Becoming Less Illegal: Deservingness Frames and Undocumented Migrant Incorporation

Abstract

Over the last two decades, research on unauthorized migration has departed from the equation of migrant illegality with absolute exclusion, emphasizing that formal exclusion typically results in subordinate inclusion. Irregular migrants integrate through informal support networks, the underground economy, and political activities. But they also incorporate into formal institutions, through policy divergence between levels of government, bureaucratic sabotage, or fraud. The incorporation of undocumented migrants involves not so much invisibility as camouflage – presenting the paradox that camouflage improves with integration. As it reaches the formal level of claims and procedures, legalization brings up the issue of the frames through which legal deservingness is asserted. Looking at the moral economy embedded in claims and programs, we examine a series of frame tensions: between universal and particular claims to legal status, between legalization based on vulnerability and that based on civic performance, between economic and cultural deservingness, and between the policy level and individual subjectivity. We show that restrictionist governments face a dilemma when their constructions of “good citizenship” threaten to extend to “deserving” undocumented migrants. Hence, they may simultaneously emphasize deservingness frames while limiting irregular migrants’ opportunities to deserve, effectively making deservingness both a civic obligation and a civic privilege.

Full text

Sociology Compass 8/4 (2014): 422–432, 10.1111/soc4.12145
Becoming Less Illegal: Deservingness Frames and
Undocumented Migrant Incorporation
Sébastien Chauvin
1
*and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas
2
1
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam
2
GRITIM, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Abstract
Over the last two decades, research on unauthorized migration has departed from the equation of
migrant illegality with absolute exclusion, emphasizing that formal exclusion typically results in
subordinate inclusion. Irregular migrants integrate through informal support networks, the under-
ground economy, and political activities. But they also incorporate into formal institutions, through
policy divergence between levels of government, bureaucratic sabotage, or fraud. The incorporation
of undocumented migrants involves not so much invisibility as camouflage –presenting the paradox
that camouflage improves with integration. As it reaches the formal level of claims and procedures,
legalization brings up the issue of the frames through which legal deservingness is asserted. Looking
at the moral economy embedded in claims and programs, we examine a series of frame tensions:
between universal and particular claims to legal status, between legalization based on vulnerability
and that based on civic performance, between economic and cultural deservingness, and between
the policy level and individual subjectivity. We show that restrictionist governments face a dilemma
when their constructions of “good citizenship”threaten to extend to “deserving”undocumented
migrants. Hence, they may simultaneously emphasize deservingness frames while limiting irregular migrants’
opportunities to deserve, effectively making deservingness both a civic obligation and a civic privilege.
Introduction
The intensified repression of “illegal”immigration in Europe and North America has
resulted in a proliferation of internment spaces and rising rates of deportation. However, over
the last two decades, research on unauthorized migration has departed from the equation of
migrant illegality with absolute exclusion. While many undocumented migrants are detained
and deported, most are not. Those who remain do not only hold jobs and incorporate into
their direct social environments but also accumulate formal traces of long-term presence and
good conduct, especially with a view to future legalization. And, because access to legal status
depends on the successful performance of deservingness, legalization raises the issue of the
frames through which deservingness is claimed and acknowledged.
1
This article brings to light recent developments in the scholarship on migrant illegality
by examining the nexus between the social incorporation of undocumented migrants
and the moral economy that regulates their uncertain access to legal status. At the
intersection between legal studies, cultural sociology, and the sociology of immigration,
we argue that incorporation within illegality forms the infrastructure of migrant political
agency and shapes the architecture of legitimation strategies by giving them purchase
and empirical resonance. The following section reviews theoretical inroads made in
the last twenty years on the study of migrant illegality as an exclusionary political
institution. We then detail the avenues of informal incorporation experienced by undocumented
migrants in spite of their formal exclusion. The section entitled “Formal incorporation,
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

camouf lage, and coming out”turns to both the legal and illegal integration of irregular
migrants into the formal institutions of their societies of residence. The last two sections
look at the moral economy embedded in legalization claims and programs and identifies
tensions traversing deservingness frames. While states see their constructions of “good
citizenship”threaten to extend to “deserving”undocumented migrants, the latter risk
being framed as “more illegal”for the same features that are also presumed to increase
their legal deservingness.
