarity and uncertainty is the degree of vulnerability experienced by those in precarious jobs. Thus, for people who are socially, economically, or politically vulnerable, a job with low pay, unpredictable hours, dangerous conditions, and/or a lack of stability and benefits exacerbates an already precarious situation, as their risks are worsened by both a lack of protection and a lack of control in their nonwork lives.

Shared insecurity is widespread and has led to the emergence of the precariat, the label Standing has proposed for the transnational class that includes not only those working under the new labor regimes of radical flexibility but those expelled from the old working class, such as labor migrants, ethnic minorities, and youth. Although the emergent precariat resembles the classic proletariat, there are several crucial differences. First, the precariat lacks labor security from formal labor contracts. Secondly, beyond employment relations, the precariat suffers from a lack of basic social services, state benefits, and statutory protections. In short, the precariat is deprived of the basic needs to forge a stable living or the ability to reproduce itself.

Across the social sciences and humanities, scholars have developed the concept of precarity to help link the micro and macro, connecting the subjective sense of vulnerability with political, social, and economic forces and institutions. For example, Zygmunt Bauman has described late modernity as liquid modernity, a "combined experience of insecurity (of position, entitlements, and livelihood), of uncertainty (as to their continuation and future stability), and of unsafety (of one’s body, one’s self, and their extensions: possessions, neighborhood, community)."¹⁶ Focusing on our socially constituted bodies,¹⁷ Judith Butler maintains that precarity is more than a state of being; it is a new form of regulation, "a politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury … [and] … are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection¹⁸ [emphasis added]. Put another way, precarity is the result of an explicit process or project: precaritization. Here, precarity plays a key political role under increased global neoliberalism, with induced uncertainty and insecurity weakening collective action and being used as a hegemonic mode of being governed, and governing ourselves."¹⁹

By bringing together discussions of precarity, mobility, migration, and (non)citizenship, Precarity and Belonging engages in a deeper discussion of a politics of precarity—that is, a consideration of a political movement or community coalescing around a response to shared, embodied vulnerabilities. Standing argues that the precariat is in fact a new dangerous class-in-the-making (if not yet a class-for-itself), binding precarious workers around the world. And while they lack a common consciousness or a common view of what to do about precarity, various factions of the new precariat, particularly the educated and ‘wired’ part, such as those involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, are engaged in new forms of collective action, from Johannesburg to Oakland.²⁰ Butler, for her part, points us toward a more localized and place-based ethical politics of cohabitation and political belonging. She also emphasizes the need for an ongoing, reflexive discussion of those whose vulnerabilities are deemed deserving of collective protection and those who are dismissed as expendable.²¹

Precarity, as an analytical lens, calls attention to the dynamism of society—to the ways in which society shapes people’s movement through space and along socioeconomic lines and the ways in which people shape society through that same movement. Linking scholarship on precarity with conversations on mobility and migration, we approach society itself as always in motion.²² There is no social stasis, Thomas Nail observes, only regimes of social circulation.²³ These regimes legitimize and value particular kinds of movement—for instance, tourism and upward social mobility—and deem others—say, refugee crises and displacement due to gentrification or foreclosure—undesirable or threatening.

By and large, the study of mobility has emphasized the movement of people, goods, and ideas across both global and local spaces for leisure (such as tourism) and labor.²⁴ Meanwhile, migration studies tend to examine people’s movement, often across international borders, due to war, violence, poverty, political and economic instability, persecution, and imperial legacies. Yet, citizens—in particular, members of the precariat—are also on the move, whether they like it or not, due to crises of capitalism, capitalist development, and environmental degradation.

In her typology of dominant discourses on citizens, Bridget Anderson describes the good citizen as law-abiding and hard-working and the failed citizen as incapable of achieving, or failing to live up to, national ideals.²⁵ In a xenophobic world and rapidly changing economy, the noncitizen—namely, the migrant—is too mobile, while the failed citizen is not mobile enough.²⁶ In addition to the parsing of citizenship and social membership based on one’s mobility, racialized and precaritized bodies, regions, and populations are increasingly targeted as dangerous and as a threat to the nation-state and/or civil society and, thus, in need of management, monitoring, containment, and incarceration.

