Violence Against Latina Immigrants: Citizenship, Inequality, and Community

4 Informal Barriers to Citizenship

79 l     l 4 Informal Barriers to Citizenship Having uncovered the parameters that the state employs to determine whether a battered immigrant is worthy or unworthy to become a citizen of the United States, I now look into how attorneys, legal assistants , and other immigrants’ advocates act as mediators between the state and the immigrants. Do they conform to or contest immigration regulations and citizenship ideals and disciplines? Do they alter or reproduce the stratified structure of American society in their daily practice? In this chapter, I will focus first on the history and institutional development of the Organization for Refugees of America/Organización para Refugiados de América, the nonprofit organization where I spent two years working as a volunteer intern in the program to assist battered immigrants. Then, I will share the cases of immigrant survivors Clara, Silvana, Rosario , Mónica, Samuel,1 Yolanda, Patricia, Ramona, and Leticia to illustrate ORA’s role as a broker of citizenship between the state and the immigrants —what I will call a gatekeeper. ORA’s History and Institutional Development Gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class barriers to citizenship embedded in the immigration system were inherited by VAWA and VTVPA. ORA staff perceived these matters, particularly the legacies of coverture , as unfortunate, but they were not committed to overcoming them. Instead, these barriers were taken as part of reality, as rules of the game, and thus were not questioned in practice. ORA staff were devoted to providing free legal services to those who could qualify within the margins of the existing legislation and were not actively advocating for changes in the law that intended to get rid of this discriminatory baggage. Arguably, 80 x Informal Barriers to Citizenship their compliance reproduced the inherited inequalities. However, the fact that ORA was providing services to those who did qualify counterbalanced their political passivity (or apathy); they were working within real constraints with the aim of at least helping people in need who deserved and could access justice. ORA’s exclusive focus on providing legal services was a problematic but conscious decision that had marked a shift in the history of the organization. In 1987, when “the nature of people doing public immigration law changed from nonpolitical to very political, because of the changing origin and reasons why immigrants left their countries,”2 the three lawyers who later formed ORA worked on a volunteer basis together with three other organizations in Texas. One was a religious group that was the first to declare sanctuary to asylum seekers in the city (and eventually was granted funds from the National Sanctuary Defense Fund), another, a shelter for Central American asylum seekers, and the third, the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. “Committed to advancing human rights in foreign and immigration policies,”3 as Sophia, one of the founding lawyers told me, ORA’s original mission was to provide legal assistance free of cost to Central American immigrants in Texas who had been arrested in very poor conditions in the United States and had been placed in deportation procedures. While these immigrants were deportable according to immigration laws, international conventions that applied to the United States permitted them to request asylum on the basis of reasonable fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership with a particular social group in their home countries. The passage of the Refugee Act of 1980 was pivotal because it brought “U.S. law into conformity with” the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1967, eliminated special preferences to people “fleeing from communist-dominated countries or countries of the Middle-East,” and differentiated between refugees and asylees.4 However , this act had been applied selectively according to the political logic of the Cold War. The government supported Nicaraguan asylum seekers (who were supposed to be right-wing “freedom fighters” against the leftist ruling Sandinistas) “at a higher rate than most, and deportation was not enforced against Nicaraguans who were denied asylum or who simply wanted to remain in the United States.”5 On the contrary, the government labeled Guatemalan and Salvadoran asylum seekers (who were supposed to be left-wing guerilleros against the right-wing U.S.-supported governments of their countries) as “‘economic migrants,’ who were generally Informal Barriers to Citizenship x 81 denied asylum and deported.”6 The government bias against Salvadorans and Guatemalans (through immigration, Border Patrol, and...