From exclusion to subordinate incorporation
Historically speaking, the existence of irregular migrants is rather new and results from the
gradual emergence of the modern system of authorization during the 19th and 20th centuries
(Caplan and Torpey 2002; Noiriel 2007; Sciortino 2004). Until quite recently, people were
considered legitimate until they were explicitly declared undesirable –which could result in
massive deportations (Ngai 2004). The degree of desirability did not depend as much on the
persons’legal status as on their perceived capacity to work and sustain themselves and their
(non)classification as politically subversive or ethnically incompatible. However, the growing
salience of nation-state boundaries throughout the 20th century led to the more effective exclu-
sion of those who were not supposed to be in a country according to immigration law. Papers
became increasingly important to the point of virtually reversing the former regime of authori-
zation: today, immigrants are assumed illegal unless they are explicitly declared legal.
Four claims have ensued in the contemporary literature on migrant illegality. First,
although popular thinking tends to see irregular migrants as the cause of illegality, most
recent scholarship is grounded in the argument that the analysis should start with the law
itself: structurally speaking, illegality is the product of the law, which restricts some traditions
of mobility and criminalizes select groups of residents (See Calavita 2005; Cvajner and
Sciortino 2010; De Genova 2002). Second, migrant illegality is not primarily about deporta-
tion. Although deportation can have devastating consequences for the people concerned and
their families (De Genova and Peutz 2010), most unauthorized migrants are not deported,
either because they are not arrested or because their deportation procedure does not go
through. Thus, third, analyzing migrant illegality as a political institution means examining its
implications for the majority of undocumented migrants who stay. Irregular immigrants’
civic exclusion is itself a form of subordinate inclusion: illegality regulates mobility not
through physical borders but through the creation of a hierarchy of rights.
2
Fourth, irregular
migrants’subordination is ensured not only through their official exclusion from the labor
market and other well-protected domains of the nation-state but also through the discipline
imposed by the threat of detention and deportation –what Nicholas de Genova (2002) called
“deportability.”As it involves durably limited economic claims, deportability sustains
migrants’“vulnerability and tractability as workers”(De Genova 2002, 439; see also Bloch
2013; Calavita 2005; Jounin 2008).
The architecture of informal inclusion
In the last decade, many authors have pointed to the informal incorporation of irregular
migrants despite formal exclusion. Key studies insist on the agency of migrants and their
use of social networks, mention the key support of non-governmental organizations
(Engbersen, van San, and Leerkes 2006) and stress unauthorized migrants’participation in
the underground economy where they perform jobs in agriculture, construction,
domestic work, street trading, small manufacturing, and urban services (e.g., Ambrosini 2013;
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Samers 2003; van Walsum 2011). The “informal citizenship”(Sassen 2002) of irregular
immigrants has also been related to active civic participation, by which they integrate into
mostly local environments and take part in myriad institutions such as schools, churches, ethnic
community groups, and political organizations (Chavez 1991; Coutin 2000; Menjívar 2006;
Pincetl 1994; Terriquez 2012).
At the discursive level, migrants contest the legal identities assigned to them with counter-
strategies and assertions of subjective legitimacy. Kyle and Siracusa (2005) showed how their
informants –Ecuadorian migrants in Spain –were aware of breaking immigration law but
rejected the idea that this made their venture illegitimate. Following Van Schendel and
Abraham’s terms (2005), they claimed that Salvadorians’stay in Spain was “illegal yet licit,”
meaning it was considered illegitimate by the state but legitimate by themselves and a significant
segment of civil society. As one attorney in a meeting for Salvadoran migrants in the United
States attended by Susan Coutin (2000) summed up: “Law is one thing, justice another.”
