Legal-Spatial Consciousness: A Legal Geography Framework for Examining Migrant Illegality

Abstract

In this article, we advance the concept of legal-spatial consciousness—an individual’s awareness of how law and space are mutually formed and influential on their lives. Through this concept, we explore how undocumented youth in a variety of American destinations understand and experience migrant illegality. By examining how immigration law and local places are imbricated, we demonstrate how immigrant illegality is defined not only by a patchwork of municipal, state, and federal laws, but also by how undocumented people move through these differently il/legal spaces in their everyday lives. Illegality is thus continually reproduced through individuals’ im/mobility through space.

Increasingly, U.S. federal immigration law and enforcement has devolved to local contexts that choose to comply--or not--with federal law. This has led to some contexts that are more welcoming and hospitable to migrants and others that have criminalized undocumented people, purposefully creating an unwelcoming environment to deter the arrival of future undocumented residents (Steil and Vasi 2014). In these uneven, variable applications it is possible to see how immigration law, place, and the il/legal immigrant person are constitutive of each other (Delaney 2015, 98; see also Braverman et al. 2014). As ethnographers working with undocumented immigrant youth and families in the West, Midwest, and South, we became interested in how place became entangled with our interlocutors’ experiences of their undocumented statuses and how these same statuses were experienced differently across our field sites. We asked: What do these local sites, and the illegality experienced and constituted within them, have in common? What do these commonalities, and differences, do to expand our notion of migrant illegality?

Scholarship in immigration and illegality studies has long demonstrated how immigration status is itself socially constructed (Abrego 2006; Gonzales 2011; Gonzales and Chavez 2012; Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014). This work has also pointed to the role that legal status plays in undocumented individuals’ ability to assimilate and incorporate into the U.S. state (Abrego 2006; Abrego and Gonzales 2010; Abrego and Menjívar 2012; Gleeson and Gonzales 2012). Recent studies of undocumented immigration have importantly focused on the effects of variable immigration laws on community members’ incorporation across geographic spaces (Armenta 2017; Cebulko and Silver 2016; Provine and Varsanyi 2012; Silver 2018; Varsanyi 2010). Furthermore, over a decade of scholarship on ‘new immigrant’ destinations in the Midwest and South underscores the importance of local political economies and histories in differentiating immigrants’ experiences of reception and their legal/illegal status (Armenta 2017; Fink 2003; Marrow 2011; Murphy, Blanchard, and Hill 2001; Silver 2018; Steusse 2016; Vega 2015).

An area, then, that warrants further examination is the role of geography or place, especially as place may serve as a mediator of illegality for undocumented youth (Cebulko and Silver 2016; Steil and Vasi, 2014; Author and collaborator 2018). One may wonder as to the importance a focus on both sub-federal immigration lawmaking and new destination migration has for studies of migrant illegality, given that immigration law is a federal domain. Several legal scholars have pointed to the disjuncture between federal and sub-federal immigration law-making as significantly consequential for illegality as a legal construct and experience (Olivas 2007; Rodriguez 2007; Villazor 2008). These sub-federal immigration law-making initiatives have taken two divergent paths -- as alluded to above-- one towards inclusion and another towards exclusion and the criminalization of undocumented immigrant communities (Steil and Vasi 2014, 1109).

Therefore, we take a constitutive approach (cf. Braverman et al. 2014; Delaney 2015) to immigration law’s uneven implementation and devolution both within and across geographic spaces, arguing for the critical co-making of law, space, and immigrant illegality. We illustrate that in this co-constitution of immigration law and space community members’ experiences and approaches vary but share a common understanding of law as unfolding in space and vice versa. For the people we work with, some spaces and modes of movement through them are more and less ‘illegal’ than others making community members, as individuals, more and less illegal.

We term this common understanding “legal-spatial consciousness”—individuals’ sense of how space and law are interconnected and experienced at the individual/personal level. Drawing from legal geography, our concept layers space and place onto the notion of legal consciousness--the awareness individuals have on how the law affects their lives as well as their everyday understanding of the law itself (Ewick and Silbey 1998; Fleury-Steiner and Nielsen 2006; Silbey 2005). Across our three cases, we show how individuals understand illegality’s legal geography through both their careful movement between spaces that heighten or lessen their experience of ‘illegality’ and their challenges to illegality through place-based community action.

In this article, rather than look at one place and see how these categories of law, space, and subject are co-produced, we examine how illegality is experienced and made sense of in three distinct cases. The cases themselves are distinct in terms of their geographic locations (California, Illinois, Tennessee, and Georgia), legal jurisdiction (national, state, county/municipal government), domains of everyday life (education, driving, and activism), and the actions people take (levels of relative compliance, circumvention, and challenges to law). However, these cases also share the common thread that they are focused on immigrants’ mobility, or immobility, through legally-marked places. In this way, im/mobility and il/legality are linked at a fundamental level. Thus, when we look at these diverse cases together, we see illegality as a ‘moving’ target across space that individuals navigate as they move through differently legal spaces in the course of daily life at different geographic scales. While illegality unfolds differently across diverse legal geographies, those touched by “illegality” are uniformly aware of its spatio-legal dimensions and act accordingly.

We start by discussing what legal geography offers to illegality studies of migrant youth. In doing so, we build on the constructivist nature of both fields to articulate what we term, “legal-spatial consciousness,” which is exhibited across the various cases. Next, we discuss our ethnographic methodologies in our broader projects. Then, we turn to our three cases. In our discussion of them we argue that they: 1) provide further evidence of the scalar nature of immigration law; 2) demonstrate the mutual constitution of immigration law and il/legal places and persons; and, 3) most centrally, illustrate legal-spatial consciousness among immigrant community members. We conclude with a speculative discussion of what comparative legal geographies, rooted in person-centered ethnography, can do for understanding immigration and the experience of illegality.

Literature Review: A Legal Geography of Migrant Illegality

Illegality has been theorized as a legal, racial, and spatial condition attributed to marginalized immigrants (Chavez 2007; De Genova 2002; Abrego and Menjívar 2012; Willen 2007). According to Hiemstra (2010), “labeling a person ‘illegal’ is a subtle yet powerful tool for creating, marking, and magnifying perceived difference and exclusion” (78). In the past twenty years, a growing body of scholarship exploring immigrant illegality has made clear that assimilation and incorporation patterns for members of the undocumented immigrant community regardless of age do not follow the same trajectory of other immigrant groups (Abrego 2006; De Genova 2002; Gonzales 2011; Menjívar 2006). Instead, these scholars find that immigrant illegality profoundly shapes undocumented immigrants’ economic, social, and political incorporation into the nation-state with critical effects on youth who experienced limited social incorporation as children but face illegality as emerging adults (Abrego 2011; Enriquez 2017; Gleeson and Gonzales 2012; Greenman and Hall 2013).

