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Legibility and Burden: Representing Immigrants’ Winnable Claims to Humanitarian Status
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2023
Abstract
In the United States, legal representation increases the likelihood that undocumented immigrants win legal claims. Yet private attorneys are expensive, and free and low-cost attorneys are scarce. How do legal services providers make representation decisions when demand outweighs capacity? Drawing on interviews with attorneys in thirty-eight nonprofit organizations who represent affirmative, humanitarian status seekers, this article describes how lawyers face pressure to represent winnable cases. Attorneys assess case winnability in two ways. First, attorneys aim to maximize clients’ cultural legibility as “deserving immigrant victims.” Simultaneously, attorneys aim to minimize case representation burden by considering the time, resources, and expertise needed to represent each claim. Attorneys assess both cultural legibility and case burden at every stage of the representation process (client selection, attorney assignment, relief pursual, and application production). In doing so, attorneys try to represent clients as the most deserving of status and in the most efficient way. These findings extend past research on attorneys’ selection processes that occur well before a client’s application is filed with the federal immigration bureaucracy. By highlighting how attorneys’ constrained decisions exacerbate legal stratification, these findings complicate calls for an immigrant legal inclusion strategy that depends on the labor of attorneys rather than on changes to the state’s demands on immigrants themselves.
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- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation
Footnotes
The author is grateful to the attorneys who generously shared their time and perspectives for this study. The author also thanks Emma Bedell Bogler, Paul Y. Chang, Jenna Cook, David T. Ellwood, Christina Ciocca Eller, Aaron Berman Fernandez, Garry Mitchell, Emily Ryo, Paige L. Sweet, John M. Towey, Mary C. Waters, Christopher Winship, Tyler Woods, Julie Yen, and members of the Harvard University Proseminar on Inequality and Social Policy and the Sociology Qualifying Paper seminar for their thoughtful feedback on previous versions of this article. Two anonymous peer reviewers provided productive comments that greatly improved this article. The author is especially grateful to Jocelyn Viterna for her guidance and support. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant no. DGE1745303 and a Malcolm Hewitt Wiener PhD Scholar fellowship from the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard University. This research received Institutional Review Board approval from the Harvard University Committee on the Use of Human Subjects (Protocol no. IRB19-0392).
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