Diverse studies thus converge in emphasizing the tensions between formal law on the one hand
and informal practices, social dissent, and discursive resistance on the other. Though officially
declared unwanted and formally excluded, irregular immigrants succeed in opening loopholes
for their informal incorporation and spaces for their political expression. While these discoveries
add important nuances to the literature that focuses on the exclusionary aspects of immigrants’
illegality, their dualistic approach risks conferring too much coherence to (il)legality itself. As we
will show in the next section, formal law excludes and includes at the same time as contradictions
are also located within the law, and tensions cut simultaneously through law, policy, and practice.
Formal incorporation, camouflage, and coming out
Although the condition of undocumented migrants often results in their exclusion from
formal institutions, this exclusion is too often taken for granted. Contrary to common
representations, “undocumented”migrants rarely have no documents. They often possess
legitimate documents from their home countries. At times, their origin governments can
even play an active role, as in the United States, where Mexican consulates lobby banks
and public institutions to accept its matriculation cards as legitimate identification even for
undocumented migrants (Bakker 2011). In countries of residence, local and national institu-
tions may grant them legitimate (if inferior) forms of identification such as driver’s license,
municipal ID cards, or tax numbers (Varsanyi 2006). Migrants may also hold expired
documents or valid registration numbers from a previous period in which they held some
form of legal status. Finally, irregular migrants can acquire formal elements of civic member-
ship (such as social security numbers) through illegal means, whether due to the absence of
control from granting institutions (Sadiq 2008), the unequal closure of various “social
systems”(Bommes 2012), the “bureaucratic sabotage”of sympathetic civil servants placing
professionalism and humanitarian concerns ahead of restrictive definitions of their publics
(van der Leun 2006; Marrow 2009), or by forging, renting, or borrowing documents
(Broeders and Engbersen 2007; Pijpers and Van Der Velde, 2007; Vasta 2011). Importantly,
these informal arrangements may lead to formal –although often illegal –outcomes.
The distinction between informality and illegality is nowhere more useful as in the study
of irregular migrants’employment. Jobs do not automatically become “informal”because
unauthorized migrants occupy them. The level of (in)formalization of an economy is a
structural feature upon which new migrants –often thought as naturally embodying the
“underground economy”–have little influence (Reyneri 1998): in economies and sectors
dominated by informal businesses or partly undeclared activities, undocumented migrants
will hold informal jobs; in very formalized economies, they will more likely hold formal
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jobs –illegally. Yet, as Giuseppe Sciortino (2004: 42) aptly noted, if civic “exclusion”is a
form of inclusion, it means inclusion at a higher price. In countries or states in which it is
illegal to provide housing to undocumented migrants, sublets are provided at higher rents.
Employment is granted as a favor by employers who claim to help migrants by taking a risk
and demand more flexibility (Bloch 2013; Chauvin 2010; Jounin 2008).
Both formal and informal integrations suggest that the notion of “invisibility,”widely used
to describe the existence of undocumented migrants, may prove inadequate. Irregular
migrants are usually at their most visible in the first weeks of residence, when “tacit knowledge
about the locale is plainly unavailable”(Sciortino 2004: 40; see also Chavez 1991), and they run
a higher risk of being detected. As studies on undocumented migrants tend to recruit informants
through NGOs and support organizations, they run the risk of overemphasizing the peculiar
situation of these not-yet-integrated newcomers who are more visible, more vulnerable and
more in need of assistance (Cvajner and Sciortino 2010). Ironically, only as unauthorized
migrants get more integrated into their societies of residence can they better avoid the punitive
visibility of arrest and detention –while becoming less readily accessible to researchers. Yet, they
cannot be said to be invisible properly speaking: undocumented migrants live, work, shop,
walk, and drive among the rest of the population in the most visible ways. The undetectability
of “integrated”unauthorized migrants can thus be better grasped by the notions of camouflage
and the “undocumented closet.”Camouflage adequately points to a situation of invisibility
within visibility. To a certain extent, the myth of invisibility is even a condition of camouflage:
if the “illegal”is believed to be invisible, then anyone who is visible is perceived as legal. The
closet, a notion borrowed from lesbian and gay studies (Sedgwick 1990), points to well-known
dilemmas associated with secrecy and coming out, among which: handling the tension between
one’srealstatusandone’s perceived status, never knowing for sure whether those around are
aware of one’s status and selectively repeating the coming out ritual as one finds oneself in
new situations in which a wrong status is again assigned, or conversely maintaining a “don’t
ask, don’ttell”policy in key environments such as at the workplace even when knowledge
is suspected.