One of these critical effects is the development of a specific mode of legal consciousness among youth. Legal consciousness is an individual’s understanding of how law works and the legal system’s impact on their daily lives (Ewick and Silbey 1998; Fleury-Steiner and Nielsen 2006; Silbey 2005). Abrego (2011) finds that the legal consciousness of undocumented immigrants who migrated as adults is qualitatively different from those who migrated as children in that youth are more likely to understand illegality as stigma. Abrego argues that this difference significantly shapes undocumented immigrants’ understanding and experience of their status. Similarly, Gleeson and Gonzales (2012) demonstrate that the socializing institutions of work and school influences undocumented immigrant youth’s relationship to American society and law as well as their hopes and expectations of the rights that they hold and are able to invoke. This rich, growing body of scholarship shows that illegality is not a static state/legal status, but is instead socially constructed and contingent. It also demonstrates that youth develop a specific legal consciousness rooted in their age and institutional domains.

For undocumented youth, the focus of the cases presented in this article, illegality unfolds over the life course (Gonzales 2011, 2016). As scholars have illustrated, the state of illegality becomes more salient as undocumented youth transition to adulthood (Abrego 2006; Gonzales 2016; Enriquez 2017). The experience of illegality is defined largely by deportability (DeGenova 2002), but also by the everyday lived experience of navigating life across various institutional, social, and political contexts (Ruszczyk and Barbosa 2016). We build on this understanding of illegality as constructed and contingent or dynamic to demonstrate that the consequences of illegality for undocumented young adults is not experienced similarly across geographic contexts (Ibid).

While the federal political and legal landscape is characterized both by enforcement through a record number of deportations and inaction on comprehensive immigration reform, states and localities have also begun to engage in their own vastly different immigration policy making and enforcement (Martos 2010; Varsanyi 2010; Provine and Varsanyi 2012; Zuniga and Hernandez-Leon 2005). Some localities have expanded rights for undocumented immigrants, as is the case in states like California and Illinois, both of which are traditional immigrant gateways, while others have become much more restrictionist, as is the case in places such as Tennessee and Georgia, which are considered new immigrant destinations. Extending the sociological framework of context of reception (Portes and Rumbaut 2006), we draw from the interdisciplinary field of legal geography to provide a critical examination of the interrelated role of law, space, and place in undocumented young adults’ experiences of illegality across both modes of reception.

Legal geography examines how “law makes space…” and in turn is an active agent that is instrumentally utilized and deployed by those authoring it towards achieving a particular goal (Delaney 2015, 100). A legal geography perspective can thus illustrate the unfolding of illegality across place and person or, as Delaney puts it, both the “mutual constitutivity of the legal and the spatial” and the “making up of the kinds of persons...who live in our world” (2015, 98; 99). Moreover, an ethnographically-oriented legal geography can provide a phenomenological perspective on how law and illegality spatiality is experienced. The application of a constitutive lens to an analysis of law and space thus provides for a consideration of the historical and social context of laws and the impact of such context in the law’s implementation and operationalization. Legal geography is also a field that is concerned with the potential for the law to contribute towards furthering a social justice agenda and fighting injustice (Delaney 2016).

Building on the concept of legal consciousness (Ewick and Silbey 1998; Fleury-Steiner and Nielsen 2006; Silbey 2005), we extend this concept by adding a layer of geography and space. A legal-spatial consciousness thus focuses on the ways that individuals interpret and engage with the socially constructed and constituted nature of law and space. As our cases suggest, the legal consciousness of undocumented young adults is influenced by state and local policy contexts and by a sense of place.

As our vignettes from fieldwork conducted in the West, Midwest and Southern United States demonstrate, immigrant community members’ experiences with the law had an important impact on the formation of their own identities/ subjectivities and vice versa. Thus, by taking into account the role of geography, the concept of a legal-spatial consciousness illustrates the co-constituted nature of law, geography, and migrant identity and the critical role all play in how individuals navigate and experience legal regimes. Important to note, however, is the non-unidirectional nature of this process, but rather its dynamic, co-constitutive nature. A constructivist, person-centered approach that we provide in our examination of a legal-spatial consciousness as experienced and deployed by undocumented immigrant youth in the United States works to illustrate the continually unfolding nature of this concept. Doing so also allows for an understanding of how social movement activism and resistance, what Delaney (2016) proposes as a central aspect of legal geography as a field, offers in terms of promoting particular forms of resistance and agency.

Methodology

Trained in cultural anthropology, sociology, and ethnic studies, we bring our unique disciplinary perspectives to our research while also seeking to emphasize the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to analysis of immigrant legal status and social movement activism. Our respective disciplines prioritize certain understandings of law, broadly speaking. Sociologists take a social constructivist approach to immigration status and law, looking at how a particular law and citizenship mode organizes social life. Anthropologists share this frame as well, but often focus on the experiential dimension of the law, looking at how illegality is felt and understood by individuals. An interdisciplinary approach, legal geography offers a unique perspective that draws together the social, the legal, and the spatial and in so doing enables us to reconceptualize the law in conversation with our disciplinary traditions and lines of inquiry (Braverman et al. 2014). Together, our operationalization of a legal geographic frame--and centrally our common ethnographic methods--prioritize a person-centered analysis of illegality as it is constituted in law and space across domains of youth’s lives and within their legal-spatial consciousness.

Ethnographic methods encompass a wide variety of individual practices. While we practiced many methods in our research, we shared three: 1) participant observation, or the active engagement in the everyday happenings in our field sites and our reflections on them (DeWalt and DeWalt 2011; 2) semi-structured and structured interviews spanning diverse topics with a variety of individuals for periods of time ranging from twenty minute interrogative conversations to multiple hours of recorded questions and answers; and 3) document collection, including but not limited to popular media and bureaucratic documents. The agony and ecstasy of such a variegated ethnographic approach is that data sets become unwieldy, large collections of fieldnotes, transcripts, newspapers, policy reports, meeting ephemera, and even student budgets written on napkins that span many topics related to the original research questions. We organize these materials through disciplined, iterative coding grounded in emic and etic understandings of events, identities, situations, and their meanings (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Miles and Huberman, 1994).

