State Categories, Bureaucracies of Displacement, and Possibilities from the Margins.

In this presidential address, I argue for the importance of state-created categories and classification systems that determine eligibility for tangible and intangible resources. Through classification systems based on rules and regulations that reflect powerful interests and ideologies, bureaucracies maintain entrenched inequality systems that include, exclude, and neglect. I propose adopting a critical perspective when using formalized categories in our work, which would acknowledge the constructed nature of those categories, their naturalization through everyday practices, and their misalignments with lived experiences. This lens can reveal the systemic structures that engender both enduring patterns of inequality and state classification systems, and reframe questions about the people the state sorts into the categories we use. I end with a brief discussion of the benefits that can accrue from expanding our theoretical repertoires by including knowledge produced in the Global South.

Blocking the Law from Within: Familyism Ideologies as Obstacles to Legal Protections for Women in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

The scholarship seeking to explain the ineffectiveness of violence against women (VAW) laws has focused on the lack of resources or will to implement these laws. Less attention has been given to how these laws are crafted and positioned in the legal hierarchy, which may undermine them from the start. This article focuses on four cases from Central America, a region where fifty-five laws to protect women from violence were passed between 1960 and 2018, yet VAW continues. It finds that the legal positioning and language of these laws prioritize family unity while undermining women's rights to protection; thus, these laws fail by design. The article identifies four legal placements that delay (El Salvador), undermine (Honduras), diminish (Nicaragua), or render abstract (Guatemala) the effectiveness of VAW laws in the context of penal and judicial codes. This work has direct policy implications and broader relevance beyond the cases examined here.

Los estudios sobre la ineficacia de las leyes de violencia contra las mujeres (VCM) se centran en la falta de recursos o voluntad para implementarlas. Menos atención han recibido su elaboración y posicionamiento en la jerarquía legal, lo que puede socavarlas desde su origen. Este artículo se centra en cuatro casos de Centro América, una región donde se aprobaron cincuenta y cinco leyes para proteger a las mujeres entre 1960 y 2018, sin embargo, la VCM continúa. El posicionamiento legal y el lenguaje de estas leyes priorizan la unidad familiar socavando los derechos de las mujeres a la protección; por lo tanto, estas leyes fallan por diseño. El artículo identifica cuatro emplazamientos legales que retrasan (El Salvador), socavan (Honduras), disminuyen (Nicaragua) o abstraen (Guatemala) la efectividad de las leyes de VCM en el contexto de los códigos penal y judicial. Este trabajo tiene implicaciones para políticas públicas y una relevancia más allá de los casos examinados aquí.

Precarious Times, Professional Tensions: The Ethics of Migration Research and the Drive for Scientific Accountability.

How should migration scholars navigate tensions between our ethical responsibilities to research participants and growing "open science" calls for data transparency, replication, and accountability? We elaborate a three-step process to navigate these tensions. First, researchers must understand core principles behind open-science initiatives and the mandates of research ethics boards, especially those related to privacy, confidentiality, and protection from harm, and take them seriously. Second, migration researchers must think beyond routinized or mandated procedures to carefully consider the unique vulnerabilities of migrants in their study, which depend on socio-political context. Third, if vulnerabilities are significant, migration researchers should modify (or challenge) procedures elaborated in the name of open science or routinized research ethic board mandates, if inappropriate for their study. We, thus, encourage migration scholars to engage with open-science advocates but also to educate colleagues on migrants' vulnerabilities and to double-down on data security, including vis-à-vis government authorities, as evolving technologies continue to change research practices.

WhatsApp as a facilitator of expressions of gratitude for palliative care professionals.

