Legal Status and Client Satisfaction: The Case of Low-Wage Immigrant Workers

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Shannon Gleeson
Keyword(s):  
Client Satisfaction ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Legal Mobilization ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Legal Counsel ◽  
Client Relationship ◽  
Undocumented Status ◽  
To Come ◽  
Sense Of Satisfaction ◽  
Pragmatic Attitude

Lawyers play an important role in mobilizing rights, yet the lawyer-client relationship can be challenging to navigate. This is especially true for immigrants who face barriers to accessing rights and protections. Undocumented status multiplies existing challenges, enhancing the need for an advocate. Based on sixty-six interviews with low-wage immigrant workers (thirty-one documented, thirty-five undocumented) from 2012 to 2014, I reveal how immigration status impacts why and how clients seek legal counsel, the expectations they have for their lawyers, and their eventual sense of satisfaction—or frustration—with their claim. As victims of an enforcement regime and legal system seemingly rigged against them, undocumented clients often have lower expectations of their lawyers and may doubt the integrity of the legal process itself. As a result, they often seemed resigned to follow their attorneys’ lead, minimizing conflict. However, undocumented status also limits labor mobility and generates uncertainty about the future, making claimants more willing to settle claims in order to move on. While they are often willing to come forward, many undocumented claimants nonetheless reject abstract notions of justice in favor of a more pragmatic attitude toward legal mobilization: a certain legal cynicism masquerading as client satisfaction.

scholarly journals Substitution between Immigrant and Native Farmworkers in the United States: Does Legal Status Matter?

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuan Wei ◽  
Gülcan Önel ◽  
Zhengfei Guan ◽  
Fritz Roka
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Substitution Effect ◽  
The United States ◽  
Elasticity Of Substitution ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Constant Elasticity ◽  
Constant Elasticity Of Substitution ◽  
Unauthorized Immigrant

AbstractThe policy debate surrounding the employment of immigrant workers in U.S. agriculture centers around the extent to which immigrant farmworkers adversely affect the economic opportunities of native farmworkers. To help answer this question, we propose a three-layer nested constant elasticity of substitution (CES) framework to investigate the substitutability among heterogeneous farmworker groups based on age, skill, and legal status utilizing National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) data from 1989 through 2012. We use farmwork experience and type of task performed as alternative proxies for skill to disentangle the substitution effect between U.S. citizens, authorized immigrants, and unauthorized immigrant farmworkers. Results show that substitutability between the three legal status groups is small; neither authorized nor unauthorized immigrant farmworkers have a significant impact on the employment of native farmworkers.

scholarly journals The Legal Status Divide among the Children of Immigrants

Daedalus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 150 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Roberto G. Gonzales ◽  
Stephen P. Ruszczyk
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Immigration Status ◽  
Educational History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Deferred Action ◽  
Undocumented Status ◽  
Master Status ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Over the past thirty-five years, federal immigration policy has brightened the boundaries of the category of undocumented status. For undocumented young people who move into adulthood, the predominance of immigration status to their everyday experiences and social position has been amplified. This process of trying to continue schooling, find work, and participate in public life has become synonymous with a process of learning to be “illegal.” This essay argues that despite known variations in undocumented youths by race, place, and educational history, undocumented status has become what Everett Hughes called a “master status.” The uniform set of immigration status-based exclusions overwhelms the impact of other statuses to create a socially significant divide. The rise, fall, and survival of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a policy offering qualified youths a temporary semilegal status, have underlined how closely access and rights hew to the contours of contemporary immigration policy.

‘With an Eye to the Past’, But No Longer ‘An Object of International Law’

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Rotem Giladi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
To Come ◽  
Foreign Ministry ◽  
Radical Transformation

The Prologue tells the story of the Jewish Yearbook of International Law, published in Jerusalem in 1949. It highlights the sense of time of those involved: an end to Jewish objecthood and the beginning of Jewish subjecthood brought by the sovereign turn in Jewish history—a radical transformation in the international legal status of Jews. The volume sought to ‘sum up’, ‘with an eye to the past’, the terms of past Jewish engagements with international law. The editors refrained from predicting the shape of things to come—the terms on which the Jewish state would now approach international law; this book explores that future. The Prologue also introduces the dramatis personae, including Jacob Robinson and Shabtai Rosenne, Foreign Ministry legal advisers and the book’s main protagonists. It also tells of their effort to assume ownership of the project which was to be renamed the Israel Yearbook of International Law.