It is this rich nature of ethnographic data and analysis that allows us to find common ground. Though we set out with very different research questions in very different places, as described below, our focused attention on the many aspects of our interlocutors lives—including the experience of illegality—enables comparative and synthetic analysis. Our work is not ’multi-sited ethnography’ in the classical sense, but rather multiple-sited ethnographic work across three ethnographers (Marcus 1995). We therefore aim to bridge our statuses as ‘lone ethnographers’ to look across sites and scales toward understanding illegality’s continual unfolding in space, law, and the legal spatial consciousness of the people we worked with in our field sites. Braverman argues that an ethnographic approach can “enhance legal geography by allowing practitioners to ask how people live, constitute, and imagine social space, place, and landscape as well as how people understand themselves as living, doing, and imagining the legal” (Braverman 2014, 84). Thus, we provide a comparative lens that draws together into a unified theorization how people across multiple spatio-legal contexts “live, constitute, and imagine” these contexts and illegality itself (Ibid).

To further ground our findings, it is necessary to sketch our individual projects’ foci as well as the data we draw from in order to show the connective through-lines of the research. Author Two’s research, conducted in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, examines undocumented immigrant activists’ participation in racial/ethnic coalition building and use of the law as a tool for organizing. In their broader research portfolio, Author Three focuses on how state laws and policies intersect with the federal political context to shape the educational trajectories and sense of belonging amongst Latinx undocumented young adults in Los Angeles and Orange County, California and Atlanta and Athens, Georgia. In both of these projects, there is already a ‘built-in’ comparative lens as Author Two and Author Three’s fieldwork were multi-sited across several cities. In contrast, Author One’s research is located only in Nashville. Author One focuses on how Latinx youth, across multiple immigration and citizen statuses, conceptualize the personal, familial, and socio-political value of higher education attainment in a context of increased nativism. In this way, Author One and Author Three’s work are connected in their focus on educational processes and their role in Latinx youth’s emergent adulthood. Clearly, across all three of our research projects, illegality was a central topic encountered and analyzed, given its role as a “master status” (Gonzales 2011, 2016; Author and Collaborator 2018) for undocumented youth and, in Author One’s case, an important frame for Latinx identity across citizenships as all Latinx people, regardless of status, are increasingly socially coded as ‘illegal’ persons (Armenta 2017; DeGenova 2002; Dick 2011; Romero 2006).

Additionally, we have all have a wealth of data for our broader projects which we selectively draw from here. Author One’s data is based on their 31 student interviews conducted in 2012–2013 and participant observation conducted in and around Nashville between 2010–2013. Author Two draws on 60 in-depth interviews conducted with undocumented immigrant activists across three sites, but here focuses on participant observation conducted in 2013 in Chicago. Their interviews were conducted with members of various Chicago-based organizations engaged in anti-deportation and immigrant community building efforts. For Author Three’s case, the specific data is drawn primarily from participant observation and 70 in-depth interviews with Latinx undocumented young adults in both California and Georgia conducted in 2014–2015.

Introduction of the Cases

Commonalities emerge across our three cases regarding immigration law’s scalar dimensions and individuals’ constrained navigation and movement through local space as a means of performing and/or refusing il/legality. Cases are presented in progression from more to less constrained movement. The first two cases demonstrate how youth understand their illegality according to their spatio-legal contexts and constrained movement through them. The third case, however, shows how undocumented youth work to counteract local constructions of illegality and, in the process, work to redefine themselves and the law through claiming presence in “illegal” spaces. Collectively, all three highlight the mutual unfolding of space, law, and personhood in legal-spatial consciousness.

Case 1: The (Im)Mobility of Latinx Undocumented Youth in California and Georgia

Starting in the Fall of 2014 through the Spring of 2015, Author 3 set out to better understand, what role, if any, do state immigration laws and policies play in the lives of Latinx undocumented young people? Author 3 chose the metropolitan Los Angeles, California and Atlanta, Georgia areas as sites for this study precisely because of the very different approaches these states have taken toward undocumented immigrants. On the one hand, California is considered a welcoming context for undocumented immigrants; on the other, Georgia is considered a hostile one. Beyond their divergent legal and political contexts, California is a traditional destination for undocumented immigrants and has the largest unauthorized immigrant population in the United States (Rumbaut 2012; Singer 2004).¹ Georgia is considered a new immigrant destination (Singer 2004) with the population increasing in the late 1990s through the 2000s.²

The characterization of California as welcoming and Georgia as hostile belies the complex history of undocumented Latinx migration to each of these states and cities.³ Yet, a close examination of the evolution of laws and policies in these states reveals the fractured landscape of state-level approaches to undocumented migration. In the early 2000’s, California was the second state to pass an in-state tuition law for undocumented immigrants, AB540. Between 2011 and 2015, California also passed laws granting state and institutional aid to undocumented students (AB130 and AB 131) as well as driver’s licenses for all undocumented immigrants (AB60). Additionally, in 2013, undocumented immigrants living in the City of Los Angeles could obtain ID cards, which eased day-to-day life in many ways including being able to open up bank accounts, borrow books from the library, and pick up their children from school.

In contrast, between 2011 to the present, Georgia passed HB87, a “show me your papers” law designed to make everyday life difficult for undocumented immigrants in the state. Around this same time, the Georgia Board of Regents passed two separate policies eliminating and severely limiting access to public colleges and universities in the state. One policy prevents undocumented immigrants from attending the top three public colleges in the state, the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Georgia Institute of Technology. The other policy requires that undocumented immigrants pay out-of-state tuition at any public college which can be up to three times the amount of in-state tuition. Take together these policies are effectively an education ban, making college attendance nearly impossible for undocumented young adults in Georgia unless they leave the state.

With the introduction of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, the federal landscape changed. DACA is an executive order that was announced by President Barack Obama in 2012. DACA grants a 2-year stay of deportation and work permits to undocumented young adults who meet several requirements including having arrived in the United States before the age of 16, being under the age of 31 on June 7, 2012, and residing continuously in the United States without a lawful status since 2007. As a result of the DACA program, several states, including Georgia, granted driver’s licenses to DACA recipients only. But non-DACA recipients, or the broader undocumented population cannot get driver’s licenses, increasing their risk of detention and deportation due to cooperation between local police and ICE (Stuesse and Coleman 2014). Although the Atlanta area is home to a vibrant immigrant rights community and is a Welcoming City (an immigrant friendly designation), surrounding counties and areas continue to cooperate with ICE.

