Angela S. García's excellent new book, Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law examines how federal, state, and local immigration laws shape the daily lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants. With clear prose and penetrating detail, the book upends popular narratives that depict undocumented immigrants as passively living “in the shadows.” Instead, the book argues that immigrants adapt to their local environments strategically. Theoretically and empirically rich, socio-legal scholars will find García's place-based account of undocumented immigrants’ shifting legal attitudes, behaviors, and identities both persuasive and provocative.
This comparative case study primarily draws from in-depth interviews with undocumented Mexican immigrants in two Southern California cities, chosen because of their dramatically different policies toward undocumented immigrant residents. Santa Ana, the more welcoming of the two jurisdictions, is a “sanctuary” city where local police do not cooperate with immigration enforcement authorities and local officials have passed policies to support immigrant residents. In contrast, local law enforcement agencies in Escondido have a long history of cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local officials passed a city ordinance that, if implemented, would have outlawed renting apartments to undocumented residents. Escondido and Santa Ana, which are fewer than 75 miles apart, embody “the theoretical concepts of local sociolegal exclusion and inclusion” (40) that form the backdrop for the book's examination of immigrant incorporation. In each subsequent chapter, García traces how these cities’ divergent policy environments impact undocumented residents’ lives—affecting everything from their sense of deportability, to their daily routines, embodied practices, and childrearing decisions.
While nativists may hope exclusionary immigration policies will encourage undocumented residents to move elsewhere, García's survey and interview data reveal that local policies in fact do not impact undocumented immigrants’ settlement choices. Immigrant residents in Escondido choose to stay put, often with the support of employers, friends, and local churches, because of the tremendous costs that moving would impose on their jobs and their familial routines. Respondents also navigated daily life with a keen awareness that local groups were challenging Escondido's anti-immigrant housing ordinance through litigation, and that the measure might never be implemented.
Chapter 4 argues that local contexts shape undocumented immigrants’ sense of their deportability, in turn influencing their daily routines, their choices about navigating physical space, and their willingness to engage with local law enforcement. In the more accommodating locale of Santa Ana, respondents traversed throughout the city with relative ease, more concerned about bike lanes and traffic safety than encounters with authorities. In contrast, undocumented residents in Escondido carefully altered daily routines of going to work, running errands, or driving children to school, all in an effort to avoid interactions with police and the subsequent threat of deportation. The point here is not that undocumented residents in Escondido retreat from public life, but that they navigate public spaces with more caution and anxiety than similarly situated residents in Santa Ana.
In Chapter 5, the book introduces its defining contribution: legal passing, “a strategic presentation of self to the outside world” in which immigrants adopt “characteristics associated with mainstream, US-born groups to mask unauthorized immigration status” (134). According to García, undocumented immigrants engaged in legal passing in exclusionary contexts like Escondido, carefully cultivating their public personas to seem more stereotypically “American.” In one particularly poignant example, García describes Lorena, a woman who has convinced her husband to change out of his landscaping uniform and into semi-professional attire on his drive home from work, because she worries that his uniform will attract police attention. Later, Lorena's husband arrives home from work, dressed in slacks and a long-sleeved button-down shirt. When García asks him about his sartorial ritual, he explains that changing his clothes to drive home has become routine and serves as a daily reminder of his wife and their love for each other. The prose in this chapter sings, and García's keen rendering of the laws’ effects on migrants’ embodied practices is an important and novel contribution to scholarship.
While Legal Passing convincingly argues that immigrants adapt to undocumented life in locally specific ways, its argument about the relationship between legal passing and assimilation is far less satisfying. García argues that while legal passing starts as an adaptation strategy, it becomes internalized, leading migrants to “shed” and “subjugate” their “culture,” and in turn more rapidly assimilate (172). García is careful to explain that legal passing relies on respondents’ narrow perceptions of “Americanness.” Yet, when García writes that “the act of legal passing forcibly distances undocumented Mexicans from their ethnic identity” (172) she essentially suggests that specific clothing, language, and consumption habits are inconsistent with particular identities.
García seems aware that her argument about undocumented immigrants’ rapid acculturation in politically hostile locales could be co-opted by immigrant restrictionists. To illustrate that this is an unfavorable development, she argues that legal passing is coerced assimilation, ultimately harmful to immigrants’ wellbeing. Still, while there is a great deal of evidence that restrictive immigration laws impose tremendous burdens on the economic, psychological, and physical wellbeing of undocumented immigrants and their families, it is not clear why these harms should come from legal passing. If legal passing is a coping strategy designed to distance undocumented migrants from a racialized and marginalized social category, then the harms are a result of racist and discriminatory immigration laws, and not the strategies that individuals enact to survive living in a racist society. In this way, Legal Passing reflects the tendency of canonical studies of assimilation to overlook the enduring significance of racism and racialization on the adaptation of immigrants and their descendants.
These limits notwithstanding, Legal Passing is 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 interdisciplinary community of socio-legal scholars.
