Susan Bibler Coutin's research while affiliated with University of California, Irvine and other places
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Publications (58)
States have long denied basic rights to non-citizens within their borders, and international law imposes only limited duties on states with respect to those fleeing persecution. But even the limited rights previously enjoyed by non-citizens are eroding in the face of rising nationalism, populism, xenophobia, and racism. Beyond Borders explores what...
Scholarship regarding those who are categorized as undocumented can put sanctuary principles into practice in research settings. To do so, scholars can conduct research in collaboration with immigrant communities, reject essentializing terminology, develop modes of sociality that challenge exclusion, and document the unofficial forms of sanctuary d...
The expansion of immigration enforcement in the United States has increased the documentation requirements to which immigrants are subjected. A case in point is birth certificates, which are used to establish identity, nationality, age, and kin relationships in myriad US immigration cases. This development gives highly localized bureaucratic practi...
Karina O. Alvarado, Alicia Ivonne Estrada and Ester E. Hernández (eds.), U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2017), pp. xi + 242, $30.00, pb. - Volume 51 Issue 3 - Susan Bibler Coutin
In the United States, the doctrine of plenary power grants the federal government considerable discretion in formulating US immigration policies. With only limited court review, the executive and legislative branches of government can create or abrogate immigration policies quite suddenly. This produces extreme uncertainty in the lives of noncitize...
In the United States, the lives of undocumented people have become increasingly precarious due to increased surveillance, enforcement, criminalization, and detention. In this context, deferred action, a form of prosecutorial discretion in which the government declines to pursue removal and provides temporary work authorization, has become a source...
This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-la...
Tragic stories of border crossings are often central to accounts of migration, and as ethnographers we are privy to stories of clandestine crossings, painful separations, and unspeakable loss. In the process of writing, ethnographers make these stories central to their own arguments and in so doing, those crossings, separations, and losses become k...
Science and technology studies can help to unveil invisible modes of power that are embedded in the ways conflicts are known, debated, and resolved. Legal forms of adjudication, reporting systems used by international commissions, and data gathering on the part of governmental and nongovernmental agencies shape how conflicts are fought out on the g...
Following the approach to social justice taken in this book, we would like to bring attention to issues of recognition, participation, and representation as these are linked to migrants’ legality and their rights in the chapters by Petchot (17), De Vlieger (16), and Mora and Handmaker (15). These three issues are closely intertwined. In this review...
To analyze the forms of membership that are created in the gap between formal citizenship and social belonging, this paper takes up three examples of citizenship in the breach: (1) the 1980–1992 Salvadoran civil war, in which human rights abuses perpetrated in El Salvador effectively constituted Salvadoran migrants as stateless persons, though tech...
As an interdisciplinary field, law and society has an ambivalent relationship with the notion of a canon: Being a field requires having a recognized set of key texts, even as this particular field's critique of doctrinal legal analysis creates an openness toward alternative perspectives. Within the interdisciplinary field of law and society itself,...
Based on life history interviews conducted with 1.5 generation Salvadorans who were raised in the United States and then deported to El Salvador, this article examines the displaced subjectivities being produced through intensified deportation regimes. Current theorizations of deportation are extended by examining the transition to illegality exper...
Our paper examines how law-making regarding Native and Central Americans in the United States gives rise to documentary forms that challenge binaries that have plagued sociolegal scholarship. In the United States, plenary power gives the federal government what former U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey termed the "administrative grace" to grant...
Over the past three decades, sociolegal scholarship on the rights of noncitizens in the United States has sought to explain rights and exclusions while incorporating new theory regarding racialization, biopolitics, neoliberalism, risk, and states of exception. Early work in this period distinguished between legal and illegal immigration, with a foc...
In the aftermath of the 1980–1992 Salvadoran civil war, biography and history have become linked, as the Salvadoran state reclaims its dispersed citizenry, and as Salvadorans who emigrated as young children reclaim their own pasts. Such reclaimings compel biographies as part of state neoliberal financial strategies that encourage remitting, but a...
This article takes a retrospective look at legal advocacy on behalf of Central American asylum seekers, which has been influential in the development of US asylum law and in the creation of an infrastructure to address immigrants' needs. The article considers three time periods when Central Americans have been deemed to fall outside of the category...