Author Three finds that state immigration laws and policies, especially in the area of higher education access, mediate Latinx undocumented youth’s educational and economic outcomes. The intersection of the federal and state contexts also profoundly shape the possibilities they envision for themselves. This circumscription of their possibilities speaks to their legal-spatial awareness of how place and law intersect in determining their futures.

Toward the end of our two-hour interview, Yesenia, who was in her second year of college at a four-year public institution in the metropolitan Los Angeles area, confided that her future plans included eventually entering law school.⁴ She shared:

I plan my life a lot so I have different plans. Like plan A, plan B, plan C, and everything after that, but I think if there’s nothing I can do about the whole reform, I’m probably going to end up just going to a university, a law school, here because I can practice here in California. I guess I would do that but I wouldn’t be content, because I’m still stuck.

Conveying her knowledge about the California Supreme Court holding allowing non-citizens to apply for professional licenses, including law licenses, she seemed resigned to practicing law in California. Yesenia also conveyed resentment about feeling “stuck” in California, despite the relative certainty that she would eventually get a college degree, promising social and economic mobility but not necessarily the freedom she was hoping for.

In contrast, in response to the same question, “Where do you see yourself in the next five years?”, Eduardo, who was working the night shift at a food distribution company in the metropolitan Atlanta area, shared:

I see myself in the next 5 years in some sort of college. I am not going to say university or technical college, because I don’t know to be honest...I guess still living in the United States...but if I’m 25 and I don’t know what I am doing with my life, I’ll return to Mexico and do something.

As compared to Yesenia, Eduardo expressed more ambiguity about what his future held. He hoped to be in college, but didn’t know exactly how that would happen. Would he be enrolled at a two-year college or at a four-year university? When Author Three interviewed Eduardo, he should have been in his second year of college like Yesenia; instead, he had been working at a series of jobs since graduating from high school. He finally secured a full-time job at the tortilla factory and distribution center where his parents also worked. In the short term, Eduardo was considering moving to Florida for the summer to work at a resort with a friend, and deciding what to do after that. If he didn’t know what he was doing with his life in five years’ time, he would consider returning to Mexico. In this specific moment of their lives, Yesenia and Eduardo’s social mobility pathways were qualitatively and significantly different. Nevertheless, they shared an understanding of their relationship to the futures as imbued with uncertainty and a sense of constraint due to their legal-spatial contexts.

In the case of Latinx undocumented youth living in Los Angeles, California and Atlanta, Georgia, feelings of belonging and membership are contested spatially through the experience of state higher education laws and policies. Undocumented young adults in both sites were dealing with altered expectations of their futures. As Abrego and Menjívar (2012) argue, that process of altering expectations for one’s future based on legal status constitutes a distinct form of legal violence. For Latinx undocumented young adults in Georgia, these altered expectations come just after high school graduation. While in California, altered expectations typically happen during the college experience as undocumented young adults encounter a system designed primarily for citizens. Internship opportunities, study abroad, living on campus, and being able to fully participate in the social life of their colleges and universities reveals the nuances of incorporation.

Echoing this sense of constraint and being “stuck,” Jovan, a 23-year who grew up in a suburb of Atlanta, recalled an incident at a party during his senior year of high school, where he became emotional reflecting on his limited opportunities, he shared, “I couldn’t go to school, you know I couldn’t do the military, I couldn’t do all of this, and I felt just stuck.” For Jovan who went to a predominantly white high school, this party was one of the first times he revealed his legal status to his friends, who were citizens. Many of his friends were planning to attend community or state colleges, but Jovan felt like he might get stuck in his community because he was undocumented. He lamented the freedom that his citizen peers enjoyed of being able to “go off and...figure out life.”

In California, Miguel, who was enrolled in a master’s degree program for mechanical engineering had to let go of his dream of working in the aerospace engineering industry which required citizenship. While he was happy to be in graduate school, he only decided to shift gears after he was let go from an internship in the aerospace industry. He took a chance to gain some experience, despite the possibility of being asked to leave the internship. During our interview, Miguel had a good sense of humor about his dismissal from his internship, as he shared:

Yeah, I was like whatever, if they say go home then I’ll just go home. [laughs] So I was doing my thing and I get a call at HR and I go to HR and they said give us your badge and you’re not allowed at the facility. So I wasn’t allowed back in the facility. That sucked.

Although Miguel’s pragmatic attitude and access to a college education made navigating this situation much easier, he still had to let go of some of his original expectations for his future. For Yesenia, Eduardo, Jovan, and Miguel and the other undocumented young adults interviewed, (im)mobility over the course of their lives was defined by a sense of freedom to pursue the same opportunities and experiences as their citizen peers. These opportunities and experiences ranged from attending college, to pursuing careers that required citizenship, to travel and study abroad.

In Los Angeles, California and Atlanta, Georgia the layered and variegated nature of immigration laws and policies (Author and Collaborator 2017; Cebulko and Silver 2016) played out in expected and unexpected ways. The social and economic mobility pathways of participants followed and will likely continue to follow expected routes, with the higher education laws in California making the road to social and economic mobility less bumpy. In Georgia, the undocumented youth Author Three interviewed may still make their way, but they have and will continue to face more roadblocks and challenges than their counterparts in California. Prospects for social and economic mobility or “integration” is not the end of the story, however, as a deeper examination of how Latinx undocumented youth make meaning of this layered legal landscape reveals a legal consciousness shaped by space and a spatial consciousness shaped by law, or a legal-spatial consciousness. Their understanding of their relationship to the law, and social mobility through traditional means such as college-going or career building, are shaped not only by inaction at the federal level but also by perceived opportunities enshrined in law in their home states.

Case 2: Citizenship as Driving under the Speed Limit

Her very first summer ‘in the field,’ Author One attended any and all public events that seemed even remotely related to their nascent research interests in Latinx immigrant youth’s educational experiences in Nashville, Tennessee. On a typically hazy July afternoon in 2010, Author One attended one such event--a public hearing on racial profiling sponsored by the city’s ACLU chapter and other local nonprofits spanning Black, immigrant, Muslim, youth, and homeless constituencies. The plush, well air-conditioned auditorium was packed with nonprofit workers, activists, affected community members, and an earnest, largely white middle-aged audience. Diverse individuals shared stories of being pulled over for ‘driving while black’ or driving while wearing a hijab as the event proceeded. About an hour into the event, staffers from two immigrant-rights organizations that worked closely with the local Latinx population came up and read testimonies from individuals who were, according to one of the presenters, too afraid to speak for themselves publicly.

