Legal Passing offers a nuanced look at how the lives of undocumented Mexicans in the US are constantly shaped by federal, state, and local immigration laws. Angela S. García compares restrictive and accommodating immigration measures in various cities and states to show that place-based inclusion and exclusion unfold in seemingly contradictory ways. Instead of fleeing restrictive localities, undocumented Mexicans react by presenting themselves as “legal,” masking the stigma of illegality to avoid local police and federal immigration enforcement. Restrictive laws coerce assimilation, because as legal passing becomes habitual and embodied, immigrants distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural identities. In accommodating destinations, undocumented Mexicans experience a localized sense of stability and membership that is simultaneously undercut by the threat of federal immigration enforcement and complex street-level tensions with local police. Combining social theory on immigration and race as well as place and law, Legal Passing uncovers the everyday failures and long-term human consequences of contemporary immigration laws in the US.

About the Author

Angela S. García is a sociologist and Assistant Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

Acknowledgments

1. The Place of Law: Subnational Immigration
Laws in an Age of Mass Deportation

2. Undocumented and Unwelcome? California’s
Shifting Immigration Laws

3. Stay or Go? The Settlement Effects of
Restrictive Subnational Laws

4. Everyday Anxiety: Devolution, Deportability,
and the Police

5. Legal Passing: Changing Bodies,
Behaviors, and Minds

6. Passing Down Legal Passing: The Diffusion of
Exclusionary Logics

7. Lessons of the Law: Subnational Immigration
Laws in the Trump Era

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Legal Passing helps make sense of not only a fragmented U.S. immigration system but also this system’s diverse effects on the undocumented immigrants subject to its varied laws and policies. Through rigorous data collection, a sharp sociological imagination, and lucid prose, Angela S. García breaks new ground by revealing the insidious ways immigration measures simultaneously integrate and marginalize millions of undocumented immigrants and their U.S.-citizen family members from the country they call home."
— Ethnic and Racial Studies

"...a real achievement and an outstanding contribution to law and society scholarship. As a study of legal consciousness, the book reveals how migrants perform legality through quotidian and embodied practices. It elucidates the uneven costs that “illegality” imposes across different geographies, demonstrating how space and place shape the effects of immigration laws, and how immigration laws also shape space and place. Eminently readable, Legal Passing will engage undergraduate and graduate students, as well as an inter-disciplinary community of socio-legal scholars."
— Law & Society

"[Legal Passing] maintains an explicit and thoughtful focus throughout on the complex, messy, and often unanticipated consequences of law."
— Social Forces

"Angela García’s excellent first book addresses [their experiences and]. . . . makes clear that undocumented immigrants are hardly living in the shadows."
— American Journal of Sociology

"The discussion of passing itself is fascinating. Angela S. García challenges the notion that inclusion and exclusion are binaries by showing that exclusionary practices can lead to inclusionary strategies. She provides a nuanced picture of the impact of living as an undocumented immigrant." —Susan C. Bibler Coutin, author of Exiled Home: Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence

“Angela S. García shows in breathtaking detail how accommodating and restrictive immigration policies enacted in cities shape the everyday lives of undocumented immigrants—from where they decide to settle and how they form bonds to how they construct their own identities. With rich empirical portraits and elegant prose, García helps us to grasp the intricacies of one of the most important and complicated issues of our time. This is social science at its best."—Tomás Jiménez, author of The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life

"Legal Passing contributes a much-needed examination of the effects of local immigration legislation on the everyday lives of Mexican undocumented immigrants. In engaging writing and with insightful analysis, Legal Passing also provides lessons for policy makers and for those concerned with these immigrants’ future membership in US society."—Cecilia Menjívar, author of Immigrant Families

"In this rigorous mixed-methods study, Angela S. García demonstrates how restrictive city laws intended to deter immigrant settlement accomplish quite the opposite: they paradoxically encourage the rapid incorporation of immigrants in those very same communities, albeit in ways that are harmful to the well-being of these immigrants, their families, and the broader community."—Monica Varsanyi, author of Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines

Awards

Latina/o Section Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention 2021 2021, American Sociological Association Latina/o Sociology Section
Thomas and Znaniecki Best Book Award 2020 2020, American Sociological Association Section on International Migration
Oliver Cromwell Cox 2021, American Sociological Association, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section
Mirra Komarovsky Book Award 2021 2021, Eastern Sociological Society
Midwest Sociological Society Distinguished Book Award 2021 2021, Midwest Sociological Society

Media

Author Angela Garcia offers an inside look at Legal Passing

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews

Awards

Media