The Global Politics of Citizenship: Producing and Protecting the “Deserving” Subject

This dissertation, “The Global Politics of Citizenship: Producing and Protecting the ‘Deserving’ Subject,” investigates how legal categories of protection are interconnected with notions of “deservingness.” I demonstrate how the limits of legal labels are connected with state, UN, and NGO officials’ efforts to incentivize rights claimants to take personal and individual responsibility for structural inequality and injustice, reinforcing narrow narratives on rights and movement while sidelining broader conceptions of political responsibility. I take an ethnographic approach to the processes of construction of the categories of the stateless, refugee, and temporary protected status (TPS). The dissertation first offers a theoretical and methodological approach to 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 late 1940s and the early 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 draw on preparatory documents, summary records, official statements, academic studies, and press coverage of the construction of legal frameworks for non-citizens in the United Nations and in the United States. I also delve into advocacy materials and fieldwork with migrant communities in North Miami, Florida.