Ethnographies of Legal Inclusion: Protection, Punishment, and Legal Fictions of Asian Immigrant Woman.

Abstract

In the San Francisco Bay Area, non-profit organizations make up one of the largest networks of legal services providers working specifically with Asian immigrant communities. Their work is the product of multiple political legacies borne of the feminist anti-violence movement, immigrant rights organizing, and prison abolitionist groups that have established and shaped local institutions and public policy. Furthermore, in the last twenty years a growth in federal grants that provide legal services to address violence against women have funded Bay Area non-profit organizations. At the same time, as humanitarian protections for immigrant women have increased, stringent laws that monitor and criminalize immigrant communities have not decreased. This dissertation explores how legal fictions about cooperation, fraud, and trust maintain a racial distance between political practices that seek humanitarian protections for women and counter-terrorism laws that criminalize immigrant communities. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of how Asian immigrant women become visible as subjects of law at the intersections of humanitarian protection, immigration, and law enforcement. Rather than argue that difference is the marker through which we identify what Asian American political issues stand within a multiracial hierarchy, I ask instead what is made to not be an Asian American issue and why is this so? I argue, the law plays a significant role in establishing what I call a racial distance, a narrative logic invoked within contemporary political debates over immigrant rights and violence against women. Thus, the following question drives the dissertation: How do Asian immigrant women become visible in the law and how have the terms of this visibility – innocence, culpability, citizenship, and illegality – shaped the kinds of political critiques attached to Asian American racial identity? I spent two years conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area with non-profit organizations that specifically use the legal system to address violence against women in Asian immigrant communities. This dissertation is not a study of any one single organization, it is instead, a discussion of dominant ideologies and political practices that address human trafficking, domestic violence, immigrant rights, and border security.