Cecilia Menjívar, Distinguished Professor

Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair

Department of Sociology

University of California, Los Angeles

State-created categories, such as the various legal statuses into which immigrants are classified, have powerful effects over a lifetime and even multigenerational. These categories are not neutral or objective; they reflect gender, race, and class ideologies such that they create and sustain enduring inequalities. Furthermore, state-created categories often do not capture immigrants’ lived realities, leading to misalignments, omissions, and in-betweenness. The talk will illustrate these points with empirical examples from various cases.

A Link to a Related Paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00031224221145727