About

My work focuses on the intersections of ethics and politics in international and US legal frameworks involving migration and citizenship. I examine how negotiations of deservingness intersect with constructions of race, gender, religion, class, and state borders to justify hierarchies, exclusions, and injustices through law.  It also points towards the need to reconceptualize political responsibility in global politics, especially taking into consideration displacement related to climate change.

My current dissertation project explores the ethics involved in crafting legal categories in the margins of citizenship. I ask how deservingness has been enmeshed in the processes of creating and reforming law for non-citizens. I argue that notions of deservingness incentivize rights claimants to take personal and individual responsibility for structural inequality and injustice, reinforcing narrow narratives on rights and movement while sidelining broader notions of political responsibility. Deservingness inhabit the tense spaces between individual and collective responsibility, personal narratives and global crises (in the plural), and negotiations of equality and difference around citizenship, without ever resolving them - and that is why it is so effective.

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Each chapter of my dissertation conducts an ethnographic exploration of how state representatives, advocacy organizations, NGOs, rights claimants, and scholars have negotiated limits in legal categories through desert, in this way establishing hierarchies within humanity and conditions for one to access rights. The dissertation first offers a theoretical and methodological approach for thinking about the global politics of the margins of citizenship informed by a postcolonial critique of deservingness. Then, it explores how notions of deservingness have shaped rights in the human rights, refugee, and stateless international protection regimes between the early 1940s and the late 1960s. And finally, exposing the overlap of international law and national contexts, it investigates how deservingness has animated US immigration policy in relation to the gaps in the international definition of the refugee. It especially considers the construction of the TPS in relation to the US intervention in El Salvador, the advocacy of Haitian TPS recipients to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, and the potentialities and shortcomings of the refugee status and the TPS to address increasing displacement connected to climate change.

I propose a critical exploration of the limits of law and assert that our current inability to propose effective solutions to rightless people requires a closer engagement with citizenship and its margins. Instead of assuming that national citizens deserve all, and that we have to come up with justifications to give gradations of rights to non-citizens, we should further explore the mechanisms, processes, and institutions through which (national) citizenship remains a privileged status. While there seems to be a relationship between law and deservingness, this connection remains underexplored in academia and either ignored or unquestionably accepted in public policy. 

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