Shannon Gleeson University of California-Berkeley
This project uses immigrants and their legal status as a lens through which to assess the broader dynamics of advanced capitalist societies. Drawing on previous scholarship in law and society, political sociology, and labor movements, this research addresses how government policies affect employer-employee relations, a worker's understanding of their rights, and their ability to act on them. I use various quantitative and qualitative methods, in a comparative context. First, I conduct an analysis of federal and state court cases where immigration status has been a contested aspect of protecting the labor rights of illegal workers. Second, I employ aggregate statistical analyses to assess the relationship between worker legal status and state labor policy, and the level and type of labor standards enforcement claims. Third, this research rests most heavily on in-depth interviews with various stakeholders in the creation and enforcement of labor rights for illegal immigrants, including: government officials, community leaders, employers and industry representatives, and individual workers themselves. Interviews are being conducted in California and Texas; these two states have distinct policy contexts and represent opposite poles on a continuum of level of labor protections for workers. In addition to its scholarly merit, this research has several broader impacts for society. First and foremost, it contributes to understudied, yet very timely, issue of illegal immigration, and furthers our understanding of the work experience of these workers and how they understand their citizenship and labor rights. This research also uses the work experiences of illegal immigrants as an empirical site for analyzing conflicts within the state, and reassess past assumptions about the state as a unified actor. This research highlights to students of government processes, the ways in which various levels of government can operate differently depending on the specific interests at stake. The results of this research also likely are of interest to policy-makers who seek to understand how government policies can affect the experiences of different groups of workers, and in particular illegal immigrant workers.