INTRODUCTION: Family members significantly value the professional and humane support that medical teams provide in the process of caring for patients with advanced diseases. Communication is currently changing, making it of interest to explore technology's possible influence on communication and on the care relationship. It remains unknown whether this can vary based on increased use of technology in patient care. Using communication technologies can facilitate recognition of professional support through the expression of gratitude aimed at healthcare professionals. The objective here is to describe expressions of gratitude sent via WhatsApp messages by patients who receive treatment from a palliative care team and their relatives. METHOD: A generic qualitative methodology was used. The palliative care service studied used WhatsApp in the patient/family-professional relationship. A content analysis of 130 WhatsApp messages sent to the professionals and containing expressions of gratitude was carried out. Two researchers inductively performed the analysis. Analysis included aspects for which senders were most grateful and others, such as who the messages came from, whether they were reactive or spontaneous and to whom they were directed. RESULTS: Almost all of the patients treated transmitted their gratitude via WhatsApp. It was also observed that family members were most grateful for features of the care received (i.e., affection, availability), the professional's support (i.e., accompaniment, comfort) and the professional's qualities (i.e., professionalism, kindness). They also appreciated symptom control and attempts to resignify loss; these aspects received the most expressions of gratitude in the messages. In turn, all the messages contain expressions of support for palliative care professionals, evidencing a patient/family-professional relationship. CONCLUSION: The use of communication technologies like WhatsApp can contribute to the perception of professionals' availability and closeness and become a facilitator of expressions of gratitude that specify the aspects that family members most appreciate from the palliative care team, such as skills related to humane care and availability.

(Il)legality and psychosocial well-being: Central Asian migrant women in Russia.

Legal status has shown far-reaching consequences for international migrants' incorporation trajectories and outcomes in Western contexts. In dialogue with the extant research, we examine the implications of legal status for subjective well-being of Central Asian migrant women in the Russian Federation. Using survey data collected through respondent-driven sampling in two large cities, we compare migrants with regularized and irregular legal statuses on several interrelated yet distinct dimensions of subjective well-being. We find that, regardless of other factors, regularized status has a strong positive association with migrants' perception of their rights and freedoms but not with their feeling of being respected in society. Regularized status is positively associated with self-efficacy and negatively with depression. Yet, no net legal status difference is found in migrants' views on their relations with other migrants or on treatment of migrants by native-borns. The findings are situated within the cross-national scholarship on the ramifications of racialized immigrant (il)legality and its implications for membership and belonging.

The Contradictions of Liminal Legality: Economic Attainment and Civic Engagement of Central American Immigrants on Temporary Protected Status.

This study examines how Temporary Protected Status (TPS) may shape immigrants' integration trajectories. Building on core themes identified in the immigrant incorporation scholarship, it investigates whether associations of educational attainment with labor market outcomes and with civic participation, which are well established in the general population, hold for immigrants who live in the "liminal legality" of TPS. Conducted in 2016 in five U.S. metropolitan areas, the study is based on a unique survey of Salvadoran and Honduran TPS holders, the majority of immigrants on this status. The analyses find that TPS holders with higher levels of educational attainment do not derive commensurate significant occupational or earnings premiums from their education. In contrast, the analysis of the relationship between educational attainment and civic engagement detects a positive association: more educated TPS holders are more likely to be members of community organizations and to participate in voluntary community service, compared to their less educated counterparts. These findings illustrate the contradictions inherent to TPS as it may hinder certain aspects of immigrant integration but not others. This examination contributes to our understanding of the implications of immigrants' legal statuses and of immigration law and policy for key aspects of immigrant integration trajectories.

Possibilities for Sociological Research to Reduce Inequalities: Observations from the Immigration Scholarship.

This commentary brings immigration research to the conversation on sociology's possibilities to respond to inequality. It argues that legal status today has become an important dimension of inequality given its enduring impact across most areas of life and effects that extend laterally to all members of a family and across generations. The piece highlights the possibilities for sociologists to contribute to policy discussions but also the limitations of research in policy spaces given the antiscience resistance in the sociopolitical context today.

The Language of Immigration Coverage: The Arizona Republic and Media's Role in the Production of Social Illegality.

Recently, several mainstream media organizations have moved away from using "illegal immigrant" in their immigration coverage. While this shift in immigration coverage is positive, seemingly positive language may still be exclusionary, particularly if the content of stories remains the same. We investigate whether newspaper articles that describe immigrants as "illegal" are more negative in content than articles that present immigrants as "undocumented" by analyzing 1,616 newspaper articles and letters to the editor in The Arizona Republic between 2000 and 2016, a critical period of immigration legislative activity in Arizona. We find that The Arizona Republic inundated readers with negative news coverage and that this coverage is baked into the content of stories and transcends the use of either term, "illegal" or "undocumented." We then draw on letters to the editor and original interview data to consider how social forces outside of the media may influence coverage.

Recasting the Immigrant Health Paradox Through Intersections of Legal Status and Race.