It is no coincidence that the term “coming out”has started being used in the United States
in the immigrant youth movement (Jones 2010; Nicholls 2013b; Seif 2011). Youths born
abroad who have spent most of their time in the United States are culturally more indistin-
guishable from their peers, thus intensifying the paradigm of the closet while making them
more legitimate candidates for legalization. Passage through the school system and other
non-exclusionary institutions heightens their feelings of legitimacy and hence their
frustration (Abrego 2011; Gleeson and Gonzales, 2012; Gonzales, 2011) –while providing
them with more cultural resources for claims-making. As this example shows, adopting the
language of coming out requires measuring the full implications of the closet by
distinguishing it from static powerlessness. The dialectic of the closet is the missing link for
understanding the passage from the “shadows”of everyday life to formal political claims-making.
For sexual minorities and other discreditable groups, the closet is at once a period of painful
dissimulation and a moment of self-discovery and autonomous construction that is a preparation
for coming out. In the case of irregular migrants, it is itself a phase of resource acquisition and
accumulation of civic capital which can later be mobilized as a political pivot. Its positive
productivity provides the infrastructure of individual and collective agency.
Together, the mechanisms described in this section point to a key paradox of restrictive migra-
tion policies: by closing some legalization opportunities or forcing previously legal residents to fall
back into illegality, they increase the ranks of long-term “integrated”undocumented migrants –
migrants who only lack papers and whom, once daring to come out, have played leading roles
in pro-legalization movements of the past decade (Barron et al. 2011; Nicholls 2013b).
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The moral economy of migrant legal deservingness
Equipped with an understanding of citizenship in non-dichotomous terms (Goldring and
Landolt, 2013; Ruhs and Anderson, 2010) and a holistic approach to the law-society nexus,
recent research has scrutinized the various ways in which undocumented migrants may make
themselves “less illegal”–following what we called the “moral economy of illegality”
(Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012). In cases where few legalization avenues are
available, being less illegal mostly boils down to becoming less deportable. In other cases,
it is more tightly connected to the prospect of acquiring full legal status (Barron et al.
2011; Nicholls 2013b; Salcido and Menjívar, 2012).
Strategies to become less illegal include the following: not committing petty crimes such as
public transportation fraud so as to avoid interaction with the police; not committing serious
crime so as to avoid becoming a priority for removal programs; paying taxes and keeping tax
receipts; being faithful to one’s employer with a view to future sponsorship; keeping the
same constructed identity over time so as to build a consistent trail for legalization; being
in contact with institutional third parties that may act as grantors and guarantors of
deservingness, whether by signing certificates of good conduct or by providing “proofs of
presence”to be included in legalization applications (Chabin and Scopsi 2013; Chauvin
and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012; Le Courant 2011).
The gradational character of (il)legality can be simultaneously observed at the levels of
policy, practice, and migrant perception and is suffused with moral judgments about degrees
of (un)deservingness: at the policy level, most “illegal”migrants are not removed, and the
bulk of programs officially focus on those who have committed serious crimes
3
; at the level
of police practice, local officers tend to make moral distinctions between categories of
unauthorized migrants and to designate priority groups for enforcement based on this
hierarchy (Leerkes, Varsanyi and Engbersen 2012); migrants and home country communities
themselves do not perceive deportation as a consequence of illegality strictly speaking, but as
the result of bad luck, laziness, or irresponsible behavior (Alpes 2011).