In the neoliberal era, citizens and noncitizens alike are increasingly economic resources to be managed.²⁷ Charting a global shift in immigration regimes toward a more transactional style of immigration governance, Anna Boucher and Justin Gest identify the emergence and proliferation of what they term the Market Model of migration. Where the ostensibly permanent and equal incorporation of immigrants into national communities has characterized the Liberal Model of some settler-colonial states—such as Australia, Canada, and the United States—in the Market Model, the migrant is not a future citizen or a subject to be assimilated, but human capital—in other words, a worker who is to add to the receiving country’s economy.²⁸

We find Boucher and Gest’s concept of the Market Model useful for understanding not only migration, but mobility and precarity as well—including and especially the (im)mobility and precarity of citizens. As scholarship on the worker citizen and the discourse of deservingness underscore, immigration law and its implementation not only create migrants but also help to produce differentiated citizenship.²⁹ Bearers of human capital, the figures of the grateful refugee and the supercitizen immigrant, including the DACA participant and the Dreamer (the would-be beneficiary of the United States’ Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act), are often upheld as hardworking, self-sufficient, patriotic, and grateful to the host country.³⁰ These figures are not only physically mobile, having moved from the sending country to the receiving one, they are also upwardly mobile. In contrast, failed citizens are portrayed as immobile, lacking ‘get up and go,’ stuck in housing estates, ghettoes, reservations, prison cells, or flyover country—the economic and cultural periphery, in other words.³¹ In Europe and its more affluent offshoots, the figures of the grateful refugee and the supercitizen immigrant burnish the image of the West as benevolent and enlightened. In the United States, they fortify the myth of egalitarian meritocracy, a society in which opportunity for advancement is putatively accessible to all and based primarily or exclusively on merit. In so doing, these figures serve to discipline citizens who fail to advance and who do not meet the economy’s shifting demands. Meanwhile, the figure of the failed citizen exposes what Elizabeth F. Cohen calls the myth of full citizenship.³²

Precarity and Belonging studies mobility and precarity with and through noncitizenship, a concept that refers both to the work citizenship does (inclusion, marginalization, and exclusion) and to the need to think beyond the exclusive framework of full state recognition. We strive to understand noncitizenship on its own terms but also, and perhaps paradoxically, to explore what full citizenship could mean and involve and whether parts, all, or any of those meanings are transposable and, in fact, regularly transposed to different contingencies and actors in real life. In other words, we are interested in how the transforming performance of rights by those who are said to have few to no rights enhances our capacity to recognize the citizenship practices of those endowed with the formal status and how such performance may allow us to better think of achievable access to rights.

As Linda Bosniak observes, citizenship is Janus-faced: if one face looks welcoming by defining the privileges and rights of those admitted, the other stare looks down on those who are not recognized as insiders.³³ Because of this inclusion/exclusion dynamic, citizenship appears to many as a nonnegotiable goal and its benefits as nontransposable and unavailable to those lacking the status. While recognizing the crucial importance of access to citizenship, we want to consider both how formal citizenship is limited or modified by contingencies and how, under certain conditions, those without citizenship may in fact perform what Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen have usefully conceptualized as acts of citizenship.³⁴ Thinking of citizenship in this light allows for a series of modifiers to what is taken by the state and others to be an absolute and univocal status. From the point of view of the state, you are either a citizen or you are not and you have legal claims to acquire the status or you do not. Not surprisingly, real life turns out to be much more complicated. This volume explores some of the complications that emerge at the nexus of mobility, precarity, and citizenship. We discuss our volume’s organization below.

