Mobilizing Under 'Illegality': The Arizona Immigrant Rights Movement's Engagement with the Law

Abstract

Arizona has been in the news for the past few years not only for its vituperative, anti-immigrant polices, but also for the impressive immigrant rights movement that continues to spawn new coalitions and new activisms. The large numbers of cases that were and continue to be litigated and the innovative use of law to mobilize present a paradox since it is the law that constructs the “illegality” of undocumented immigrants, providing them very limited recourse to rights claims.

This paper analyzes the opportunities in existing legal doctrine for claiming rights for the undocumented. I argue that in the almost categorical acceptance of the plenary power of the Congress in immigration and the absence of a clear-cut articulation of rights for undocumented immigrants, immigrant rights advocates are faced with procedural and substantive obstacles to make legal claims. The legal opportunities that exist currently offer partial and ineffective solutions at best. I then explore what compelled legal mobilization strategies despite the lack of entitlements under immigration law and how the costs of legal strategies are mitigated by other advantages that legal mobilization provides. I suggest that activists invoked the law in various ways, not necessarily enamored by rights discourses or by an unbridled expectation in law as a means to achieve justice. The law, even with its limitations and biases, still provided avenues to curb state power and it also functioned as a symbolic, discursive, and mobilizing resource. I show that undocumented immigrants rely on legal action and rights discourse not only because of the expected diffusional effects of movements such as the civil rights and gay rights movement but also as acts of resistance and as assertions of quasi-citizenship.

Keywords: Law and Social Movements, Immigration, Legal Mobilization