Introduction Excerpt for The Borders of Privilege
INTRODUCTION
“DACA is a crappy piece of duct tape,” Elisabete, twenty-five, exclaimed over lunch at a bright Brazilian café back in 2015.1 DACA, short for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is an Obama-era policy that provides temporary relief from deportation to young people like Elisabete—immigrants who came to the US as children but still do not have lawful status in the country.2 While DACA had been celebrated in many political and media circles for bringing youth out of the shadows when it was announced in 2012, for Elisabete it has been a Band-Aid that fails to fix the overarching problem, which is the absence of full legal membership in society. The precarity of DACA has been underscored in recent years as Republicans have attacked the program, throwing its future into legal jeopardy. Indeed, as of this writing in winter 2024, a federal judge in Texas had ruled the program unconstitutional, likely setting up another Supreme Court decision.3
But even before the program was in legal jeopardy, Elisabete was frustrated with DACA. On the one hand, it provided her with a work permit and Social Security number. In so doing, DACA has allowed her to reap the benefits of her investment in higher education, opening up work opportunities in the corporate world. But on the other hand, DACA has always been temporary and uncertain, as it does not provide a pathway to citizenship.4 Furthermore, when we met up that day, DACA had not allowed Elisabete to reunite with her husband, Keith, a British citizen of Asian descent. According to Elisabete, Keith never had trouble securing a visa to the United States—until DACA. The couple met as high schoolers when he was visiting the States, fell in love, and were married in the US years later. But soon after Elisabete “outed herself to the government” when she applied for DACA, Keith was denied a student visa, despite being accepted into a prestigious graduate program. Elisabete told me that immigration officials suspected that his “student” reasons for coming to the United States were fraudulent because of his marriage to Elisabete.
In many ways, Elisabete’s story is similar to the story of the over 800,000 DACA beneficiaries—a tale of immigrants living their lives in a gray area of legal limbo as they face legal uncertainty and severe limits to full membership in society. Like most of her DACA peers, illegality became more salient for Elisabete during the transition to adulthood, as she faced countless barriers to education and work (Cebulko 2013; Gonzales 2011; Silver 2012). A strong student in high school, she discovered during the college application process that she was ineligible for federal financial aid. Because she also lived in Massachusetts, undocumented immigrants like her were also barred from in-state tuition.5 Thus, legally in Massachusetts, undocumented students had to pay out-of-state tuition without the help of federal grants or loans to go to college. Elisabete resigned herself to enrolling in—and commuting to—the state school in her hometown, the school she claimed her like-minded, high-achieving high school classmates deemed the place that “failures” attended. In a testament to her own hard work and resilience, she managed to graduate from this state school in three years. But after graduation, Elisabete discovered that without a work permit, she was blocked from legally working in a job commensurate with her education. Instead, Elisabete began nannying during the day and working as a janitor at night.
Because of these frustrations, we might think that legal status is the most salient identity in Elisabete’s life. Roberto Gonzales, one of the most prolific immigration scholars, has persuasively argued that legal status becomes a “master status” overpowering all other social identities during the transition to adulthood for 1.5-generation immigrants. Yet the negative impacts of illegality are only part of Elisabete’s story. A more complete and nuanced picture of her life experiences—and her own understanding of them—suggests that the master status frame does not adequately capture her lived experiences. Indeed, Elisabete does not fit the stereotypical, racialized image that most Americans imagine undocumented immigrants to be. As Leo Chavez (2013) argues, Americans conflate illegality with “looking Mexican,” which they associate with having indigenous features, including brown skin, short stature, and dark black hair (Ortiz and Telles 2012). But with her light skin, light brown hair, and high cheekbones, Elisabete looks white. And whiteness is so essential to Elisabete’s identity that she told me that if a genie offered her the option to come back to earth as nonwhite with legal status, she’d continue to choose being white and undocumented. “Us white girls, we have a lot of privilege,” she said matter-of-factly. Thus legal status by itself is insufficient for understanding Elisabete’s life experiences. Instead, as I demonstrate in this book, we need to capture how illegality articulates with social class and race to shape Elisabete and other 1.5-generation Brazilians’ experiences in the United States.