As it reaches the formal level of political claims and administrative procedures, legalization
brings up the issue of the frames through which migrant legal deservingness is asserted (see Paul
2012). Deservingness frames, as they are mobilized by migrants, activists, and government
agents, are traversed by several tensions. A first one opposes demands for universal legalization
based on mere presence and claims to legal status based on specific situations. On the one hand,
claiming legalization on the basis of a particular niche (being a student, a worker, or a parent
for example) risks validating and reinforcing the restrictiveness of current migration regimes
for those not sharing these same attributes (Nicholls 2013a: 627). On the other hand, although
niches can seem to clash at the discursive level, in practice, opening one door has not always
meant closing others. The master frame of the “deserving migrant”may even be reinforced
by the multiplicity of its deployments and become more readily available for further uses.
Perhaps a more salient tension appears with the opposition between strategies for the
acquisition of legal status based on vulnerability and those based on civic performance
(Chauvin, Garcés-Mascareñas and Kraler, 2013b). On the one hand, in an era of increasing
criminalization of migration, the good candidate for asylum has seemingly become the one
who would have preferred not to migrate but has come or stayed due to exceptional circum-
stances associated with vulnerability. These circumstances include, among others: persecution
in one’s home country; being an unaccompanied minor; certified medical emergency (Fassin
and d’Halluin 2005); and victimization during or after migration (Morando Lakhani 2013).
On the other hand, restrictionist policies have also tended to define deserving migrants as
those who can demonstrate their integration and contributions as residents (Murphy 2010).
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Performance-based deservingness has been particularly emphasized by migrant movements
and their supporters. This is well encapsulated in the following slogan from the Dream Act
movement in the United States: “We believe people should be asked for their grades, not
for their papers.”Similarly, France’s undocumented migrants recently made claims to
legalization on the grounds that they were integrated and productive workers, often
employed in the formal economy (Barron et al. 2011). Because this source of legality typi-
cally requires the successful performance of formal membership (Chabin and Scopsi, 2013),
it tends to be gendered: female migrants are more likely to have worked off the books; they
are often ‘erased’from bills and other official traces of household life; in the United States,
when they wish to adjust their status through marriage, they must hide salaried activity until
a work permit has been given (Salcido and Menjívar, 2012, 350–54).
At the same time, performance-based deservingness can itself be ridden with yet a third
type of tension, between deservingness based on cultural integration and deservingness based
on economic performance (Chauvin, Garcés-Mascareñas and Kraler 2013a). As the ongoing
“culturalization of citizenship”results in migrants’linguistic, ideological, and religious
allegiances being increasingly scrutinized as indicators of integration (Duyvendak et al., 2010),
these requirements are also implicated in legalization politics and policy. Migration rights
activists and representational brokers frequently describe migrants in terms that “resonate with
the moral and legal norms of the nation”(Nicholls 2013a). In a number of countries, groups of
migrants are indeed granted legal status based on “cultural assimilation”and “identification with
the State”(Garcés-Mascareñas 2012; Kalir 2010). With such focus on cultural issues, one might
have expected economic integration to remain marginal within calculations of civic
deservingness. Yet, some civic rituals –such as going on strike in a country like France, where
labor conflict is an important trope of national life (Barron et al. 2011) –are sometimes indistin-
guishably economic and cultural. More importantly, in neoliberal times, gainful employment,
self-sufficiency, and the performance of reliability within precarious labor markets, are also
framed as key civic duties, for citizens as well as for noncitizens. However, employment-based
deservingness is not always attributed to workers themselves. In Austria’s2007–2008
legalization program for care workers, employers were deemed deserving of keeping “their”
migrants (Chauvin, Garcés-Mascareñas and Kraler 2013b).
The contrast between how frames clash at the formal policy and discursive levels, and how
they are experienced in practice constitutes another type of tension (Peksen 2013). First, the
opposition between demands of “legalization for all”on the one hand (or the more radical
“no human being is illegal”), and legalization based on specific criteria or on a “case-by-case”
basis on the other, which has often torn immigrant movements apart (Nicholls 2013a), tends
to blur at the level of practice. Indeed, regularization applications are always examined
individually by authorities, and activists in favor of universal legalization often help migrants
with their personal cases even when this means embracing a logic of individual deservingness.