Learning the Story for Myself

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-81
Author(s):  
Sarah C. Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Undocumented Immigrants ◽  
Rites Of Passage ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Undocumented Youth ◽  
Undocumented Status ◽  
Public Voice

This chapter chronicles the ways young undocumented immigrants uncover their lack of legal status experientially—through interactions with parents and others, in attempts to pursue rites of passage reserved for citizens, and as audiences of political and popular media. The narrators featured in this chapter recount their immigration stories and explore the personal and social ramifications of discovering their status, including feelings of isolation and anomie. It explains how these experiences influence one’s decision about whether to cultivate a public voice, and the narrators reflect on the processes of determining how to narrate their experiences in the context of activism. After undocumented youth learn and grow to understand the implications of their undocumented status, they come to a crossroads: Will they come to see themselves as part of the story of immigrant activism, or does this story belong to others?

Guestworkers of the World, Unite!

No Man's Land ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cindy Hahamovitch
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global History ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
To Come

This chapter explores the first phase of the global history of guestworker programs, which began in the late nineteenth century and lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Before that time, there were no guestworker programs because there were no immigration restrictions. Immigration restrictions led to guestworker programs as states sought to guarantee employers access to the immigrant workers that restrictionists were trying to deny them. Temporary immigration schemes—guestworker programs—were state-brokered compromises designed to placate employers' demands for labor and nativists' demands for restriction. Guestworker programs offered clear-cut distinctions between citizens and noncitizens, natives and aliens, insiders and outsiders, whites and nonwhites. This first phase in the history of guestworker programs thus reveals the essential features of the guestworker programs to come.

INEQUALITY IN A “POSTRACIAL” ERA

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Prison Population ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Immigration Policies ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Criminal Legislation

AbstractOver the past four decades, increasingly punitive and enforcement-oriented U.S. immigration policies have been legitimized by a rhetoric of criminality that stigmatizes Latino immigrant workers and intensifies their exploitation. Simultaneously, there has been a sevenfold increase in the prison population in the United States, in which African Americans are eight times more likely to be jailed than Whites (Western 2006, p. 3). In this paper, I draw on scholarship in history and sociology, as well as my own anthropological research, to develop the argument that criminal justice policies and immigration policies together disempower low-wage U.S. labor and maintain categorical racial inequalities in a “postracial” United States. First, I review the historical role of race in U.S. immigration policy, and I consider the evidence for systemic racism in immigration enforcement in the contemporary period. Second, I discuss criminal legislation in the neoliberal era and examine the ways in which criminal legislation and immigration policies together disempower large segments of the U.S. workforce, satisfying employer demands for low cost and pliant labor. Finally, I argue that a political focus on immigrant workers' “illegality” masks the role of the state in (re)defining the legal status of low-wage workers and veils the ways in which punitive policies maintain historical racial and class inequalities.

scholarly journals Leniency in exchange for cartel confessions

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.D. Jaspers
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Civil Liability ◽  
Private Enforcement ◽  
Legal Counsel ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Detection Tool ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
To Come

Leniency offers corporations the possibility to come clean about their involvement in cartel conduct (for example, price-fixing, bid-rigging) in exchange for immunity or reduction of financial penalties. In Europe, nearly 60 percent of detected cartels are discovered through leniency. This makes leniency the most applied detection tool for uncovering cartel conduct violations. What are the considerations in applying for leniency or refraining from doing so? How do those considerations relate to private law enforcement through civil liability regarding business cartels? These questions are discussed based on semi-structured interviews ( n = 34) with cartelists, competition lawyers and in-house legal counsel to study theoretical assumptions underpinning leniency arrangements in the Netherlands. This study investigates four scenarios on the use of leniency suggested in the literature and finds empirical support for only two. Strategic use of leniency and false confessions occur in the Netherlands, but to a lesser extent than the existing literature suggests. Moreover, various disincentives, and especially the rise of private enforcement, make leniency an unattractive and uncertain option for cartelists.

Imagining a Solution: Final Status Arrangements and Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon

1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rex Brynen
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
The Social ◽  
West Bank And Gaza ◽  
Palestinian Refugee ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Right ◽  
Palestinian Population ◽  
Research And Policy

Possible final status arrangements for the Palestinian refugee issue are explored, with emphasis on their consequences for the Palestinians in Lebanon. It is suggested that the right of return will be limited largely to the West Bank and Gaza, where it will be shaped by local economic conditions. Available compensation funds may be inadequate. Greater research and policy planning are needed in these areas. Moreover, because Lebanon will continue to host a significant Palestinian population for many years to come, both Palestinian-Lebanese dialogue and improvement in the social, economic, and legal status of the Palestinians are imperative.

Marx on Immigration: Workers, Wages, and Legal Status

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (9) ◽  
pp. 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

Given the intense and often bitter debates over immigration now taking place in the United States and Europe…. [Marx's thoughts on the subject have] received surprisingly little attention from the modern left.… [Marx wrote about immigrant workers] nearly 150 years ago, and he was certainly not infallible, but a great deal of his analysis sounds remarkably contemporary.… [And among his insights, largely ignored by economists and activists alike, is] the one Marx considered "most important of all": the way immigration can be used to create "a working class divided into two hostile camps."Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

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