The importance of whiteness to Elisabete’s identity emerged before I even met her in person. Before our first interview, Elisabete told me I could spot her by looking for the “American-looking white girl.” When I met her for a second interview at a casual dining café tucked in-between hip coffee shops, bars, and little boutiques, she consciously presented herself in racialized, gendered, and class-specific ways—this time as a corporate woman, wearing a black pencil skirt, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a Kate Spade purse, signaling membership in upper-middle-class, white American society. As she told me over dinner, none of her coworkers at her corporate firm thought that she was undocumented, and often pejoratively referred to immigrants as “illegal aliens” in front of her.
Elisabete was particularly conscious of how her whiteness has allowed her to escape negative interactions with the criminal justice system. During college, she was driving without a driver’s license, as DACA had not yet been passed. One day she hit a bicyclist—a US citizen—with her car. As the police approached the scene of the accident, Elisabete felt sick to her stomach. She did not have a license to present to him. But in stark contrast to systemic police brutality toward Black Americans, the police officer did not even get angry with her. Instead he told her to go home to retrieve her license and he would meet her there. Elisabete’s anxiety doubled over—she had just inadvertently invited the police officer to her home. But when he showed up, and she admitted she did not have a license due to her undocumented status, he did not turn her over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instead he gave her a ticket. He told her to show up in court and assured her she would face no penalty in court beyond a fine. And he was right.
Elisabete understood her good fortune to be related to her whiteness, not luck. “My face would have been all over the news if I hadn’t been white,” she told me. She is not wrong that race and racial assumptions likely played a role in the minimal consequences she faced. As Chavez (2013) has shown, politicians and the mass media have helped create the “Latino Threat Narrative”—a story of undeserving, criminal, undocumented brown people harming innocent white American citizens. But Elisabete is highly educated, speaks English without a (Brazilian) accent, and looks white.
Importantly, it is not just whiteness that has profoundly shaped her life in beneficial ways—so has her Brazilian middle-class roots. For Elisabete, going to college, despite the obstacles she faced due to her legal status, was never a question. Indeed, it was an expectation in her Brazilian middle-class family. In Brazil, they had lived in a gated community with a pool and security. Her dad had graduated from high school and been a pricing analyst. Although he experienced downward mobility in the United States, working as a janitor due to his undocumented status, Elisabete knew that his sacrifices would be worth it when she, his daughter, achieved a better life. And she was not going to let her family or herself down, as she was determined to repay her parents’ sacrifices, fulfilling what sociologist Robert C. Smith (2005) refers to as “the immigrant bargain.”6 Her ability to overcome the barriers to college as an undocumented immigrant, even if she did have to downgrade her choice of school, is certainly a function of her own hard work and resilience. However, it was also a function of her family’s Brazilian social class, as their pre-migration wealth provided a financial safety net in the US. For example, even though her parents worked as undocumented laborers in the US, their pre-migration wealth helped her pay tuition for college, without the assistance of federal grants or loans. While other undocumented youth around the country feel pressure to work instead of go to school in order to help support their low-income families (Gonzales 2016), Elisabete was able to work and go to school. She did not need to work full-time to support her family’s daily expenses.
Still, her powerful racial and (Brazilian) social class positions relative to most of her undocumented peers does not mean that Elisabete identifies as American. In Elisabete’s case, she does not even identify as a hyphenated Brazilian-American. “You [America] don’t deserve me. You don’t get to screw me over and then have the privilege of having me [identify as American] in your census.” Whiteness, which has been—and continues to be—so important for inclusion in American society, has not led to formal legal citizenship for Elisabete. And due to this legal exclusion from full membership, including the political, social and civil dimensions of citizenship (Marshall 1950), she does not feel a sense of belonging as American. Furthermore, Elisabete does not racially identify as white in the US, despite passing as white and feeling very Americanized. Nor, however, did she identify as Latino/a/x. Instead she refused to ethno-racially categorize herself altogether, a phenomenon that Julie Dowling (2014) has found to be true for other Latin American groups.