Second, the “vulnerability”and “performance”niches that can be identified in discourse and
administrative procedures often do not actually refer to distinct categories of persons but to
different framing strategies by the same groups of migrants, which are contingent on changes
in the political opportunity structure. Migrants do not only adjust their stories, but they also
perform real practical and ethical changes in their lives and aspirations, thus illustrating the
“transformative effects of immigration law”(Menjívar and Morando Lakhani, n. d). Yet, the
policy frame of vulnerability translates poorly at the level of migrants’subjective experiences
and day-to-day presentations of their selves (see Cvajner 2012): as obtaining legal status often
requires complex and lengthy procedures, it is typically lived as a reward for hard work and
an achievement based on successful performance –including, in the case of refugee status and
humanitarian legalization, the successful performance of vulnerability (Kim 2013).
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Frame discrepancy can pose serious challenges to real-life migrants, for example, when a
“vulnerability”frame dominates as a necessary passage for obtaining a “tolerated”status (such
as with the Duldung in German municipalities) but is subsequently replaced by an opposite
“performance”frame (such as good integration or having a job contract) once the same person
aims to be granted a less precarious legal status. In one French study, a migrant constructed two
different administrative identities with two separate paper trails based on hopes of either getting
refugee status or benefiting from employment-based legalization programs (Le Courant 2011).
The work of immigration attorneys is also challenging when proofs of victimization and civic
integration are simultaneously required for accessing certain forms of humanitarian legalization,
such as the U visa in the United States (Morando Lakhani 2013). As for undocumented students
applying to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, they must prove
they are innocent victims of their parents’migration while also demonstrating they are
contributing citizens and performing students (Nicholls 2013b).
Moreover, the same elements of citizenship can result in contradictory symbolic framings.
Formal proofs of integration risk revealing precarious lives and biographical failings such as
work absenteeism, bad grades, or unpaid bills (Chabin and Scopsi, 2013) and might even
provide a hold for detection and deportation (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012). The
increased internal controls of immigration, welfare, and labor authorities have not always
driven migrants into the underground; they have also led them to commit more illegal acts
(such as fraud) in order to maintain a level of formalized existence. Such practical contradic-
tions in the architecture of concrete incorporation structure the tensions traversing the
politics of migrant deservingness while insuring that the symbolic struggles they occasion
remain open, and their outcome uncertain.
Conclusion: deservingness and danger
This article describes key dimensions of the incorporation of unauthorized migrants into their
societies of residence. It shows how some aspects of integration allow migrants to make
themselves “less illegal,”whether by becoming less detectable or less deportable, by gaining
more legitimacy for making claims in the political realm or by successfully obtaining formal
legalization. Because the politics of legalization bring the question of deservingness to the
foreground, we examined the different frames promoted by migrant advocates and legalization
programs as legitimate avenues towards legality. These frames define a set of distinct legal
constraints, administrative tracks, presentation strategies, and life-altering practices. Finally, we
insisted on potential tensions between frames at different levels.
The important paradox identified by Susan Coutin (2000; 2005), according to which
life lived in illegality is subsequently utilized as an argument for regularization, is
intensified when governments aim to make migration policy more restrictive; the more
severe criteria for legalization are, the more they appear to be “rewarding illegality”
(by requiring a longer duration of stay or exceptional integration, for example). The
very closure of legalization opportunities thus intensifies the hierarchy between the
“very deserving”and the undeserving. The moral gradation in illegality is partially a
product of repression itself.
Definitions of civic deservingness typically apply to a far larger group than just
immigrants and cover the entire nation. Yet, theyweighharderonmigrants,especially
when the latter hold precarious legal statuses: as “tolerated citizens,”migrants are thus
turned into guardians of good citizenship (Anderson 2013). In this context, states cannot
easily shift policy frames as their attention turns from citizens to migrants, by requiring
different types of virtues from each group. This is nowhere more visible as with neoliberal
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constructions of employment: if work is the duty of all citizens, restrictionist governments
must spend a high amount of discursive inventiveness to simultaneously turn it –when
dealing with migrants –into a privilege only accessible to citizens (Chauvin, Garcés-Mascareñas
and Kraler 2013a).
