Immigrant Children in a Pol(ICE) State

Guided by the following questions: (1) What are the experiences of immigrant children attending schools in communities experiencing police brutality and anti-immigrant sentiments? (2) How do middle school children of immigrants visually represent their experiences with legal violence? and (3) What are children’s visions of freedom and community safety in this context?, this article highlights the understudied preadolescent children of immigrants through a 2-year study of a multidisciplinary theater class at a local elementary school in South Central Los Angeles. Data includes child interviews, class observations, artwork, and performance videos, from recently arrived Mexican and Central American children aged 10 to 13 years. Findings reveal how children come to understand policing, reinforcing concepts like “good cop/bad cop,” conflating local police and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, but also imagining alternatives for community safety outside of police systems. This work contributes to the fields of immigration, abolitionist education, and ethnic studies, among others, offering new ways of supporting immigrant children through the use of arts-based tools.

Love Jihad and the Governance of Gender and Intimacy in Hindu Nationalist Statecraft

What role does the Islamophobic theory of “love jihad” play in the politics of Hindu nationalist statecraft—the legal codification of Hindu nationalist ideology—in India today? In this article, we address this question through a critical analysis of how the idea of “love jihad” relate to both (a) a conservative politics of governing gender and intimacy in which women are constituted as subjects of protection and (b) an authoritarian populism grounded in a foundational opposition between true Indians and their anti-national enemies within. The article begins by exploring how “love jihad” has transformed from an idea that was used to legitimize extra-legal violence by Hindu nationalist vigilantes to the status of law, with a particular focus on the BJP-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh. We then situate the “love jihad” laws in relation to a regime of gender governance that constitutes women as subjects of protection - and specifically protection by state and nation—and discuss how this resonates with a pervasive patriarchal common sense in Indian society. Finally, we show how “love jihad” laws and the wider conservative politics of gender and intimacy within which it is embedded feeds into the authoritarian politics of the Modi regime, in which Muslims are consistently portrayed as enemies of the Indian nation, and reflect on what this entails for the country’s secular political order.

State Authority and Lynching in Latin America

Social scientists observed a significant increase in the number of lynchings in contemporary Latin America. The reasons for the rise are wide-ranging and conflicting. However, there are commonalities with the well-known cases of the United States of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which state legitimacy was the subject of intense debate. Therefore, this essay aims at observing why state intervention was deemed illegitimate in resolving local disputes that led to the vigilantes’ use of this form of extra-legal violence.

The Notion of Power and Liberalism Evolution

The author of the article makes the attempt to explain the evolution of liberalism and even broader, of human history not through the evolution of the notion of freedom, that became the philosophic mainstream already at the time of Hegel and was convenient for liberalism itself, but on the basis of the notion of power analysis that is interpreted by the liberals as opposite to freedom. Proceeding from the linguistic and political history data, the author demonstrates the multi-components character of the notion of power that is interpreted as: 1) some intriguing and “charming” authority ensuring harmony and order; 2) the source of legal violence; 3) the promise of advantages that leads to voluntary assuming certain responsibilities; 4) dependence on the source of want satisfaction; 5) passion, irrational dependence. The present notion of power structure is coherent to the Varna system specific for Indo-European nations; each Varna has its own, specific only for it, understanding of power. In various epochs and in various societies we find a specific governing notion of power. So, in Russia since ancient times the worldview of Kshatriyas prevailed and it still determines to a large extent its civilizational specifics. The classic western liberalism was characterized by the Vaishyas ideology dominance, i.e. the bourgeois class; on the contrary modern liberalism, libertarianism share the world view of the “classless society” of the Dalits (“gone astray”), whose dominance deprives the world of controllability and destructs all vertical hierarchy. The way out of the universal crisis is possible only on the basis of new historical grounds that will become, according to Heidegger, “the new beginning of history”.

Mixed-status Families in Northern Arizona: An Inductive Analysis of Legal Clinic Participation and the Gendered Dynamics of Emotional Care Work

Fear of deportation and consequent separation of “mixed-status families” (those with citizen and non-citizen members) is a central issue facing immigrants today. Yet, there is a gap in sociological explorations of legal clinics designed to assist these families. Here, we examine parents of mixed-status families in danger of deportation who visited one such clinic: what factors drove them to seek legal help? While we explore theoretical implications related to legal violence, we also highlight ways to better reach these families and provide free legal services, particularly to women who seem to be primarily tasked with this work. Research was conducted through Northern Arizona Immigration Legal Services (NAILS). Using in-depth interviews with nine undocumented Mexican-born parents, mostly mothers, our findings reveal patterns that could aid NAILS and other legal support services in providing assistance to these families. Issues such as traditional gendered labor division within the family and the role of social workers were the most relevant themes in seeking legal help. These findings not only contribute to the growing sociological research on immigration and gender dynamics but can also help NAILS and other similar community organizations connect with immigrants in more efficient ways, particularly as it relates to the emotional care work of mothers in mixed-status families.