This review explores the ways that Bosniaks The Citizen and the Alien and Shachars The Birthright Lottery usefully expose gaps between permissible and prohibited realities and persons. Drawing on ethnographic research regarding immigration from Central America to the United States, the review also highlights the importance of analyzing the transn...
This article re-examines the US–Central American sanctu-ary movement of the 1980s. Our re-examination is motiv-ated by two factors. First, with the passage of time it is pos-sible to discern the movement's origins in ways that could not be fully articulated while it was ongoing. We are able to show how certain relationships between the movement's N...
The securitization of immigration has led to increased reliance on border enforcement, detention, and deportation to control unauthorized movements. Based on a case study of the ways that Salvadoran immigrants to the United States have experienced these tactics, this paper analyzes the spatial implications of current enforcement strategies. As move...
This essay analyzes the ways that El Salvador as a site of origin is configured in relation to Salvadoran migrants in the U.S. The post-war Salvadoran government, well aware of the economic benefits of the more than 2.5 billion dollars that emigres send to relatives annually, depicted El Salvador as an object of longing, as a parent to which emigre...
In 1985–86, 11 religious activists whose congregations had declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees were tried in Tucson, Arizona, on alien-smuggling charges. Although 8 of the 11 were convicted and although the verdicts were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the social and legal significance of the trial,...
Drawing on research regarding undocumented immigration and transnational adoption, this essay argues that legal and ethnographic accounts retroactively instantiate potential realities that were there all along but are only made visible by official recognition. In this sense, the “field” that is at the center of ethnographic inquiry is brought into...
Una forma de identificar las características que, según las autoridades y la ley, el ciudadano ideal debe de tener es estudiar casos de inmigración en corte. Por medio de observar la preparatión de tales casos, entrevistar a abogados y solicitantes, y asistir a audiencias en la corte federal de inmigración en Los Angeles, se analiza estas caracterí...
The Network Inside Out Annelise Riles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
In the United States, unprecedented high numbers of naturalization applicants, the adoption of restrictive immigration policies, changing demographics, and the 1996 presidential election coalesced in the mid-1990s to make naturalization simultaneously a high priority and problematic. Salvadorans who had immigrated during the 1980s and who were stil...
Through an ethnography of unauthorized migration from El Salvador to the United States, I explore “clandestinity” as a hidden, yet known, dimension of social reality. Unauthorized migrants who are en route to the United States have to make themselves absent from the spaces they occupy. When they become clandestine, such migrants embody illegality;...
Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Cecilia Menjívar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xiii. 301 pp., map, tables, appendixes, notes, references, index.
This essay examines the legitimation work of globalization by bringing into dialogue the authors' research on immigration, finance, and intercountryadoption. It is concerned with the practices that produce, define, and preclude both movement and connection, such as “naturalizing” some border crossings while criminalizing others; denying the histori...
Scholars' and policy-makers' interest in the remittances that migrants send home to relatives has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Focusing on remittances from the United States to El Salvador, we examine how academic studies, public discourse, and state accounting practices simultaneously produce and reveal the nature of this phenom...
As a field, criminology has paid insufficient attention to societal processes that obscure the distinction between legality and illegality, decriminalize formerly objectionable behavior or redefine law-breakers as deserving members of society. An analysis of undocumented immigrants’ efforts to redefine themselves as legal residents highlights ways...
With the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski set the standards for ethnographic research for decades to come. His advice to ethnographers was straightforward. Know the natives. Live among them. Adopt their point of view. Learn their language. Spend a long time in the field. Take copious fieldnotes. Locate a...
By differentiating between legal and illegal movements, transactions, andpersons, legal prohibitions and law enforcement practices create boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate social spheres. Individuals who are located in an illegitimate domain survive at least in part through unauthorized and quasi-illegal practices. The boundaries betwe...
“Cause lawyering” denotes the practice of law by those committed to furthering through the upholding of a particular cause by legal means, the aims of the good society. This books explains how new configurations of state power, brought about by globalization and democratization processes, are creating new opportunities for altering the political an...
By juxtaposing religious, legal, and victims’accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the smte that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S. asylum taw. In the United States, asylum is available to aliens whose gooernments fail to protect them from persecution on the...