How can we understand Elisabete’s experiences? I argue that we cannot understand Elisabete’s story—and the stories of other 1.5-generation Brazilians who migrated as part of the first large wave of Brazilian migrants to Massachusetts—without situating their lived experiences in an articulation framework that accounts for the interlocking systems of stratification that shape their lives and considers how race, class, and (il)legality join together in specific spaces in particular historical moments (Clarno and Vally 2023; Hall 1980). In other words, we must think about how race, class, and legal status in the US are connected to global histories of domination and oppression and how those global histories of structural domination travel across spatial borders and play out in specific historical conjunctures. Elisabete’s Brazilian middle-class roots and whiteness are no historical accident, as race and class are deeply intertwined in Brazil, a legacy of Portuguese colonization and (after independence) Brazil’s own racial projects in nation-state building (FitzGerald and Cook-Martín 2014; Hernández 2012; Loveman 2014; dos Santos 2002; Telles 2004). In part, Brazilian middle-class families like Elisabete’s sought economic opportunities through migration, hoping to maintain their families’ place in the global racial-economic hierarchy (Cebulko 2013). Importantly, Elisabete and other 1.5-generation Brazilians’ privileged economic and racial positions in Brazil have impacted both how they were able to migrate (on tourist visas) and integrate in the US (as discussed throughout this book). At the same time, the wholesale transfer of racial and economic privilege across borders is disrupted by increasingly hostile US laws and policies that make the lives of undocumented immigrants more difficult and precarious.
For Elisabete and many other 1.5-generation Brazilians I met, navigating their everyday lives in this hostile anti-immigrant context involves presenting themselves as white. I argue that these constructions of whiteness are a form of what Angela García (2019) calls “legal passing,” which ultimately allows them to avoid the deleterious impacts of a racialized immigration status (Asad and Clair 2018). While being undocumented is not a visible trait, illegality is racialized and conflated with certain physical traits (and nationalities, languages, and low-status job) such that it makes sense to talk about “racialized legal status’ or “racialized illegality” and to attend to the ways that race and illegality intersect to impact immigrants’ lives (Asad and Clair 2018; García 2017; Herrera 2016; Menjívar 2021; Patler 2014). To be clear, not all 1.5-generation Brazilians are as unambiguously white as Elisabete. Indeed, at times—depending on who they are with, what they are wearing, and what language they are speaking—many white-passing 1.5-generation Brazilians are racialized as nonwhite, most often as Latino/a/x. (I use white-passing rather than white for two reasons. First, as explored in Chapter 4, many 1.5-generation Brazilians do not racially identify as white in the United States. This was true for Elisabete. Indeed, while she was almost always perceived as white and accrued some of the wages of whiteness, there were limits to its privileges for her. Second, as mentioned here and in other places in the book, many 1.5-generation Brazilians who can present as white also have experiences being racialized by others as Latino/a/x.) Thus, constructing whiteness serves as a “protective mechanism” from the deleterious impacts of racialized illegality (Enriquez and Millán 2019) and sometimes involves distancing themselves away from Latino/a/xs (Cebulko 2021). In these ways, we can see both how the interlocking structures of white supremacy and capitalism shape their experiences of illegality and how immigrants’ everyday practices and identities sustain these very structures of domination and oppression.
Notes
1. Elisabete and the names of all other respondents—and their friends and family members—are pseudonyms.
2. DACA is a discretionary policy that provides some undocumented young people who came to the US as children with temporary relief from deportation, renewable every two years. DACA also provides access to Social Security numbers for work purposes and work permits. Eligibility requirements included the following: being under age thirty-one and present in the US on June 15, 2012, living in the US for five years, and arrival in the US before age sixteen. Eligible recipients also must have no felony record and need to be in school or have completed at least a General Education Diploma (GED).
3. Trump’s administration announced the termination of DACA in 2017. Republican governors and attorneys general led the charge against DACA. And in September 2023, Judge Andrew Hanen, a George W. Bush–appointed judge, ruled that DACA is unlawful. He continued, however, to stay the impact of the ruling for current program beneficiaries. At the time of this writing, this means that means that current DACA beneficiaries continue to have work authorization and protection from deportation and that the Biden administration can continue processing renewal applications. The Supreme Court, which will decide the ultimate fate of DACA, however, has grown increasingly conservative, jeopardizing its future.
4. At the time of writing, DACA was still in legal limbo. The courts had stopped the implementation of new applications, but renewals were still permitted.
5. As discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, Massachusetts did not provide in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants until August 2023. In 2007, the Board of Higher Education did allow those immigrants with work permits to pay in-state tuition rates. And in 2012, after the passage of DACA, those with DACA—because of their work permits—were able to pay in-state rates.
6. Smith (2005) argues that children of immigrants’ successes in the US—especially in school and work—helps to repay their parents’ migration sacrifices.