Migration infrastructures and the production of migrants’ irregularity in Japan and the United Kingdom

The article examines the migration infrastructures and pathways through which migrants move into, through and out of irregular status in Japan and the UK and how these infrastructures uniquely shape their migrant experiences of irregularity at key stages of their migration projects.Our analysis brings together two bodies of migration scholarship, namely critical work on the social and legal production of illegality and the impact of legal violence on the lives of immigrants with precarious legal status, and on the role of migration infrastructures in shaping mobility pathways.Drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews with irregular and precarious migrants in Japan and the UK collected over a ten-year period, this article develops a three-pronged analysis of the infrastructures of irregularity, focusing on infrastructures of entry, settlement and exit, casting a comparative light on the mechanisms that produce precarious and expendable migrant lives in relation to access to labour and labour conditions, access and quality of housing and law enforcement, and how migrants adapt, cope, resist or eventually are overpowered by them.

Undocumented in the time of pandemic: exploring legal violence, health care and human rights of irregular Filipino migrants in Italy and the UK

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of states’ pandemic responses to the conditions and vulnerabilities of undocumented Filipino migrants in Italy and the UK. It also explores the role and strategies of migrant organisations in addressing the issues and concerns of undocumented workers. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative approaches are used to collect and analyse the narratives of the migrants and migrant organisations. This paper used government reports, policy briefs and documents from international organisations in analysing the socio-political vulnerabilities of undocumented migrants in the context of the global pandemic. In addition, we interviewed leaders of migrant organisations, which are involved in supporting irregular migrants. Findings The study reveals that states have exercised a regime of legitimate violence against undocumented workers in Italy and the UK. This regime is imposed not only by the stringent laws and policies that directly and indirectly cause economic, social and even cultural suffering to the migrants but also by the “symbolic violence” manifested in structural and social inequalities, and the exploitative economic order amid the pandemic. Responding to the “regime of fear”, migrant organisations provide immediate relief and “safe spaces” for the undocumented workers. Originality/value The paper contributes to the ongoing conversation on state practices in regulating migration by framing the conditions of undocumentation as legal violence that structurally deprives irregular migrants access to health care and human rights amid global health crisis.

Disability Law in a Pandemic: The Temporal Folds of Medico-legal Violence

Disabled people are subject to disability laws – such as guardianship, mental health and mental capacity legislation – which only apply to them, and which enable legal violence on the basis of disability (‘disability-specific lawful violence’). While public health laws during the COVID-19 pandemic enabled coercive interventions in the general population, disabled people have additionally been subject to the continued, and at times intensified, operation of disability laws and their lawful violence. In this article we engage with scholarship on law, temporality and disability to explore the amplification of disability-specific lawful violence during the pandemic. We show how this amplification has been made possible through the folding of longstanding assumptions about disabled people – as at risk of police contact; as vulnerable, unhealthy and contaminating – into the immediate crisis of the pandemic; ignoring structural drivers of oppression, and responsibilising disabled people for their circumstances and the violence they experience.

Decolonizing Memory

The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria (1830–1962) is such that only aesthetic works have been able to register its enduring effects. In Decolonizing Memory Jill Jarvis examines the power of literature to provide what demographic data, historical facts, and legal trials have not in terms of attesting to and accounting for this destruction. Taking up the unfinished work of decolonization since 1962, Algerian writers have played a crucial role in forging historical memory and nurturing political resistance—their work helps to make possible what state violence has rendered almost unthinkable. Drawing together readings of multilingual texts by Yamina Mechakra, Waciny Laredj, Zahia Rahmani, Fadhma Aïth Mansour Amrouche, Assia Djebar, and Samira Negrouche alongside theoretical, juridical, visual, and activist texts from both Algeria’s national liberation war (1954–1962) and war on civilians (1988–1999), this book challenges temporal and geographical frameworks that have implicitly organized studies of cultural memory around Euro-American reference points. Jarvis shows how this literature rewrites history, disputes state authority to arbitrate justice, and cultivates a multilingual archive for imagining decolonized futures.

The Violence of Asylum: The Case of Undocumented Chinese Migration to the US

A sizable portion of the undocumented population in the US is Chinese, yet they are an understudied group. We integrate a multidisciplinary body of work on undocumented Chinese migration with the sociology of migration and analyze interviews with undocumented migrants, community organizers, social workers, and others working in the Chinese community in New York City, as well as participant observation of community events. We show that restrictive immigration policies exclude most Chinese migrants from legal entry into the US, force many to endure dangerous migration routes, incur extraordinary debt and bind Chinese migrants’ experience of illegality with asylum seeking. The asylum regime is putatively humanitarian but inflicts legal violence on migrants and diverts efforts away from collective organizing for rights-based remedies towards debt-fueled migration and asylum seeking, a process that keeps migrants in lengthy periods of legal precarity and reproduces national and global inequalities. Our study contributes to the literature on migrant illegality in sociology that is primarily based on the experiences of Latinx migrants. We highlight the continuities and unique features of legal violence experienced by undocumented Chinese migrants.