Departmental Colloquium

Abstract: Undocumented Mexican adult caregivers face multiple binds from contemporary US migration governance. Major federal public benefits programs have long excluded them, while the steady militarization of the US-Mexico border has cut off circular migration just as an infusion of interior enforcement has brought deportation threat to their doorsteps. With few viable legal channels for visas, people who manage to cross from Mexico without authorization are sealed into the United States, a country that has not enacted a major legalization since 1986, despite its dependence on immigrants to sustain labor markets and community life. As a result, of the estimated 10-11 million undocumented people in the US, the average adult is 39 years old, likely born in Mexico, and has lived without authorization for 15 years, transitioning from young adulthood to middle age. How do these immigrants manage the constraints of “illegality” as they engage in unpaid caregiving for children and aging parents across borders and over time? Theorizing the temporalities of immigrant “illegality” through the case of domestic care work, I draw on three waves of longitudinal data from 51 undocumented Mexican adults to chart the emergence of an undocumented “sandwich generation,” wherein middle-aged immigrants provide care for their children and, from afar, for parents aging in communities of origin. This study illuminates the many ways that “illegality” moves with immigrants across time, impacting domains as intimate as domestic care work. Rather than produce static or flat effects, the oppressive weight of “illegality” constrains caregiving differentially, and in accordance with the life course-related needs of care givers and receivers embedded in the structural realities of US migration governance.