We live in an era of human mobility from which two different perspectives on borders have emerged. On the one hand, hyperglobalizers celebrate a borderless world where international borders are becoming obsolete. On the other hand, skeptics argue that nation-states continue to be powerful, regulating borders through the barricading and militarizing of international boundaries. I draw on data from 60 in-depth interviews with residents living in the border town of Mexicali, as well as ethnographic field data from 14 months of participant observation at a deportee center in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico, to argue that the U.S.-Mexico border simultaneously embodies contradictory perspectives, as it stands neither completely sealed (through its militarization) nor completely opened (through the process of globalization). My research shows that an important element that shapes whether people experience the U.S.-Mexico border as open or closed is determined by their ability to cross the border legally. Thus, by juxtaposing the experiences of Mexican nationals with different legal relationships to the U.S. (as tourists, unauthorized migrants, and deportees), I demonstrate how these legal categories differentiate people. The process of legal differentiation shapes whether Mexican nationals experience the U.S.-Mexico border as a borderless site of opportunity and privilege, or as a bordered site of hardship and stigmatization. Moreover, I argue that this process of differentiation creates divergent identities and experiences of policing and violence along the border. Legal differentiation obscures convergent underlying similarities of normalized border violence and racialized experiences of Mexican nationals in the U.S. Ultimately, I show that the border is more than the territorial boundary of the state, where citizenship and legality are enforced, determining who is or who is not allowed into the United States. The border is also a site where state power is exercised, and this power is exercised through legal classifications. While other scholars have shown how the state directly shapes violence and identity, among other aspects of life, my dissertation contributes by showing one mechanism by which the state exerts power, namely, by establishing and enforcing legal categories. I show four arenas that exemplify how the state exercises power through legal classifications: by exerting violence, (Ch 2); by influencing identity, (Ch 3); by shaping what is considered normal, (Ch 4); and by structuring racialization, (Ch 5).

We examine the official scope and actual coverage of immigrant civil society in seven California cities using a widely-employed 501(c)3 database. First, to capture demographic underrepresentation, we compare the number of immigrant organizations in official data to population statistics and find substantially fewer immigrant organizations than we would expect. Second, we measure the organizational undercount by calculating the number of publicly present immigrant organizations not captured in official data. We do this for four immigrant-origin communities (Indian, Mexican, Portuguese and Vietnamese) using 160 key informant interviews and extensive examination of directories and media (ethnic and mainstream). We find a notable organizational undercount, which varies by city and immigrant group. Considering both underrepresentation and undercounts, Mexican-origin organizations seem at a particular disadvantage. Our findings have important implications for resource inequalities and advocacy capacity in minority communities, as well as for scholars’ ability to accurately document the vitality of immigrant civil society.

The steady growth of Chinese migrants to South Africa in the past decade provides an opportunity to use Amartya Sen's (2001) capabilities approach in the field of immigration. This theoretical framing along with qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews and participant observation in three South African cities, Johannesburg, Durban, and Bloemfontein, reveals that the Chinese employ, what I call, a small pond migration strategy--utilizing mobility to maximize their social, economic, and human capital. I argue that mainland Chinese migrants move to South Africa because of a desire to adventure out of China and pursue freedoms associated with being one's own boss. Once in South Africa, they choose to stay because of comfortable weather and a slower pace of life, despite losing freedoms associated with high crime in Johannesburg. As a contrast to these mainland Chinese migrants, Chinese migrants from the province of Fujian embrace a hyper-small pond migration strategy where they move year to year searching out the best places to make money. This is because rather than valuing long-term development and quality of life concerns, Fujianese migrants value short-term money-making above all. These findings suggest alternative ways of understanding factors of migration, a way to utilize Sen's capabilities framework in immigration studies, a model that explains migration from more developed countries to less developed ones, and a potentially predictive model of what may happen throughout the African continent as China invests more in Africa.

How do undocumented young adults of Asian origin, namely those who can “pass” as documented, navigate their everyday lives?  More broadly, how do racial discourses shape pathways of incorporation for undocumented young adults?  Undocumented immigrants of Asian origin occupy a unique social location in the United States because what “illegal” conjures in the American consciousness is not what “Asian” looks like. On one hand, they live in a context where they are primarily racialized as non-threatening “model minorities” leading to perceptions of success, achievement, and docility. Simultaneously, however, they also carry the burden of their criminalized undocumented immigration status. This status, and both the stigma and burden that come with it, is invisible. Not only is legal status undetectable to the naked eye, unlike race or gender, but Asians do not fall into the racial imagery of an “illegal immigrant” that is conflated with “Mexican.” Living in the United States as someone who is Asian and undocumented is, in essence, a double-edged sword.

Drawing on a comparative analysis of in-depth interviews with 63 undocumented Asian and Latinx young adults from California, in addition to two years of intermittent participant observation at community-based organizations, events, and workshops serving the undocumented population, I shed light on the ways in which illegality, the everyday experience of living with undocumented status, is refracted through the prism of racialization in the United States. My findings reveal that 1.5-generation undocumented Asian immigrants experience what I call invisible illegality. Race operates to simultaneously shield Asian undocumented young adults from and expose them to the precarious nature of their immigration status, and this varies across institutional and relational contexts. Relative to their Latinx counterparts, Asian undocumented immigrants experience advantages such as greater physical security since they are less vulnerable to racial profiling and ICE raids. However, being a camouflaged minority within the undocumented population results in their exclusion from a collective identity of illegality that, for many, rests on shared race-based narratives of being Latino. Such exclusion results in intensified feelings of shame and a sense of isolation both within their ethnoracial community and the broader undocumented community. It also hinders access to formal and informal supports in civil society. The unique nexus of being Asian and undocumented thus leads to a delicate position of invisible illegality that is produced by multiple co-constitutive processes of racialization.

By unraveling how the intersection of race and undocumented status uniquely shapes the burdens of illegality of undocumented young adults of Asian origin, Invisible Illegality has sobering implications beyond an understanding of diverse trajectories of illegality. It exposes the ways in which the racialization of immigrant communities is a powerful mechanism that cements broader inequalities in U.S. society.

This dissertation examines U.S. military service enlistment intentions and post-military education and labor market outcomes among young adult children of immigrants in the United States in the early 21st century. I assert that the military is perceived as an alternative pathway to incorporation among disadvantaged children of immigrants. Rather than relying on ethnic social ties and networks to get ahead as segmented assimilation asserts is necessary for success among disadvantaged children of immigrants, they actively avoid downward mobility by choosing military service as a pathway to mobility. I argue that disadvantaged children of immigrants who aspire to upward mobility are pushed toward military service by structural disadvantages but only those who perceive the military as best option to get ahead make the decision to enlist.

An empirical investigation of post-military educational and labor market outcomes reveal that military service does not uniformly benefit veteran children of immigrants as they may have hoped. Analyses of nationally representative data, the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Youth (ADD Health) and the Current Population Surveys (CPS) reveal that veteran children of immigrants are less likely to acquire bachelor's degrees and are less likely to be enrolled in post-secondary school than non-veterans by the ages of 24 to 32 but unemployment and earnings are similar between veteran and non-veteran children of immigrants.

However, these findings hide the variation underlying these outcomes that are revealed by in-depth interviews with thirty-three veteran children of immigrants. While some individuals seamlessly transition from military service to stable, middle-income occupations in the civilian labor market, others face unemployment, underemployment and obstacles to post-secondary degrees because of non-transferable military job skills and the challenges of transitioning from military to civilian life. Members of a third group were pursuing four-year degrees at the time of their interviews and post-college trajectories have yet to be determined.