It was no surprise that Latinx immigrants would feel afraid. Since 2007, Nashville had participated in the 287(g) program. Named for a section of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, the program enables local police and sheriffs, in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, to enforce national immigration law in the course of their municipally-based work (Armenta 2017). The 287(g) program, and its effective twin the Secure Communities program that began in 2008 and was reactivated in 2017, are but two examples of how immigration law has been devolved to more local control, including on the county and municipal level (Varsanyi 2010, Provine et al. 2016). The initial goal of the program, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was to remove individuals who “pose the greatest risk to public safety” (Key 2012, 5). However, as Donato and colleagues found, in Nashville the majority of deportations made through 287(g) were for minor traffic violations and not criminal offenses (Key 2012), with “characteristics about foreignness such as country of origin, language use, and legal status” gaining salience in arrests reports post-287(g) (Donato and Rodriguez 2014, 1697; see also Armenta 2012, 2016, 2017). Chief among these offenses was driving without a license. Ironically, the ability to get a license was itself a moving legal target in Tennessee, with laws going back and forth allowing and disallowing undocumented individuals from getting licenses and the short-lived Certificates for Driving (Armenta 2017, 41–45). Thus, the state created its own problem with respect to driving without a license. Without the ability to apply for and receive a license, undocumented migrants are unable to comply with the law. As Armenta asserts in her work on policing and 287(g) in Nashville, this irony was not lost on local law enforcement, especially as they chose in individual stops to not confiscate expired certificates or licenses (2016, 118). Local law, however, forces migrants into further illegality through circumscribing immigrants’ ability to be lawful as they drive through local space.

Moreover, the 287(g) program enshrined Latinx people’s ethno-racial and linguistic profiling into policing practice, as Latinx individuals were disproportionality selected for in the stopping, arresting, and booking processes (Key 2012, 17; see also Armenta 2017). According to the Davidson County Sheriff Office’s two-year review of the 287(g) program in 2009, 5,300 undocumented migrants were deported in years 2007–2009, with 97% of deportees from Latin America (Davidson County Sheriff’s Office 2009,1: 7). The testimonies that were read that hot July afternoon bore these facts out. The writers, through their nonprofit avatars, shared stories of being pulled over for minor infractions or even made up ones, experiencing racist interactions with law enforcement that suggested biased targeting, being detained with little information, and, ultimately, living in fear of deportation while driving.

When Author One returned for a year of fieldwork in 2012, driving remained a major focus of her interlocutors’ lives, albeit in mostly happier terms. The then-new DACA program was opening up the hoped-for possibility of driver’s licenses for the teens Author One knew. The inability to get a license, and thus continue to achieve the same milestones as their citizen peers, is often one of the first ways that undocumented youth come to know their status and how it will limit them (Gonzales 2011). Beyond the driver license’s symbolic importance to a sense of adulthood, in Nashville and most Southern cities without reliable public transport, “driving is a basic requirement in order to work and socially reproduce” (Steusse and Coleman 2014, 58). While 287(g) had ended in August 2012 in Nashville, Secure Communities replaced it in October of that same year--effectively continuing similar, if not the same, patterns of targeted stopping and processing that can lead to deportation. Driving, for undocumented people generally in the South and those in Nashville specifically is a “risk” that they “cannot afford to take and one they must endure” (Steusse and Coleman 2014, 58).

Thus, beyond missing a marker of adulthood, the inability to drive with a license renders youth ‘illegal’ because it renders them immobile or at least less mobile than citizens or documented peers. With DACA-enabled licensure, students excitedly chatted about the long waits for road tests, boasted about successful driver’s tests that impressed nervous-driver Author One, and proudly showed off their newly-minted licenses that were then carefully placed back into their wallets’ ID compartment. Most of these young people with new DACA-enabled licenses had driven without a license previously in order to accomplish their everyday lives. It wasn’t then the technical ability to drive and move through space that was important to youth as a result of DACA, but rather the security of moving through space lawfully that engendered a new sense of self as legal. This new sense of self, enabled through laws and licensure that regulate spatial motion, speak to illegality as a condition of the self that is produced through law and space’s interweaving.

Consider driver Alicia Hernandez, age 18, and her best friend and frequent passenger Pamela Maza, also age 18. Author One had come to expect Alicia’s bright blue, used mini-SUV in Edward Maloney High School’s parking lot. Alicia often drove Pamela home from school, as Pamela did not have a car. Pamela sometimes teased Alicia about her extremely cautious driving and the considerable care Alicia put into keeping her car clean and in good working order. The care she put into her car and the caution she exercised while driving was not born from pride, but rather fear and the desire to not draw attention to herself as an unlicensed driver pre-receipt of her DACA-enabled license. She told Author One that “I have to be super careful and everything” while driving, which made it very stressful and worrisome for her. Alicia was nervous every time she drove and also every time a family member drove because driving could lead to deportation. Alicia’s fears of driving draw our attention to, again, how moving through spaces that are themselves imbued with legal significance create the experience of immigrant illegality/legality as well as the unique, legal-spatial consciousness of undocumented youth.

It was clear that, despite her playful ribbing of her friend, Pamela understood the risks of driving. When asked what it means to be a citizen in her interview with Author One, she laughingly answered: “It means to drive under the speed limit.” In her terse and prototypically comic definition, Pamela revealed how local legal spaces and identities (speed limits and the abiding driver) were tied to others (the lawfully-present citizen in national space). Performing lawful movement from home, to school, to work, to wherever one needed to go to “socially reproduce” was a protective cover for spatial movement (undocumented migration) which had been defined as unlawful and the ‘master status’ it entailed (Steusse and Coleman 2014, 58; Author and Collaborator 2018).

In part, the act of driving under the speed limit is an instance of “altermobility” which Steusse and Coleman define as the “strategies people use to regain their individual and family mobility--physical, social, spiritual” (2014:61). Steusse and Coleman’s work primarily focuses on altermobility through the use of taxis, carpools, and social media alerts regarding the presence of police, calling these efforts “strategy and resistance because they often accompany a growing political sensibility” regarding immigrant rights (2014, 54). While “driving under the speed limit” is a strategy of altermobility, it is critical to acknowledge the performative element at play regardless of political consciousness raising. We are not arguing that driving under the speed limit makes Pamela and Alicia citizens in a juridical sense, but it makes them seem like it and the appearance of citizenship enables them to remain less deportable and feel like/be interpellated as an authorized member. In a way, driving as Alicia does is, in Austin’s sense, a performative act that makes her a citizen (1975).