Immigrant health research has often noted an "immigrant health paradox", the observation that immigrants are "healthier" compared to their native-born peers of similar demographic and socioeconomic profile. This paradox disappears as immigrants stay longer in the host country. Multiple arguments, including migrant selectivity and cultural and behavioral factors have been proposed as reasons for the apparent paradox. Recently, the field has focused on immigrant legal status, especially its racialization. We review the literature on the immigrant health paradox, legal status, and racialized legal status to examine how this debate has taken a more structural approach. We find that immigrant health research has taken a needed intersectional approach, a productive development that examines how different markers of disadvantage work concurrently to shape immigrants' health. This approach, which factors in immigration enforcement practices, aligns with explanations for poor health outcomes among other racialized groups, and promises a fruitful avenue for future research.

The Gendered Effects of Local Immigration Enforcement: Latinas' Social Isolation in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.

The 2017 revitalization of the controversial Security Communities program, which requires local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration officials in the United States, has made it urgent to better understand such enforcement programs' effects on the well-being of Latinas/os, especially the foreign-born. Social isolation from increased immigration enforcement can have significant impacts on economic, social, and health outcomes among Latina/o immigrants and non-immigrants. This article analyzes the gendered impacts of different levels of increased local involvement in immigration enforcement on social isolation, using a survey of over 2000 Latinas/os in four large US cities, all considered to be traditional destinations. Unsurprisingly, respondents reported increased social isolation resulting from local law enforcement's involvement in immigration enforcement. In contrast to results from previous research, our analysis found that women and men were equally likely to feel socially isolated and that having children led to more social isolation for both women and men. Personal and vicarious experiences with immigration enforcement, as well as living in Phoenix and Houston - two urban areas with the strictest enforcement regimes - were strongly related to social isolation. Our results indicate that local authorities' increased involvement in immigration enforcement can lead to more social isolation for Latina immigrants, particularly those who have children, aligning their experiences with men's and, thus, undermining Latinas' previously recognized role as bridges between their families and social institutions and as community builders.

The Racialization of "Illegality".

This essay examines the intertwined nature of seemingly neutral immigration laws that illegalize certain immigrant groups and the socially constructed attitudes and stereotypes that associate the same legally targeted groups with "illegality," to produce the racialization of illegality. These complementary factors are further sustained by other social forces, including media discourses that reify those associations. The racialization of illegality is a fundamentally situational, relational, dynamic, and historically and context-specific process. Today, Latino groups are the preeminent target group of both the social and the legal production of illegality. Thus, this essay examines Latinos' racialized illegality across geographical contexts, within their group, and in relation to other contemporary immigrants. Although expressions of racialized illegality and specific targeted groups will vary across time and space, the contours of the phenomenon will be present across contexts and times (and produce specific outcomes) because they are shaped by existing racial hierarchies.

Legal Violence, Health, and Access to Care: Latina Immigrants in Rural and Urban Kansas.

Using interviews and ethnography started in 2016 in rural and urban Kansas, we examine the consequences of an amplified immigration enforcement combined with a local limited health care infrastructure that reproduce legal violence manifesting on Latina immigrants' health, access to care, and community participation. We highlight the conditions rooted in place that generate short- and long-term negative impacts for Latina immigrants' health. Fear and anxiety about the deportation of themselves and their family members make them ill and also generate apprehension about contacting medical institutions, driving, and spending time in public spaces. These circumstances coalesce in women's lives to block access to medical care and undermine women's roles in their communities. Following gendered expectations, women turn to their informal networks to seek health care for their families. In the context that the enforcement regime has created, these ties can turn exploitative.

Undocumented and unaccompanied: children of migration in the European Union and the United States.

Thousands of minors are migrating unaccompanied to high-income countries. This special issue focuses on unaccompanied migrant minors from the Global South to Europe and the United States. In this introduction we seek to complement the contributions to this special issue by shedding light on what resources and experiences unaccompanied migrants arrive with, stressing these young migrants' challenges at each stage prior to arrival and the challenges they face navigating the receiving context. We first clarify how the international community defines "unaccompanied minors" or "unaccompanied children." We then provide brief histories of unaccompanied minors in immigration flows to the U.S. and the EU. Next, we review the literature on the experiences of unaccompanied minors before, during, and after migration. Finally, we discuss key themes and insights from the articles provided in this special issue.

Financial and Emotional Support in Close Personal Ties among Central Asian Migrant Women in Russia.

