Vol. 10 No. 6 (June 2000) pp. 365-368.

LEGALIZING MOVES: SALVADORAN IMMIGRANTS STRUGGLE FOR U.S. RESIDENCY by Susan Bibler Coutin. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000. 228 pp. Cloth. $39.50. ISBN 0-472-11012-8.

Reviewed by Noah Pickus, Sanford Institute of Public Policy and Department of Political Science, Duke University.

In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which imposed sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants and offered an amnesty to immigrants who had been living illegally in the United States since 1982. This amnesty was presented as a one-time only plan, an effort to regularize the status of those who had been contributing to American society while simultaneously cutting off the main source of attraction for newly undocumented workers. It eventually resulted in the legalization of 2.7 million previously illegal migrants. Fourteen years later, a remarkable coalition of labor, religious, tax reform, and immigrant advocacy groups are pressing for a new amnesty, one that could legalize as many as six million illegal immigrants. Americans for Tax Reform and the AFL-CIO, traditional opponents of amnesties, have joined advocates for immigrants like the National Council for La Raza and the National Immigration Forum in this campaign.

Susan Bibler Coutin's LEGALIZING MOVES: SALVADORAN IMMIGRANTS' STRUGGLE FOR U.S. RESIDENCY, shows why such calls for renewed amnesties are likely to be a recurring part of American politics and law. Coutin traces the efforts of migrants from El Salvador to become legal residents of the United States from the early 1980s to the present. She interviewed migrants, legal-service providers and other advocates, attended training sessions on immigration law, worked for community organizations in preparing applications for asylum, sat in on court hearings, and joined Salvadorans and activists in demonstrations, political campaigns, and lobbying efforts. Her analysis reveals the complex and contradictory signals U. S. law and politics send to illegal workers and the various strategies those workers and their advocates employ in responding to those signals. These signals and strategies present significant obstacles to achieving what many claim is the goal of immigration law and policy - to separate an orderly process of legal immigration and naturalization from a disorderly and disruptive process of illegal entry and social participation.

Coutin is trained as an anthropologist and offers her study as, "an ethnography of a legal process." She delineates, for instance, how law makes immigrants simultaneously absent and present. Illegal aliens cannot officially work, but to regularize their status and demonstrate their merit they must show that they have been present and contributed to society. At the same time illegal aliens are officially not present, they can produce the bills, contracts, leases, receipts, and records that attest to their social participation in the United States. Indeed, law and legislation all recognize, to a

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degree, that immigrants' presence and participation have made them de facto members of society whose rights require protection. These complexities and contradictions are extended by an unofficial "legal consciousness" migrants develop, one that diverges from formal law. Law and policy tend to divide immigrants into dichotomous categories of legal and illegal immigrants whose papers reflect their status. In contrast, migrants see a variety of statuses and stages of legalization in which documentation itself confers status. Contrary to official law, they also regard activities, such as work, as sufficient evidence for legalization, and believe that the government condones the use of fraudulent documents since they are so easily available.

Advocates for immigrants contribute to this legal consciousness by reinforcing immigrants' sense that law is arbitrary and manipulable. These advocates serve as a front-line of the Critical Legal Studies movement, linking "U. S. immigration law to racism, xenophobia, discrimination, exploitation, injustice, and inequality." They apply this perspective as they negotiate between official and unofficial law, interpreting legal categories to fit their clients and shaping their clients' narratives to meet formal requirements. In this process of negotiation, Coutin contends, informal understandings of the law shape the formal law. Immigrants' beliefs that individual documents confer status on them, for instance, is borne out by a myriad of employers and officials to whom these partial documents in fact make them legal. More fundamentally, the various methods immigrants used to prolong their stay in the United States were ultimately legitimized. New legislation permitted them to regularize their status owing to the many years they had remained in the country.

Coutin argues that the way U. S. law makes immigrants simultaneously present and absent and the way in which official and unofficial law are intertwined challenge the authority of law itself. Unofficial realities, she believes, should therefore be accounted for in asylum and amnesty proceedings. An applicant who had been misled by a predatory notary, for instance, should not be held accountable for submitting a false application. Instead, officials should probe the context that makes such a result likely. She suggests, however, that this wider form of analysis is unlikely to be employed because to do so would undermine the law's claim to speak with a unitary voice.