Ironically, in Pamela’s definition, what legal status and citizenship could allow for was the ‘illegal,’ e.g. speeding. Citizens’ movement through space, while still observed, was less dire in its consequences, e.g. a ticket rather than the beginning of removal. This interplay between citizen-as-speeder and undocumented migrant-as-lawful reveals hidden complexity. If one wants to be read a citizen, they should speed because that is what citizens actually do; but, speeding could result in being exposed as a non-citizen. The ways that movement through space comes to be read by Pamela, Alicia, and others reveals how law, space, and the legal movement through it construct the citizen and construct what is understood as the citizen’s behavior, even if sometimes those constructions do not align with actual practice. This understanding of movement is an example of how legal-spatial consciousness is deployed. Pamela’s statement, and Alicia’s cautious driving, point to how the performance of legality is inextricably tied to one’s comportment traveling within spaces that are themselves imbued with legality.

Once their DACA applications were approved, both youth were able to successfully apply for and receive driver’s licenses, alleviating Alicia’s fears of driving for herself, but not for her parents. They also enabled a resumption of the rituals of American teenage transitions. For example, at a fundraising pancake breakfast, Pamela gleefully told me she and her parents were headed out afterwards to buy her a car. Author One knew she had been saving all year in anticipation of her impending driver’s license enabled through DACA. In that moment, as Pamela and her younger brother listed the merits of various models and makes, Pamela acted again in ways indistinguishable from citizen peers. She could now be present on the road in the same way. DACA-enabled driver’s licenses may, at first, seem a product of law as distinct from space except in their ability to regulate it. However, Pamela, Alicia, and the absent Latinx undocumented speakers’ experiences illustrate law, space, and illegality are mutually made in everyday life. While laws may seem to exist a priori from space, they are given meaning and important through space. Citizenship, in this case, is always on road.

Case 3: Sanctuary Policies, Social Movement Strategy, and Venue Choice

In this section, Author Two employs the use of a legal geography approach to examine undocumented immigrant youth activism in two specific contexts: the 2013 National Coming Out of the Shadows (NCOS) gathering in DuPage County, Illinois and a 2017 Chicago based rally regarding proposed amendments to the city’s sanctuary city ordinance. In doing so, the author works to examine illegality’s effects on undocumented residents’ daily lives across an uneven legal terrain with regard to how immigration law is operationalized between the two counties: DuPage and Cook counties. Along the same vein as Authors One and Three, Author Two then supplements these observations with an analysis of how community members have engaged legal geography in their localized grassroots organizing efforts. During his time in Chicago, Author Two worked with undocumented immigrant activists who were in the process of collaborating more closely with activists outside the city and county limits in neighboring DuPage County. Through these conversations, he found that local county boundaries played an important role in the development of the movement’s organizing strategy and tactical choices.

Chicago is a city that is home to many individuals and organizations who have been at the forefront of the national fight to halt deportations of local community members (Rumore 2017). Such efforts have involved local activists and city leaders’ participation over the span of several decades in this fight (Ibid). DuPage County lies directly to the west of Cook County, in which the city of Chicago is located. While Cook County is a self-declared sanctuary county -- local police have been instructed to hold undocumented immigrants for additional time until federal immigration agents can come to place them under arrest -- DuPage County is not. ⁵ Rather, DuPage County is the county where the Broadview Detention Center, a detention facility where many Chicago residents are placed as they make their way through deportation/removal proceedings, is located (Immigrant Youth Justice League 2013). This detention facility has served as a key target of political protests, vigils, and undocumented immigrant led civil disobediences helping to focus activists’ efforts on the situation facing local DuPage County residents (Ibid).

While conducting research in the Chicago region, Author Two witnessed the culmination of some of these efforts to build stronger coalitions between Chicago and non-Chicago based organizers, which later led to the launch of the first NCOS rally held in DuPage County.⁶ This rally served an important purpose for local organizers, highlighting the urgency of raising awareness regarding the daily constraints local residents faced being subjected to a legal system that criminalizes them and their family members.

In the process of reaching out to DuPage County residents to build stronger bridges for potential collaboration, some of the organizers active in Chicago politics, themselves were able to articulate the differences between DuPage County and Cook County policies as they too resided in Cook County. “Many of us [undocumented people] live outside Cook County [in DuPage County], but we come to work everyday in Chicago [located in Cook County]. We are putting ourselves at risk each day we go to work [just] given where we live and work,” Monica an undocumented resident of DuPage County explained. In traversing a local regional space across two counties, a mere distance of approximately 15 miles from downtown Chicago to the village of Broadview, where the detention center is located, one encounters a divergent local approach to immigration law enforcement. In Chicago, residents are able to obtain a local city identification card that acts as a form of recognized identification and one that does not necessarily single someone out for being undocumented as it is issued by a U.S. government entity.⁷ On the other hand, in DuPage County, undocumented residents remain extremely cautious about disclosing their immigration status noting the risk of deportation if they are caught in any transgression of the law including even something as mundane as being issued a traffic citation. Noting the uneven nature of the local legal terrain, thus taking a legal-spatial geography approach, Monica and members of the immigrant rights organization with which Author Two partnered, paid careful attention to the ways in which national boundaries are reproduced within the heartland leading to the interiorization of the border. At the same time, these organizers sought to highlight this daily reality as a means of bringing public attention to the issue and working to improve the daily lives of residents by campaigning for DuPage County to also become a sanctuary county.

This collaboration and bridge building between Cook and DuPage County residents also resulted in undocumented organizers turning their focus inward, reflecting on the role of Cook County as a sanctuary county. In the process, these Chicago based organizers sought to ensure that Cook County officials actually upheld their commitment to implementing sanctuary city policies in light of the development of an increasingly hostile anti-immigrant climate on the national level. In the summer of 2017, immigrant rights organizers in Chicago partnered with activists from racial justice organizations across the city to draw awareness to the pending amendments to the city’s sanctuary ordinances. Through this work these Chicago based activists sought to expand sanctuary to all residents and in the process, re-define notions of belonging and safety in the space.

A key example of the impact Chicago’s opaque sanctuary city ordinance is highlighted by the case of Antonio, a recent college graduate and immigrant rights organizer, but also an individual who had previously been convicted of a DUI (Organized Communities Against Deportation 2017). According to Antonio’s testimony, carve-outs to the city’s sanctuary ordinance would provide the potential for individuals, like himself, doing critical work to safeguard the needs of local residents, to be deported (Ibid). In the process of highlighting the limitations of a sanctuary city ordinance that does not protect the rights of all immigrant community members, activists like Antonio have pointed to the fact that even embedded within the law are notions of deservingness and belonging that work to promote the incorporation of the so-called “good” immigrants at the expense of those rendered harmful and/or criminals (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2014).

