Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Rights of Non-Citizens in the Workplace

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Abstract of Doctoral Dissertation Research: Work, Justice and the Foreigner: The Social Contexts of Non-Citizens Rights in the U.S.This project explores the roles that city governments and local (city, county, or private) organizations play in constructing the meaning of legal rights for non-citizens in the United States. The legal and social scientific literatures on non-citizens rights generally presume that nation-states are the final arbiters of the meanings of citizenship and alienage. This view fails to capture the important ways in which local organizations help to construct non-citizens rights in action. Preliminary research suggests that local government agencies and non-governmental service organizations can effectively expand, constrict, or transform the legal rights of non-citizens that are nominally granted (or denied) by federal law. This project examines the localized construction of non-citizens rights in the context of day labor solicitation, the practice of searching for temporary daily work, primarily manual labor work, on street corners and other public spaces within American municipalities. Because day laborers are primarily illegally present in the United States, and because illegal aliens represent the most problematic category of territorially present non-citizens, the regulation of day labor employment poses three crucial questions. First, how do non-nation-state, locally-based, public and private organizations take part in constructing the meaning and content of non-citizens rights on the ground? Second, how do these organizations frame the rights of non-citizens to engage in day labor solicitation (e.g., as a matter of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, or a right to fair employment)? Third, what are the terms and contexts of these rights, and how robust are these rights? Five California cities serve as the field sites for this study, and the research examines the effects of different kinds of municipal agencies and programs within each of these cities. The project involves multiple forms of qualitative research, including interviews with public officials, observation of day labor solicitation sites, and archival research. This is the first major sociolegal study of day labor solicitation. Because it examines the role of municipal agencies and non-governmental organizations in the construction of rights in action, this research has crucial policy implications for U.S. cities, states, and the federal government. It will identify the challenges of regulating the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of day labor, and it will suggest more effective ways of doing so.