Part I: Mobility and Migration

We work with two definitions of mobility. First, mobility may refer to the movement of people through space—for example, from Bolivia to Argentina, or from rural to urban China. Often this type of movement is understood as migration, a term that can refer to movement across international lines or within the space of the nation-state (internal migration, in other words). Secondly, mobility connotes movement within society—for example, along socioeconomic lines. As the upwardly mobile accumulate wealth, security for the downwardly mobile becomes all the more elusive, while all are differentially affected by varying forms of precarity.

Paradoxically, the global securitization of migration—that is, the transformation of migration into a security issue—has blurred the line between citizens and noncitizens and impacted both groups physically and socially. For example, surveillance technologies and techniques deployed at national borders are taken up by domestic law enforcement units and are used against both citizens and noncitizens. Some citizens are denied status and rights when they are racialized as unauthorized migrants. Others are criminalized for aiding the undocumented. As migration streams shift, so, too, do immigration laws, policies, and practices, rendering some migrants more or less documented. Meanwhile, as people travel across international borders, their status can change from legal to illegal and vice versa. Status notwithstanding, people find ways to participate in civil society and the market, to build community, and to challenge, make claims on, and subvert the state.

The essays in Part I illuminate mobility’s multiple meanings and the nexus of mobility, precarity, and citizenship. In chapter 1, Bridget Anderson examines the instability of citizenship as she asks how the United Kingdom Home Office rendered members of the Windrush generation (Black British subjects who migrated to Britain after the Second World War) illegal and deportable when it revoked their citizenship status in 2018. Rather than pit citizens against migrants, she scrutinizes how neoliberal conceptions of work, class, and deservingness, alongside racial, sexual, and gender norms, influence who is granted and who is denied citizenship in the United Kingdom. Above all, her chapter highlights the links between wealth and mobility and between the category of the citizen and its putative opposite, the migrant.

Looking at both formal and informal citizenship, Adrián Félix offers an empirical assessment of transnational networks as mechanisms for the diffusion of political information and their potentially democratic outcomes in chapter 2. He contests the axiom that all politics is local and contends that migrant networks across Mexico and the United States coalesce for the purposes of civic and political engagement in both local and translocal contexts. Ultimately, he reassesses the civic impact of network-driven migration, also known as chain migration, a target of immigration restrictionists.

In chapter 3, Leisy J. Abrego and Alejandro Villalpando narrate a history of the racialization of Central Americans in the United States. Using the frameworks of neoliberal multiculturalism (the relationship between race and integration into a capitalist system of wealth accumulation) and multicriminalism (the criminalization of racially and socially marginalized groups as a consequence of the proliferation of massive illegal economies), they show how U.S. foreign policy, the mainstream media, and presidential administrations from Ronald Reagan through Donald Trump have dehumanized Central Americans. Whether they are branded communists, illegal immigrants, or gang members, Central Americans, Abrego and Villalpando argue, are deemed a threat to the United States and the global order it defends.

Similarly, in chapter 4, Alejandro Grimson juxtaposes the displacement of peoples from the Global South to the Global North and south-south migrations as he meditates on the long history of human migration. Approaching the movement of people to Europe and across South America as a consequence of late-twentieth and twenty-first-century globalization, his chapter offers a unique, comparative perspective. In particular, his discussion of Bolivian, Aymara, and Quechua migration to Argentina and Brazil stresses mobility’s spatial and social aspects.

In chapter 5, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer examines how U.S. state surveillance against undocumented migrants crossing the Tohono O’odham reservation from Mexico into the United States has led to a militarized occupation of Tohono O’odham land. She argues that calls for migrants’ rights to mobility and citizenship ignore the impact of the state’s security regime on the sovereignty, mobility, and dispossession of the Tohono O’odham, as well as the Tohono O’odhams’ own sacred worldview.

Lastly, in chapter 6, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa explores how the reality of dispossession informs diasporic memories and the construction of the Tibetan nation-in-exile, an entity that is not recognized as sovereign by nation-states or intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations. Considering the figure of the refugee-citizen and the contradictions of Tibetan statelessness and membership in the deterritorialized state of the Central Tibetan Administration, she interrogates the spatial logics of nation-building and membership in what is imagined and lived as a diasporic and deterritorialized nation-to-come.

