Lineages of the Deportable Labor State: Migrant Workers and the Law in American History

FAIN: HB-288758-23

Gabrielle E. Clark
California State University, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90032-4226)

Research and writing leading to a book about the political and legal institutions that have governed migrant labor in the US from the end of the nineteenth century until today.

My book project, Lineages of the Deportable Labor State: Migrant Workers and the Law in American History, examines the political and legal institutions that have governed migrant labor in the US since the end of the nineteenth century until today. By following migrants from the Caribbean, Mexico, India, and China as they use American legal protections "from below," Lineages also focuses upon how migrants have surprisingly and continuously sought redress from workplace violations and abuse through the law across time and sectors. We know very little about the longstanding, yet changing, relationship between migrant labor and the American political and legal system because scholars of US immigration have previously focused on immigrant admissions and exclusions from the polity rather than the deportation power and rights in the workplace. Lineages will thus be a considerable contribution to the study of migration in the US and in the humanities and social sciences.