(Un)deserving Subjects: The Creation of the Temporary Protected Status

• In Event: The Legal Construction of Time and Terminology in US Migration Policy

Abstract

Scholars, judges, policymakers, and activists have debated the extent to which the temporary protected status would encompass ethical obligations towards noncitizens and effectively protect noncitizens in the context of humanitarian crises. Even though some academic works challenge the humanitarian intent and outcomes associated with this legal label, scholarship has yet to address how constructions of morality and race account for the workings of the temporary protected status in the broader context of the overlap between US foreign and immigration policy. Relying on an ethnographic history of the process of the creation of the temporary protected status in the 1990 Immigration Act by the 101st Congress, this paper argues that Congresspeople relied on notions of deservingness to make protection a matter of moral desert and individual virtue in ways that allowed the US to limit responsibility over disruption and instability around the world, especially concerning its intervention in El Salvador and Central and Latin America in conflicts related to the Cold War. As a disciplinary apparatus that tackles morality to deviate responsibility for structural inequality and injustice, notions of deservingness offered a moral language to help Congress members to both justify racial hierarchies that sustain the overlap between US foreign and immigration policy, and to reach agreement across political parties. Grappling with the shortcomings of the temporary protected status and US immigration policy requires a critical engagement with the relationship between deservingness and law.

Author

• Nathalia Justo, Bowdoin College