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We examine how the politics of knowledge production limit research on the relationship between immigration status and social inequality. We centre the practices of methodological nationalism in Canada, a traditional country of permanent immigration in which temporary migration has become a core feature of the immigration system. In this case, state classification and counting of populations, and the careful curation of data on nominally permanent and temporary migrants limits research on immigration status. We also document the research design process and survey instrument we developed to work towards methodological autonomy from the state categorization of people on the move. The research design included community consultations, democratization of the research process, and a commitment to experiential knowledge. The resulting survey offers a parsimonious instrument to study complex and indeterminate precarious legal status trajectories and their relationship to social inequality.

Precarious legal status trajectories (PLSTs) are marked by periods without state authorisation and/or forms of temporary authorisation. They are temporally prolonged and directionally unpredictable, and may be spatially, juridically and substantively discontinuous. Their complexity poses challenges for researchers interested in the relationship between changes in legal status and differential inclusion. We examine the trajectories of illegalised Anglo-Caribbean and Latin American migrants living in Canada in the mid-2000s who applied for one or both of two humanitarian legal status adjustment mechanisms to obtain permanent residence: late refugee claims and applications on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Despite sharing early illegalisation, we find regional racialised and gendered differences in their PLSTs. We present a framework for understanding how different trajectories are populated, and how the somewhat unpredictable outcomes of adjudications may lead to further applications and a reorganisation of PLSTs. We conceptualise PLSTs as assembled through (1) colonial legacies and histories of migration that contribute to racialised humanitarian deservingness, (2) state policies and humanitarian adjudication procedures, and (3) everyday encounters between migrants and other social and institutional actors. Our analysis shows how these elements come together and generate variable PLSTs and multi-dimensional differential inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a framework for understanding noncitizenship that combines attention to systemic processes with interest in contingency and indeterminacy in the production and substantive practices associated with noncitizen legal status categories and trajectories. We argue that noncitizenship is a dynamic, multi-scalar assemblage that brings together disparate elements in patterned and changing ways. Individuals and institutions generate the formal and substantive systems that confer or deny noncitizens the formal and substantive right to be present in a country and/or to access entitlements. Noncitizens exercise agency in choosing to make claims (or choosing to not make claims) to substantive rights, and the individuals and institutions with which they interact may facilitate or hinder such claims-making. In this process, social actors are enacting conditionality; they are working to meet the conditions required to maintain presence and access. Discretion, migrant agency, unequal social interactions, and social learning unfold over time and can generate a range of experiences of noncitizenship and legal status trajectories. These do not necessarily conform to expected pathways and timelines, and may combine access to various resources and public goods in variable and contingent ways. We illustrate the framework with data from research conducted in Toronto. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We offer an institutional analysis of Chilean and Colombian transnational politics in Toronto to account for cross-group variation in transnational political practices and the formation of different types of transnational social fields of political action. The article is based on interviews conducted with Chilean and Colombian community activists and Canadian refugee rights and social justice activists. We use the concept of political culture to account for differences in Chilean and Colombian transnational politics and to explain the different kinds of relationships the two groups have developed with non-migrants. We introduce the concept of activist dialogues, understood as patterns of strategic political interaction between groups, to characterize how migrants and non-migrants read and navigate their interlocutors' ways of doing politics. We argue that variation in the character of activist dialogues results in different types of transnational social fields of political action. Chilean–Canadian activist dialogues reflect a convergence of political cultures and strategies of action; Colombian–Canadian activist dialogues are marked by a relationship in which there is a divergence of strategies of action. Convergent dialogues produce thicker and more stable transnational social fields. Divergent dialogues are associated with a series of ad hoc initiatives, the absence of stable and strongly institutionalized partnerships, and a thinner transnational social field of political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a longitudinal map of three overlapping organizational trajectories developed by Latin American immigrants in the city of Toronto. We propose the concept of bridging and boundary work to specify how new (1) intersectional political identities and organizational agendas are constituted by Latin American feminist women and artists in the interstice of (2) country-of-origin and (3) mainstream pan-ethnic organizations. Boundary work occurs as activists with intersectional priorities carve out a distinct political agenda; the 'out-group' relations based on a shared sectoral focus constitute bridging work. Tracing changes in the local and transnational political opportunity structures, we consider how negotiations over resources, representation and agendas between these three Latin American organizational forms generate multi-directional political learning and socialization and the coexistence of different Latin American political cultures. We define political socialization as in-group and out-group encounters between political cultures understood as civic toolkits or ways of doing politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]