The legalization strategies pursued by Salvadoran immigrants and activists from the 1980s to the present demonstrate that migrants’ and advocates’ responses to policy changes reinterpret law in ways that affect future policy. Law is critical to immigrants’ strategies in that legal status is increasingly a prerequisite for rights and services and th...
"The legalization strategies pursued by Salvadoran immigrants and activists from the 1980s to the present demonstrate that migrants' and advocates' responses to policy changes reinterpret law in ways that affect future policy. Law is critical to immigrants' strategies in that [U.S.] legal status is increasingly a prerequisite for rights and service...
Ethnographic analyses of political dissidence are deeply implicated in the political contests about which ethnographers write. A comparison of the authors' fieldwork among dissidents in Argentina, Kenya, and the United States reveals both the differing dynamics of contests over the political and the complex ways that ethnographers are situated with...
The U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) created a new legal category, “illegal immigrant eligible for amnesty.” Media coverage of IRCA provides an opportunity to analyze the connections between the legal and cultural discourses in which identities are created and contested. From our analysis of media images of amnesty applicants,...
Legal advocacy on behalf of Central American asylum seekers in the United States has played a key role in developing U.S. asylum and refugee law and in creating an infrastructure of legal expertise to address the needs of legal and unauthorized immigrants more generally. This talk takes a retrospective look at this advocacy work, considering how at...
Citations
... En parallèle, des conditions peuvent être imposées indépendamment des procédures criminelles et s'adjoindre aux ordonnances préventives de garder la paix rendues par un juge de paix à la suite d'un renseignement fourni par une personne ayant des motifs raisonnables de craindre que des blessures corporelles lui soient infligées, ou soient infligées à un conjoint ou à ses enfants, ou que sa propriété soit endommagée. 18 Dans cette partie du projet, nous traitons principalement des conditions restrictives imposées par le tribunal aux étapes de la mise en liberté (avant procès) et de la détermination de la peine (après procès) à Montréal, Vancouver, 20 Notre première contribution à la discussion consiste à jeter un éclairage sur les géographies du droit résultant des tactiques spatiales imposées par les tribunaux. Bien qu'il existe une vaste littérature sur le rôle spécifique de la police ou du pouvoir législatif dans la réglementation des espaces publics par l'usage de tactiques spatiales, très peu d'écrits ont traité de la façon dont les tribunaux et les acteurs judiciaires oeuvrant au sein du système de justice criminelle (par ex. ...
... municipales otorgan "personalidad social" a estos migrantes(Horton 2020).Pero, como nos advierteCoutin (2020), algunos tipos de documentación pueden llevar tanto hacia la legalización como a impedir la obtención de un estatus legal. Como veremos más adelante, los documentos que algunos migrantes obtienen en el sur de México, utilizando vías creativas, pero no necesariamente "legales", se han convertido en un obstáculo que les impide optar por vías "legales" que harían más segura su situación.En este contexto multi-escalar, los migrantes pasan por transiciones multidireccionales entre la legalidad y la ilegalidad. ...
... We turn our attention, then, to critical approaches to migration studies that have initiated an expansive analysis of repressive migration policies (Carens 2013;Isin 2012;Nyers and Rygiel ;Sassen 2008), exploitation of migrant labour (De Genova 2002;Rogaly 2015;Sharma 2006), racism (Duffield 2006;Kansteiner 2019), increased surveillance and violence at borders, and torture in detention centres, jails and prisons (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2009;De Genova et al. 2015;Hayter 2003;King 2016), and squatted spaces and public commons (Alldred 2003;Aureli and Mudu 2017;Bauder 2016;Harvey 2012;Mudu and Chattopadhyay 2017;Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013;Walia 2013). Critical migration studies scholars also investigate state policies that oversimplify the problematic distinction between refugees and migrants (Coutin 1998), and the creation of camps, detention centres and jails for migrants and asylum seekers that consider them as the waste of nations upon which to exercise their power through extra-judicial and constitutional apparatuses (Agamben 1998;Pallister-Wilkins). Despite the important analyses provided by this existing work, it is still unclear how to organise a strong opposition built, for example, on "the struggles of exploited and marginalized groups" (Colatrella 2011, 1) through counter-struggles of migrants as practices of autonomy that respond to these patterns of exploitation, segregation and annihilation. ...
