Events

Event Description

The Informal State: Green Card Guest Workers and the Paradox of Legal Inclusion

This project examines how U.S. immigration policy was quietly restructured in the early 1960s through administrative improvisation and grassroots contestation, focusing on the paradoxical status of Mexican green card commuters—workers classified as permanent residents but required to live in Mexico and cross the border for seasonal labor. Denied settlement, family reunification, and basic protections, they embodied a legal contradiction engineered to preserve racialized labor regimes while evading oversight. Drawing on consular correspondence, union archives, oral histories, and internal agency memos, Esquivel argues that this shift was not legislative rupture but bureaucratic recalibration. Through what Esquivel terms informalization, state officials and growers used administrative discretion and gendered applications of the public charge provision to maintain labor control while withdrawing protections. Meanwhile, civil rights and labor organizations mobilized to enforce exclusion. This work bridges immigration history with legal geography, labor studies, and carceral theory to reveal how legality itself became a tool of labor discipline and border enforcement.