Furthermore, the coalition of groups convened for this rally, especially the presence of Black and Latinx community members, highlighted the ways that movements activists worked diligently to identify common sources of oppression and to target those systems of oppression rather than be pit against one another. As these activists articulated as part of this call for an inclusive practicing of sanctuary at the county level, issues intersecting with the plight of undocumented community members include calls to dismantle the police’s gang database and to de-escalate the use of force perpetrated against Black community members. This cross-racial Black-Brown coalition demonstrated how this action offered a re-imaging of safety and belonging in the space, but also a re-definition of who inhabits the space and the particular rights they hold as residents of the city.

The strategies that undocumented immigrant activists have developed paying attention to the divergent ways that legal regimes of migrant illegality are implemented across two local jurisdictions -- DuPage and Cook Counties -- demonstrates the critical importance of a legal geography framework for examining the case of undocumented immigrant political activism. As Authors One and Three similarly demonstrate in their work, the contours of legal geographies and their often uneven or unevenly implemented nature provide an important opening within the legal system for movement organizing to take place. This activism in turn not only disrupts, but also works to re-shape the contours of the legal landscape, as the Chicago based efforts of the immigrant rights organizers with whom Author Two worked demonstrate. These activists’ efforts centered around building activist alliances with residents in a neighboring county and holding actions in that county -- NCOS and Broadview Detention Center civil disobediences -- to increase the visibility in this more hostile local context. Yet, through these efforts, the Chicago based organizers who Author Two worked with, also found themselves refocusing their efforts back on their own city context, as part of their calls for increased transparency at the city and county level regarding how sanctuary policies are enacted and to forge coalitions across racial/ethnic boundaries. The role of space, place and geographic context, is thus key to understanding not only how regimes of immigrant illegality are implemented and their effects on migrants’ everyday lives, but also the manner in which activists develop and leverage the strategies and tactics they operationalize in their own campaigns.

Discussion

We return, in this discussion and conclusion, to the questions that initially sparked our collaborative project. In this section, we explore the first of our two questions: What do these local sites, and the illegality experienced and constituted within them, have in common? Emerging from our sites, we see common threads of: 1) the scalar nature of immigration law; 2) the mutual constitution of place, law, and illegality/the (il)legal person; and, most critically, 3) the development and deployment of legal-spatial consciousness.

Scale

Collectively, our cases provide further evidence of the scalar nature of law. As undocumented young adults move through the life course and in their daily lives, they navigate multiple and layered legal contexts (Author and Collaborator 2017; Cebulko and Silver 2016). On a basic level, the cases presented here demonstrate how federal, state, and municipal contexts can differ; and how these differences matter for the im/mobility of undocumented youth. Author Three’s case reveals differences across two states, California and Georgia, but also demonstrates how the temporary nature of DACA imbues a sense of “stuckness” or immobility amongst undocumented young adults in both states. Author Two’s case highlights how county-to-county differences across DuPage and Cook County in the Chicago area can highlight the contours of uneven legal geographies to shape new strategies and tactics amongst activists. Author One’s case demonstrates how in Nashville, Tennessee, mobility defined by the act of driving with or without a driver’s license shifted over time, and in this shift, undocumented youth’s understanding of their relationship to the law also shifted.

Taken together, these cases demonstrate not only the scalar nature of the current immigration landscape but also the dynamic nature of illegality itself (Ruszczyk and Barbosa 2016). Our cases highlight differences across states, counties, and localities, but we also see some similarities. Most notably, we see how the devolution toward local jurisdiction and enforcement can thicken illegality. Aspects of daily life and the life course, including education and driving, become bound up with immigration enforcement and crimmigration. In Georgia, undocumented youth are made more “illegal” through harsh educational limits. In Nashville, undocumented immigrants are made more “illegal” through 287(g) agreements and no access to driver’s licenses. While in this same locality, DACA recipients’ access to driver’s license make them less “illegal” than other undocumented immigrants. Similarly, in Los Angeles, California and Chicago, Illinois, both sanctuary cities and counties, undocumented youth’s understandings of illegality are often related to experience with or knowledge of more hostile cities and counties. This knowledge and experience can create unexpected openings for solidarity and activism as Author Two shows with the case of undocumented activists in Cook County developing a critical approach to sanctuary status.

In this way, the devolution of immigration laws intimately connects the socio-legal-spatial organization of undocumented young adults’ daily lives and their life course. As we demonstrate, undocumented youth in each of these cases understood their relationship to the law through the lenses of space and place. This understanding of space and place is informed by multiple and layered notions of federal, state, and local contexts and laws. The spatial understanding of law and this legal understanding of space, or the co-constitutive nature of these concepts, work to inform our conclusions in each of these cases. Therefore, we argue that for undocumented youth, a legal-spatial consciousness is a more holistic understanding of their relationship to law, space, and personhood.

Mutual Constitution of Place, Law, and illegality/(il)legal person

Beyond the question of the jurisdictional scale, our cases demonstrate that law and place are mutually formed and that this co-creation is profoundly social. For, it is individuals’ movements through place that are making and unmaking law. Those movements, through legally-defined spaces, are also determining the parameters of illegality and what it means to be an undocumented person.

As we demonstrate, immigration law, il/legalty, and other modes of law are made more and less binding through individual’s compliance or resistance to law’s spatiality. Alicia drives “under the speed limit” to act as a citizen, thereby investing driving laws with even more authority as immigration law is layered onto them. The activists that Author Two focuses on are, contrastingly, unmaking immigration law’s authority and their statuses as ‘illegal’ immigrants through constitutionally-protected socio-civic activism that challenges place’s existing immigrant il/legalities, e.g. their civil disobedience in the Broadview Detention Center. Compliant or resistant movement through local legal spaces makes the law in practice, investing it with more and less authority as it is obeyed or flouted.

Individual mobility also becomes a marker of one’s il/legality, further demonstrating the interpenetration of law, space, and the immigrant person. Programs like 287(g), sanctuary city ordinances, and education access laws force migrants to circumscribe their movement to both attempt to build full lives and to reduce their risk of removal. On the the state and hyper-local legal geographic scale of the county or municipality, an undocumented person is less deportable in one place and highly deportable in another, e.g. moving from DuPage to Cook County. This shift in deportability reveals micro legal geographies’ individual effects as people move through space and experience a change in their legal construction. Perceived and real spatial immobility defines illegality and freedom of movement defines legality, thereby linking law, space, and juridical self. As Authors One and Three found, many of their interlocutors came to understand their undocumented status through their relative freedom of movement through local places--recall Jovan’s feeling of being stuck or Pamela’s definition of citizenship as free movement. Author Two’s cross-county activists came to form solidarities with each other and allied communities due to shared vulnerabilities across legal-spatial lines. These emic understandings illustrate how law, space and place, and illegal personhood were mutually formed ‘in motion.’