This study advances research on the role of personal networks as sources of financial and emotional support in immigrants' close personal ties beyond the immediate family. Because resource scarcity experienced by members of immigrant communities is likely to disrupt normatively expected reciprocal support, we explored multi-level predictors of exchange processes with personal network members that involve (1) only receiving support, (2) only providing support, and (3) reciprocal support exchanges. We focus on an understudied case of Central Asian migrant women in the Russian Federation using a sample of 607 women from three ethnic groups-Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uzbek-who were surveyed in two large Russian cities-Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan. The survey collected information on respondents' demographic, socioeconomic, and migration-related characteristics, as well as characteristics of up to five individuals with whom they had a close relationship. Multi-level multinomial regression analyses were used to account for the nested nature of the data. Our results revealed that closer social relationships (siblings and friends) and greater levels of resources (income and regularized legal status) at both ego and alter levels were positively related to providing, receiving, and reciprocally exchanging financial and emotional support. Egos were more likely to provide financial assistance to transnational alters, whereas they were more likely to engage in mutual exchanges of emotional support with their network members from other countries. Personal network size and density showed no relationship with support exchanges. These findings provide a nuanced picture of close personal ties as conduits for financial and emotional support in migrant communities in a major, yet understudied, migrant-receiving context.

The ripple effects of deportations in Honduras.

Hondurans have been targeted for deportation since the 1980s, but today their deportations have grown disproportionate to their immigrant population size. They are more likely to face deportation than other targeted groups, such as Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Given Hondurans' singular position in the deportation system and the dearth of research about this group, we ask: What are the potential short- and long-term consequences of deportation for Honduran migrants, their families, and the broader community? To address this question, we utilize qualitative interviews with deportees, their families, and community members collected in Honduras in 2011 and 2014 as part of a multi-country research project our team conducted on the social impacts of deportations. While our findings in Honduras parallel those in other studies, we capture economic, social, and emotional effects beyond the individual deportees, including non-migrant family members and the broader community that receives them. Our longitudinal approach allows us to capture re-migration patterns as well.

Legality, Racialization, and Immigrants' Experience of Ethnoracial Harassment in Russia.

Using data from a structured survey and in-depth interviews in three Russian cities, our study engages the scholarship on immigration legal regimes and racialization practices to examine the experiences of ethnoracially motivated harassment among working migrant women from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in Russia. The results of statistical analyses show that regularized legal status is associated with a significantly lower likelihood of experiencing harassment at the hands of law enforcement agents and other actors alike. Regardless of legal status, however, the analyses reveal significant variations across the three migrant groups, with members of the group that is seen as racially most distinct from the host population having the highest odds of reporting harassment. The analysis of in-depth interviews confirms and expands on these patterns, providing additional insights into the complex expressions and interplay of legality and race in migrants' everyday experiences. The study findings are situated within the cross-national literature on migrants' legal and ethnoracial exclusion in receiving contexts.

Violence and vulnerability of female migrants in drop houses in Arizona: the predictable outcome of a chain reaction of violence.

This qualitative research study examines the experiences of immigrant women crossing the U.S./Mexico border and the proliferation of "drop houses" in Arizona as a new phenomenon, one that is often marked by kidnappings and sexual assault. Little research has been published on the violence women face on their journey, and the drop houses have almost completely escaped scholarly analysis. We argue that the drop houses must be seen as a consequence of a "state of emergency" declared by policy makers that led to changes in U.S. national and local immigration policies that fueled what we call a "chain reaction of violence."

Fighting down the scourge, building up the church: organisational constraints in religious involvement with HIV/AIDS in Mozambique.

Religious organisations (ROs) are often said to play an important role in mitigating the impact of HIV/AIDS. Yet, limitations of that role have also been acknowledged. While most of the literature has focused on ideological and individual-level implications of religion for HIV/AIDS, in this study we shift the focus to the organisational factors that shape and constrain ROs' involvement in both HIV prevention and HIV/AIDS care and support. Using primarily qualitative data collected in a predominantly Christian area in southern Mozambique, we show that the organisational vitality of a RO as determined by its membership size and its relationships with other churches and with governmental and non-governmental agencies is a pervasive priority of RO leaders. Therefore, all church activities, including those related to HIV/AIDS, are instrumentalised by the religious leadership to achieve the church's organisational aims--maintaining and growing its membership, safeguarding the often precarious coexistence with other churches, and enhancing its standing vis-à-vis the government and powerful non-governmental organisations. As a result, the effectiveness of ROs' involvement in HIV/AIDS prevention and assistance is often compromised.