Part II: Labor and Precarity

Although precaritization is widespread and affects multiple social groups, the politics of precarity is especially relevant to migrant and undocumented populations, since migration and noncitizenship can multiply vulnerabilities. Labor migrants are often differentially incorporated into host societies that desire and depend on their labor but reject their presence. Particularly when faced with labor and migration regimes that offer them few legal protections, migrants entering the bottom of the labor market become more vulnerable to exploitation, such as wage theft, discrimination, and exposure to health and safety violations, while their lack of full citizenship can undermine their bargaining power, social entitlements, knowledge of rights, and willingness to report abuses to authorities. The migrants’ precarious existence is thus compounded, combining vulnerability to deportation and state violence, exclusion from public services and basic state protections, insecure employment and exploitation at work, insecure livelihood, and everyday discrimination or isolation. From low-skilled economic migrants to high-skilled guest workers, mobile laborers with limited rights often face new opportunities abroad alongside new forms of vulnerability, contingency, and expendability.

Describing a generalized but differential condition of the contemporary moment, the concept of precarity highlights the connection between migrants at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and citizens who, while higher up that ladder, are plagued by multiple forms of insecurity as well. Precarity, then, is as central to the experience of many contemporary migrants as it is to the lives of those who, while working better paid jobs, live as freelancers or subcontracted workers with irregular employment. Migrants, freelancers, and subcontracted workers—often with no benefits and few prospects of stability—commingle in the same labor market without security.

Interrogating precarity as a global phenomenon, Marcel Paret analyzes contemporary migrant labor regimes in the United States, China, South Africa, and Palestine/Israel in chapter 7. By comparing these sites, his chapter highlights the connections between segregation practices and precarity. It also offers a dual focus: on space, within which states draw political boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and on labor—that is, the extent to which labor power within a given state is required for capital accumulation.

Where Paret’s chapter offers a broad, comparative perspective, Shannon Gleeson homes in on unequal power relations between employer and worker in a particular place, the San Francisco Bay Area, in chapter 8. Focusing on cases of wage theft, she shows how a low-wage, migrant labor force is incorporated into a precarious workforce, despite the existence of pro-migrant legal standards and the good intentions of legal advocates and bureaucrats. In a situation in which relatively few workers ever make claims and pursue legal recourse in cases of wage theft, she offers a sobering account about what happens to migrant workers when they assert their established rights.

Expanding the category of the precariat to include migrants whose legal status binds them to work solely and continuously for an employer-sponsor, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Krittiya Kantachote examine how the legal status of indenture shapes labor conditions for Filipino migrant domestic workers in Singapore. In chapter 9, the authors use the cell phone as a window into the culture of servitude as they present employers who mitigate or aggravate the unequal relation of indenture. While recognizing the limits of the workers’ indentured status, Parreñas and Kantachote highlight those workers’ efforts to negotiate for better working conditions.

Similarly, in chapter 10, Biao Xiang examines the relationship between individual agency and social forces by exploring what he calls pocketed proletarianization, the interspersing of intensive proletarian labor, self-employment, and entrepreneurial undertakings that Chinese workers choose to take on. By showing the complex interplay among the Chinese state, individual entrepreneurship, and employers’ exploitation, he distinguishes the Chinese precariat from its counterparts in other countries, thereby calling into question assumptions about the precariat.

Lastly, in chapter 11, Claudia Maria López shows how people displaced from the Colombian countryside struggle to enter the formal labor market and become politically engaged in Medellín. Using ethnographic methods, she examines the hierarchy of citizens in a rapidly gentrifying and globalizing city.