Coutin also draws on her ethnographic data to modify, and to a large degree reject, the view that celebrates the subversive qualities of illegal aliens and migrants who live in multiple places. She acknowledges that undocumented workers and refugees pose challenges to established state structures and categories of membership and that they often create alternative means of belonging and social participation. She notes especially that the clandestineness that characterizes their lives in the United States, especially the stealth of those who actively supported revolutionary groups like the Farabundo Marti National Liberal Front (FMLN), leads to practices that themselves redefine both citizenship and state functions. Fundamentally, though, Coutin sees their encounters with law as evidence of the continued dominance of a traditional model of citizenship in a single nation-state, even as migrants and their advocates seek to exploit that model. Thus, arguments for legal status based on immigrants' social and economic participation draw their strength from claims to participation in a particular society among a particular people. Also the contention that asylum laws should be broadened to include

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the daily terror refugees might encounter upon return, or that economic deprivation in itself should constitute a claim for protection, operates within a framework of nation-states determining the nature and extent of actionable claims.

Coutin sees as well that there is no consensus among Salvadorans in the U.S. regarding their sense of belonging. Some define citizenship as based on blood, and therefore as immutable; others stress an emotional connectedness that often binds them to their country of origin but that is more flexible than blood. Still others call attention to their substantive actions - living, working, and paying taxes - as the hallmark of true citizenship. Whatever meanings migrants ascribe to membership, they are likely to regard legal citizenship in the United States as their least significant identity, and to view naturalization as a strategic action. They resist the official notion that becoming an American citizen should be a mystical, transformative experience. However even this challenge operates within the larger framework of state sovereignty and the pressure on Salvadorans "to naturalize their differences by claiming a spot within the array of nationalities that make up immigrant America."

Ultimately, Coutin views Salvadoran migrants as oppressed and subjugated, not mobile and subversive. Immigrants are "erased" and made to occupy sites of "nonexistence" in multiple ways by U.S. policy and law. Policies and laws that exclude immigrants, limit their rights, and restrict services available to them create dangerous conditions with which they must constantly contend. They are thus constantly "trying to construct workable identities in conditions that are simultaneously too fluid and too fixed - that is, these immigrants were forced to move and are in danger of being deported yet are now stuck in legal categories and national spaces. Their ease or unease with fluid identity is sort of beside the point, given the power that inheres in constructing identities."

Coutin's cautions about the abiding strength of the nation-state and traditional models of membership are a valuable contribution to a debate in which scholarly fantasies can outrun lived experience. Also, her insights into the complexities and contradictions that attend the United State's treatment of illegal immigrants and refugees are real ones that could have practical consequences. They could provide public officials and critics of the current asylum and amnesty processes with a deeper sense of the challenges involved in creating a more just system. However these officials and critics are not likely to read this book, much less glean important lessons from it, as Coutin engages in her own form of erasure. She describes a strategy of clogging the asylum system until a blanket amnesty based on immigrants' social participation can be attained, yet never addresses critics of this strategy. Nor does she address those who worry about amnesty programs where applicants learn that law is arbitrary and naturalization is a political maneuver.

Coutin instead celebrates these strategies as intermediate efforts toward a "moral order in which citizenship and justice would be linked." In this order, social citizenship would be primary and legal citizenship irrelevant. Yet, a wide range of analysts believe that the protection of rights may well depend on the sovereign state and shared sense of American citizenship that Coutin is eager to undermine. These scholars worry that the legal strategies and normative worldview she endorses risk weakening the political support necessary to

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protect the most vulnerable. Coutin shows, for instance, that when peace accords were signed in 1992, activists redefined Salvadorans as immigrants who were part of the U. S. community rather than refugees in need of protection. Such "legalizing moves" bolster critics' contention that temporary programs of protection are merely ruses to gain time until permanent settlement can be won.

Analysts further contend that, as Peter Schuck puts it, "the link between sovereignty and protection is more than a regrettable necessity . . . . The mature nation-state is a unique formation conceived through communal imagination, cemented by history, fueled by political ideology, and equilibrated by institutions. Its combinations of scale, power, predictability, and normativity enable it to generate levels of self- sacrifice and coordinated action in the common interest of which other groups, whether larger or smaller, seem incapable" (1998). As Schuck and others have suggested, the challenge is to negotiate between the demands of U. S. citizenship and the increase in opportunities for individuals to inhabit multiple membership statuses. Coutin's unwillingness to consider this challenge weakens her analysis and makes it less likely that her genuine insights into the asylum and amnesty processes will help those most in need.

REFERENCE:

Schuck, Peter H. 1998. CITIZENS, STRANGERS, AND IN-BETWEENS: ESSAYS ON IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press.