Protracted Precarity: The Contingent Politics of Temporary Protected Status, 1990-2025

Neha Lund, Brown University

Debates over immigration policy have recently drawn scrutiny towards Temporary Protected Status (TPS). However, less attention has been paid to the creation and forms of liminal status such as TPS, especially amidst changing political opportunity structures. Intended to function as “temporary” protection, TPS-holders have been in the U.S. for years, even decades, due to the difficulty in adjusting TPS into a permanent legal status. But pathways to citizenship for TPS-holders are limited, as SCOTUS ruled in 2021 that TPS holders are ineligible to individually adjust status into lawful permanent residency. Regardless, TPS advocates have been negotiating the expansion of rights for TPS holders since the program's inception in 1990. This paper presents preliminary findings from my dissertation, which examines the politics of TPS advocacy from 1990-current day. Tracing relationships between actors in a political field, I use interview, archival, and document data to examine claims made upon the state by TPS advocates for creating, renewing, and expanding group-specific and/or universal protections for TPS holders, and how such claims are negotiated and perceived by state actors. Specifically, I focus on how racial discrimination becomes a basis through which claims for the expansion of TPS protections are structured through legal advocacy. Taking a claims-making approach to the politics of citizenship, I study TPS policy not as a series of static outcomes, but as a dynamic product of contestation between state and civil society actors with both material and cultural impacts. Drawing from racial formation theory, I situate the production of racial projects, or ethnoracial meanings tied to the distribution of material resources, as a consequential outcome of this advocacy. Overall, I contend with a central question by bridging work on immigration, social movements, and racialization: how do advocates make claims on behalf of those who lack the most foundational of formal rights?

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 3. Visibility and Exclusion