Full Description
Enduring Illegality chronicles the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants who have spent decades in the United States waiting for a path to legalization that never arrives. Based on longitudinal fieldwork, this book traces how people who migrated as young adults have transitioned into middle age still undocumented, caught in a state of legal and temporal suspension. Focusing on parents who would have qualified for the failed Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program, Angela S. García argues that illegality is not only a legal condition but a temporal one, produced and reproduced through decades of waiting for reform. Even in the face of such exclusion, migrants sustain lives, labor, and care across borders. Enduring Illegality offers a critical account of how the state uses time as a mechanism of immigration control, structuring lives and inequality in ways that outlast any single policy or presidential administration.
Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Waiting Through the Politics of Immigration
1. Deferring Action: The Waiting State as Immigration Governance
2. Growing Older on the Job: Illegality and the Work of Midlife
3. Caring Here and Caring There: The Undocumented Sandwich Generation
4. Dying Undocumented: Aging, Health, and End-of-Life Horizons
5. Relating to the State: The Felt Politics of Immigrant Illegality
Conclusion: Redressing the Waiting State
Notes
Bibliography
Index