Reference: Rethinking the Migrant Position
... However, this study shows that the production of paperlessness is a papered process. The paperless collect documents of partial recognition, in efforts to legitimize their status (Chauvin 2009;Abarca and Bibler Coutin 2018). As one asylum-seeker participating in the Right to Live protest commented to an author, "We have many papers, but not the one we want." ...
... Rather than simply a dichotomous construct-citizen or noncitizen, documented or undocumented-contemporary migrants are increasingly experiencing more uncertain circumstances and a proliferation of liminal zones of authorization and inclusion (Golash-Boza 2013;Gomberg-Muñoz 2016;Menjívar 2006). Interim, temporary, or precarious administrative status produces especially pernicious forms of inequality (Coutin et al. 2017;Landolt and Goldring 2016), especially when such status is incomplete and reversible (Basok and Weisner 2018). Further, differentiated treatment has resulted in graduated citizenship (Ong 2006) of often ethnic minority groups, reflecting purported racial and cultural differences. ...
... Among the emergent themes in this body of work are the role of human emotions and the ways in which experiences of exile and deportability engender feelings of stigma, strain, alienation, and anxiety, not only for the individuals targeted for detention and removal but for their families caught in this ever-widening net of "collective liminality" (Martinez-Aranda 2020). Several terms have been coined to capture the experiences of the deported (and would-be deported), including Reiter & Coutin's (2017) "disintegrated subjects" and Coutin's (2000) concept of "legal nonexistence." Zilberg (2011) uses the term "security-scapes" (see also Gusterson 2001) to capture those tenuous spaces-created through fear, omnipresent scrutiny, and the impossibility of securing documents-occupied by asylum seekers and the undocumented that effectively give ethnographies of individuals in absentia a "ghostly" quality (Coutin & Vogel 2016, p. 638). ...
... Field access was, after all, not merely a matter of access to data (Scheffer et al 2010: 25): it was a particular challenge that needed to be problematised and managed in an ongoing fashion which ultimately required a more layered understanding of methods in socio-legal research (Banakar and Travers 2005). 1 One recent exception is the work of Scheffer et al on access to the ' criminal case load ' fi eld (2010). There are also notable works on access to lawyers or their offi ces (Coutin 2002;Flood 1991;Hoy 1995 This chapter offers a refl exive account of the process of carrying out a socio-legal study in Istanbul courts. It is a methodological exploration of doing fi eld research in judicial settings with a particular focus on the problem of ' access ' which seems to be a rather neglected area of study even among court ethnographers. ...
... Contemporary scholars, such as historian Gerawork Gizaw and anthropologist Liisa Malkki, who focus on current requests for asylum and contexts of refuge, recognise how pervasive and potentially damaging such tropes of the idealised deserving subject of pity and charity are (Gizaw 2022;Gizaw and Reed 2022;Malkki 1995, 1996, as well as: Behrman 2016Cabot 2019;Coutin and Vogel 2016;Kushner 2006;Marfleet 2007;Reed and Schenck 2023). Heath Cabot, in a critical reflection on anthropology's approach to refugee issues, also recognises in her own work a 'tendency to aestheticize certain "tragic" aspects of asylum processes, which demonstrates how tropes of victimhood also imbued my own writing even as I sought to critically contest them' (Cabot 2019, p. 266). ...
... Legal definitions of deportable offenses also changed (Zatz and Rodriguez 2015), coinciding with the practice of placing immigrants in deportation proceedings without the benefit of a hearing before a judge (Gonzalez-Barrera and Krogstad 2014). These changes curtailed immigrants' ability to apply for a stay of removal and wreaked havoc on their lives (Coutin 2010). Moreover, despite the shift toward more inclusive policies, the collateral consequences of S.B. 90 lingered, demonstrating that even after anti-immigrant policies are eliminated, immigrant communities must contend with the aftermath over the long term. ...
... This illustrates how bordering practices and the accompanying deportability not only have enormous long-term legal and social consequences for deportees but also seriously influence their mental and physical health even long after deportation. Dingeman-Cerda and Coutin (2012) believe that such unwanted deportations bring about not only individual suffering but also what they call "social suffering," which affects society as a whole, at least in the Salvadorian context. 6 ...
