Doctoral Dissertation Research: The political economy of migration, labor, and documentation

该奖项全部或部分由《2021年美国救援计划法案》（公法117-2）资助。规范化的官僚策略被证明可以防止具有合法身份的移民沦为非法身份。这也会对依赖移徙劳工为生的社区产生不利影响。这篇博士论文研究询问个人如何在不断变化的政治背景下谈判确保文件以支持他们的主张。它直接侧重于支持民族认同主张的文件的连续性，试图超越法律地位的二元特征。该项目培养研究生的经验，科学的数据收集和分析的方法。研究结果将广泛传播给学术界和非学术界的读者。该项目整合了法律人类学、官僚主义人类学和政治经济学的理论，探讨了三个研究问题：1)文书工作如何与法律地位相关？2)移民采取什么策略来获得证件，政府官员是如何裁决的？3)记录移民生活经历的后果是什么？学生调查员使用参与性观察、访谈和档案研究，在多种环境下，文件的过程展开，以表征不同形式的文件对法律地位和生活经历的影响。这项工作为规范文件程序的工作提供了参考，以使受劳工移徙影响的社区和个人受益。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Regularized bureaucratic strategies are demonstrated to prevent migrants with legal status from lapsing into illegal status. This can also adversely impact communities whose livelihoods depend on migrant labor. This doctoral dissertation research asks how individuals negotiate securing documentation to support their claims in changing political contexts. It focuses directly on the continuum of documents that support claims of national identity in an attempt to move beyond binary characterizations of legal status. This project trains a graduate student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis. The results will be widely disseminated to academic and non-academic audiences.The project integrates theory in legal anthropology, the anthropology of bureaucracy and political economy to investigate three research questions: 1) How does paperwork relate to legal status? 2) What strategies do migrants pursue to secure documentation and how is this adjudicated by government officials? 3) What are the consequences of documentation on migrants’ lived experiences? The student investigator uses participant observation, interviews, and archival research in multiple settings where processes of documentation unfold to characterize the effects of different forms of documents on legal status and lived experiences. The work informs efforts to regularize documentation processes to benefit communities and individuals impacted by labor migration.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.