As states cannot entirely control the extensiveness of their own definitions, they may
simultaneously promote deservingness frames and limit migrant access to them, whether by
preventing immigrants from becoming “too integrated”(too many years of presence, too
much of a social network, and too strong a claim to cultural literacy) or from being
recognized as vulnerable. Because what makes us deserving may also make us dangerous from
the point of view of migration control, states may thus increasingly restrict the “right to
deserve”and effectively turn it into a civic privilege.
Short Biographies
Sébastien Chauvin is assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of
the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science
Research. He was a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2006 and a
lecturer in sociology at the Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne from 2006 to 2008. He
conducted in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with mostly undocumented Hispanic immigrant
day laborers in the Chicago region, including the staffing industry that employed them, and
the social movements in which they mobilized, as part of his PhD dissertation (EHESS Paris,
2007). Since late 2007, he has been working on a collective study exploring the labor market
experience and following the union-supported mobilization of undocumented immigrant
workers in France. His main research deals with the relationship between civic inequality and
precarious work. He also keeps an active interest in gender and sexuality studies, social capital
and the sociology of elites, social theory, and the sociology of knowledge. He is the author
of a number of articles and book chapters, as well as Les agences de la précarité.Journaliers à Chicago
(Paris: Le Seuil, 2010), Introduction aux gender studies (with L. Bereni, A. Jaunait, and A.Revillard ;
Brussels:DeBoeck,2008),andOn bosse ici,on reste ici:La grève des sans-papiers:une aventure inédite
(with P. Barron, A. Bory, N. Jounin, and L. Tourette ; Paris : La découverte, 2011).
Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas is researcher at GRITIM - Department of Political and Social
Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona. She graduated with degrees in
History and Anthropology in the University of Barcelona and holds a PhD cum laude in Social
Sciences (2010) from the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD thesis, which has been awarded
the Dutch Sociological Association (NSV) biennial prize for the best dissertation in the
Netherlands, analysed immigration policies in Malaysia and Spain. Blanca has also worked on
immigration and integration policies in the Netherlands, political discourses on immigration
in Spain and, together with Sébastien Chauvin, on a theoretical conceptualisation of the irregular
immigrant from a comparative perspective. Along with a number of articles, book chapters, and
reports, she is the author of Labour Migration in Malaysia and Spain, Markets, Citizenship and Rights
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), Research and Migration. Filling Penninx’heuristic
model (with A.van Heelsum; Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press) and Immigració a Catalunya:
una perspectiva municipal (with R. Zapata-Barrero; Barcelona: ACM, 2011).
Notes
* Correspondence address: Sébastien Chauvin, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam,
Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: chauvin@uva.nl
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1
We are grateful to Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Jaeeun Kim, Maaike van Vree, Gail Zuckerwise, and our two
anonymous reviewers for their useful advice on the first draft of this article. Our elaboration on camouflage was triggered
by a seminal discussion with Mattia Vitiello in preparation for the 2010 European Science Foundation workshop on
“Migrant Legality and Employment.”Our review of deservingness frames expands analyses developed with the
International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe Research Group on Migrant Employment and
Legality (2010–2013), and in particular collaboration with Albert Kraler on legalization policy and migrant deservingness
(Chauvin, Garcés-Mascareñas and Kraler 2013a, 2013b). A first sketch of this review benefited from comments by
participants in the mini-symposium on “Economies of migrant deservingness”at the 20th International Conference
of Europeanists in June 2013. We especially thank our discussant Regine Paul.
2
Yen Le Esperitu (2003: 46–49) offers a close elaboration about the “differential inclusion”of Filipino migrants in the
United States.
3
It should be noted, however, that more restrictive policies may expand the definition of “deportable crimes”to an
increasing array of infractions previously deemed to be civil infractions, including those relative to immigration law.
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