Browsing by Author "Thompson, Charles"
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Item Open Access A Home of Our Own: Social Reproduction of a Precarious, Migrant Class(2019-04-29) Aguilar, ErickMany of the recent migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico have experienced the rise of drug-related gang violence and declining economic conditions in their home countries brought on by transnational agreements. With the ongoing collapse of their communities and homes via these conditions, many of these migrants move to the United States and join precarious jobs, such as agricultural labor. This thesis explores the ways in which family connections, inside and outside the home, affects the decision-making processes that leads migrant parents to join these precarious labor regimes. Through participant-observation and semi-structured interviews with migrant mothers and fathers from Honduras and Mexico living in rural towns in Eastern North Carolina, I investigate the social reproductive forces of the family that help fuel mass migration into rural North Carolina. Furthermore, I use my own experience as the son of an agricultural worker to complement my findings within the fields. My findings show that migrant mothers choose to migrate to North Carolina to raise their sons in proximity to their fathers, which they believe will allow their sons to learn how to become successful laborers in the future. Additionally, migrant parents believe that the home can be a place where the trauma of displacement can be undone. These findings show a glimmer of how lives can be structured and shaped outside of wage labor.Item Open Access Critiquing Operation Streamline’s Role in the Mass Criminalization of Immigration(2019-04-29) Oballe Vasconcellos, JairStarting in the late 1990’s, U.S. immigration policy began categorizing and punishing illegal immigration as a criminal act, penalizing what had solely been a civil offense through the criminal justice system. This shift coincided with the implementation of various systems in the early 2000’s to address rising rates of apprehension and detention at the border. This thesis explores the impact of one of these systems, a judicial procedure in border states known as Operation Streamline. It explores the role of defense lawyers whose clients are parts of mass change of plea and sentencing procedures of up to 70 individuals in one court hearing. Drawing upon recent literature on Streamline, as well as interviews with lawyers familiar with and working in Streamline cases at the border, this thesis illuminates the numerous constraints placed upon lawyers and their clients from a compressed timeline between apprehension and sentencing. This includes the length of time a client must wait in jail for a bench trial, an inability to pay bail, and the irrelevance of an asylum claim within criminal justice procedure. Through this, I place Streamline within a larger narrative in understanding how the act of migration has been criminalized and subsequently punished through our immigration and criminal justice system and how this shift affects lawyers and undocumented immigrants.