Part III: Belonging and (Non)citizenship

Citizenship, in its simplest and most general sense, refers to membership in a community. However, as scholars in citizenship studies have demonstrated, there is a multiplicity of citizenships—for example, social citizenship and cultural citizenship (to name but two forms that citizenship can take).³⁵ Likewise, there are various degrees of membership, as racial formations and programs like DACA manifest. Moving beyond the presumed fixity of status and rights, Part III interrogates the spectrum of changing, revocable, and aspired citizenships coexisting in any given location. The chapters here grapple with the space between the informal social contract of the undocumented and the forms of curtailed citizenship imposed on nominal citizens who are disenfranchised. Differences notwithstanding, both groups contend with precarity and (im)mobility—for example, migration, deportation, movement from colony to metropole, racial segregation, and upward or downward social mobility. By exploring a range of concepts, including noncitizenship, quasi-citizenship, informal citizenship, denizenship, and imperial citizenship, the chapters in this section highlight the fluidity, variability, and historicity of rights, status, agency, and agentic capacity. They also question traditional and problem-defining binaries, such as citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, legal/illegal, and deserving/undeserving.

In addition to complicating binary understandings of citizenship and noncitizenship, the contributors here show how formal citizenship coexists with and is confirmed or contradicted by the interplay of social, economic, and political processes. In doing so, they take seriously Katherine Tonkiss and Tendayi Bloom’s call to study noncitizenship as a topic in itself, not contingent on citizenship.³⁶ Thus, instead of seeing noncitizenship simply as lack—that is, as the absence of or an exclusion from a status—and instead of implicitly conceiving of citizenship as the only relevant core relationship with a state, our contributors approach noncitizenship as another fundamental and real relationship with a polity and/or people, one with material and far-reaching effects.³⁷

Susan Bibler Coutin and Véronique Fortin approach noncitizenship as a real relationship with a polity in chapter 12. Drawing from participant-observation at a non-profit legal services organization in Los Angeles, they expose the bureaucratic labyrinth migrants and their advocates confront in the migrants’ quest for regularization. Quasi-citizens, the migrants have deep ties to the United States. Yet as denizens, they are treated as if they are on probation and remain vulnerable to deportation.

Juan Poblete explores the diversification of citizenship, including full, non-, quasi-, and limited citizenships, in chapter 13. Linking the diversification of citizenship in the space between formal and informal legal statuses with the diversification of practices in the space between formal and informal economies in the United States and Latin America, he highlights the connections between those who labor but do not have citizenship rights and citizens whose rights to work seem, at least to them, significantly questioned by the globalization of their national situation.

In chapter 14, Nicholas De Genova scrutinizes what he calls the hard kernel of denizenship within citizenship. Rather than enshroud the individual’s supposedly innate and inalienable autonomous power of self-government, citizenship, he argues, is how we are made the objects of modern state power. Focusing on the migrant noncitizen and the criminal (failed) citizen, as well as on DACA and its abortive predecessor, the DREAM Act, he uses denizenship as a lens for magnifying the ways in which citizenship is differentiated from within.

Next, Catherine S. Ramírez probes the past, present, and future of denizenship and the politics of commonality between African Americans and undocumented migrants in the United States in chapter 15. Via a close reading of George Schuyler’s 1931 Afrofuturist novel Black No More, Ramírez explores the omission of African Americans in conversations about immigration and assimilation. By disentangling assimilation and immigration, she draws attention to the historical discrepancy between Blackness and Americanness and the parallels between African American and migrant denizenship.

Emily Mitchell-Eaton closes Part III. Focusing on the Compact of Free Association (COFA), the 1986 bilateral agreement between the United States and the now former U.S. territory of the Marshall Islands, chapter 16 argues that Marshallese migrants to the United States are imperial citizens, rather than partial citizens or noncitizens, in that they can live, work, and attend school in the United States without a visa, yet they lack a clear path to U.S. permanent residency and citizenship. In addition to showing how U.S. citizenship is produced on the margins of empire, Mitchell-Eaton contends that COFA simultaneously blurs and sharpens the margins between metropole and colony and between foreigner and