The Other Dreamers: International Students, Temporary Workers, and the Limits of Legality in the United States

Abstract

Over one million international students enter the United States each year. By definition, international students are nonimmigrants, ineligible to settle permanently in the United States. Yet, more than 45% of graduating international students extend their legal status with a temporary work permit that paves a path to legal permanent residence and ultimately naturalization. This dissertation examines how people unauthorized to immigrate learn about, navigate, and take advantage of scant opportunities for legal permanent residence. This long-term, multi-sited ethnographic research follows international students as they traverse a complex legal rite of passage that transforms aliens into citizens. People with nonimmigrant status move and are moved through rites of separation, liminality, and incorporation, which are highly interwoven with and contingent upon other unfolding ritual processes. Identification of imbricated rites of passage, and the rituals therein, then works to demystify migrant incorporation as a discrete, linear process. Examination of the holistic nonimmigrant to immigrant rite of passage also serves as an intervention against indiscriminate theorizations of sustained or permanent liminality, which perpetuate violence by confusing marginalizing social contexts for the inherent qualities of individuals. Utilizing an interpretive policy analysis approach, the dissertation moves beyond tracing the nonimmigrant figure to map the everyday people—including higher education staff, employers, and romantic partners—who become de facto immigration enforcement agents, constructing policies and procedures that transform students’ legal and social identities according to a diverse range of legal, cultural, political, and moral commitments.Interrogation of this underexamined guest labor and naturalization program reveals compounding contradictions between international students’ economic, political, and physical belonging, which produce devastating material, biological and psychological consequences. Despite their legal status, people with nonimmigrant status face family separation, restricted mobility, delegitimated labor, and deportation, yet are left out of proposed and implemented policies focused on legalization, Dreamers, Temporary Protected Status, as well as local inflections of sanctuary. The dissertation identifies ableism, the legal production of dependence, and exclusion from adjustment of status as untheorized strategies which work in coordination with illegality to subordinate individuals and labor. This research pushes beyond the lawful/unlawful, deserving/undeserving, and citizen/noncitizen binaries, advancing anthropological understandings of governance, governmentality, and the processes of making and unmaking immigrants.