UC Berkeley

How do undocumented youth, whose very presence and identities are constructed as outside the law, mobilize the law in their efforts to enact social change? In what ways do their conceptions of their individual and collective identities construct citizenship from the bottom up, and how does this challenge and/or reinforce formal, legal conceptions of citizenship? Unlike other social movement participants, undocumented youth, by virtue of their undocumented status, are removable from the state at any time; their very participation in a social movement thus places them at risk of deportation. Existing literature suggests that this elevated risk would inhibit social movement activism, yet this has not been the case. Utilizing an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach combining cognitive discourse analysis, in-depth interviews and participant observation in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area, this dissertation explores the activism of undocumented Asian and Latina/o immigrant youth advocating for the passage of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. In doing so, I advance a proxy dynamic process argument to explain how the process by which non-citizens assert citizenship rights. This process involves first raising the political consciousness of citizens, second engaging the law in a piecemeal fashion to construct the equivalent of formal citizenship rights and third deploying their newly won rights as a means of working to challenge the normative, dominant construct of citizenship altogether. This dissertation is extremely timely given the rapidly changing U.S. treatment of immigrants both at the local and national level. While states such as Arizona and Georgia have sought to enact harsh anti-immigrant laws, others such as California and Illinois have passed progressive bills allowing increased access to education for undocumented young people. On a national level, President Obama recently announced his plan to extend prosecutorial discretion providing undocumented youth with a stay on deportation and granting them renewable work permits in increments of 2-years. The changing legal environment is therefore evidence that the sustained political activism of undocumented youth is indeed having a positive impact on increasing rights for the entire undocumented immigrant community.