It is not, however, just immigrant il/legality and illegal personhood that are co-made in law and space. We also see how other aspects of self are made and unmade due to law’s spatiality in the assumption, or limitation of, activist identities. Author Two shows how undocumented and otherwise marginalized people can share illegality in common across legal geographies leading to further solidarities. However, hyper-spatialization in immigration law disallows that solidarity from forming in Nashville. As the Nashville Latinx immigrants’ testimonies--or rather their performance by citizen others--made clear, spatialized illegalities can render immigrants out of local conversations on law’s practice or malpractice. As Author Two shows, this fact has significant impacts for immigrant activism, including the possibility of reclaiming spaces that mark the undocumented as illegal through undocumented activists’ claims for rights in these same ‘illegal’ spaces. Beyond activism, in Author One and Three’s cases more everyday identities as student, workers, and drivers are made/unmade due to the legal geography of immigrant il/legality. From a legal geographic perspective, the legal, the spatial, and the social are not discrete categories but “mutually constitutive ones” (Delaney 2015, 48). Illegality, and the idea and experience of the illegal person, are forged in the intersection of law and space.

Legal Spatial Consciousness

As the narratives have demonstrated, the articulation of a legal-spatial consciousness provides a timely, useful framework for examining how individuals, in this case undocumented immigrant youth, both experience and engage legal structures across multiple geographic contexts. A legal-spatial consciousness helps facilitate the move from an analysis of the law’s impact from something that exists, to something that is intentionally constructed and deployed. By examining the multiple contexts in which the law is implemented, one can better understand the role of human actors in this process. In our conceptualization of a legal-spatial consciousness, we aim to highlight the impact the law has on people’s everyday lives as well as how those individuals whose lives the law seeks to regulate, also take part in shaping the law itself. Thus, as the narratives in this article demonstrate, community members do not experience the law merely in a unidirectional sense, but also engage it back. In engaging the law, community members express their opinions about the law and call upon legislators to make changes to the law when it works to criminalize, oppress, and enact violence upon people’s lives.

The law, as implemented in different contexts and on multiple scales, sometimes aligns in terms of intended purpose and scope, while in other contexts does not. As discussed by Author Three the differential implementation of immigration laws and policies has, in the US, led to thean uneven legal terrain on a state-to-state level. Youth recognize this and plan their lives accordingly. Seeing the impact of this uneven legal terrain, undocumented immigrant youth, through their activism and everyday living have worked to incorporate a critical analysis of law, geography, and space into their own consciousness. This consciousness has manifested itself in their challenges to the law’s authority, their careful monitoring of their driving, or in their educational plans for their futures.

The concept of legal-spatial consciousness make an important contribution to the literature in immigration, human geography, and socio-legal studies scholarship as it highlights the co-constitutive nature of law and geography— shaping community members lives and community members shaping these policies—while also revealing at the individual level, the ways that directly affected community members demonstrate an acute critical awareness of the systems that shape the trajectory of their own life course. Centering the perspectives of these undocumented immigrant youth who find themselves situated within a unique legal-spatial context, we demonstrate how legal-spatial consciousness introduces an additional critical layer to the discussion: the subjectivity and oppositional consciousness of community members.

Conclusion: A Spatial Illegality

Each of our cases highlight a unique aspect of legal geography’s role in shaping the experiences of undocumented community members across the US. In this conclusion, we elaborate on how these commonalities, and differences, expand our notion of migrant illegality. Our findings regarding the scalar nature of immigration law and illegality, the mutual constitution of law, place, and illegality/illegal personhood, and the notion of legal-spatial consciousness described above demonstrate three enduring insights about illegality that can only be gained using a legal geography frame.

First, illegality is place-sensitive. We have demonstrated that certain locations and people within them become more, and less, illegal than others with laws becoming more and less legally-binding in certain spaces than others. Illegality studies reminds us that the category of the ‘illegal’ gets reproduced over time and becomes more and more important over the life course. Our analysis shows that illegality’s reproduction and shifting importance is highly place-sensitive as levels of illegality are relative across place. While ample literature established illegality’s dynamism, we foreground the spatial origins of that dynamism that will only gain in importance as federal inaction and local devolution of law continue.

Second, illegality remains a master status that can be mediated and managed. Author and Coauthor point to the importance of scholarship examining how urban/rural and state-to-state differences in reception mediate the experience of illegality (2018). All of our interlocutors are experiencing illegality and the manner in which it is mediated through local ordinances of sanctuary (Cook County), rights provision (AB 540), or national immigration programming such as DACA. Where there are persistent illegalities, it is more-or-less managed as people creatively navigate spaces through driving a certain way, protesting in a given location, attending school in some sites and not others. There are, however, other persistent illegalities that shape their lives that cannot be managed. While unevenness exists and can create windows of legality, for example Chicago’s municipal identification and DACA-enabled driver’s licenses, illegality remains a master status in that this legality is temporally and geographically limited.

Third, the legal-spatial consciousness of undocumented individuals that we see across contexts reveals that illegality is also reproduced in people’s sensemaking of law and space’s inter-determinacy. Illegality for our interlocutors is often a place-bound concept, with certain spaces and movements being understood as il/legal. It isn’t just that people make sense of the law, per earlier discussion of legal consciousness, but that this sensemaking is tied to space and how individuals move through it. In this way, illegality is not solely place-sensitive and place-managed, but also intrinsically a co-constituted concept involving an individual, local legislation, and geographic context outside of the “spectacle” of borders and within the confines of a county or a highway lane (De Genova 2013).

Comparative legal geography is a useful frame as it allows the bearing out of the above three facets regarding illegality. While a strictly legal approach allows us to map the devolution of immigration to the local, a legal geography perspective allows us see the topography of that map, that is, the dynamic local detail that gives devolution a particular character in particular places. Even when contexts seem similar such as the unwelcoming Georgia and Tennessee pair or the welcoming one of California and Illinois, we see through comparative legal geography that there are hidden ways il/legality manifests itself even in seemingly similar contexts. The tool undocumented people have to navigate this topographic map of illegality is their legal-spatial consciousness, be they about the ramparts, in the classroom, or on the road.