Dissenting migrants: the dreamers legal mobilization in the United States

• Grant number: 20/14387-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2021
• End date: February 08, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Theory
• Principal Investigator: Cicero Romão Resende de Araujo
• Grantee: Andréia Fressatti Cardoso
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/04176-5 - Rights subjectivity in immigrant struggles for rights in the United States: the struggle for DACA, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

The aim of this research is to develop a theoretical framework to analyze the transformations of political concepts in lawsuits through the perspectives of Jacques Rancière's disssensus and legal mobilization. In order to do this, we inform this theoretical issue empirically through the Dreamers' lawsuits in the United States, proposed in opposition to the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2017. The selection of this case is due to three main reasons: the tolerated permanence status of these migrants, granted by the policy, which does not generate rights; the use of legal mobilization as a strategy in opposition to the end of the policy and its benefits, which differentiates them from similar movements of "illegal" migrants; and, finally, the argumentation for rights in the lawsuits. Our hypothesis is that Rancière's approach can be critically mobilized through the interpretative framework of the legal mobilization, indicating that the access to courts, as a possible political action to subjects, creates a subjetivation process, that is, an interval of identities in which they can reconstruct an understanding of the self, as subject of rights. In this sense, it would be possible to develop a dialogue between these theories of different scopes based on the connections established between different plans of analysis. To do this, we will analyze the documents of the lawsuits proposed by migrants in opposition to the end of DACA, and conduct semi-structured interviews with the lawsuits' authors and lawyers to reconstruct subjectivation processes. (AU)