Producing Immigrant Victims’ “Right” to Legal Status and the Management of Legal Uncertainty

Abstract

This article investigates how lawyers manage legal and bureaucratic uncertainties associated with humanitarian immigration law by examining their representation of undocumented crime victims petitioning for U Visa status. Immigration attorneys craft dual narratives to persuade adjudicators that their clients qualify for and deserve this new legal status, but representing migrants well creates moral dilemmas. I explore how lawyers elicit and script narratives of “clean” victimhood to demonstrate that their clients qualify for U Visa standing. Next I argue that attorneys construct narratives articulating migrants’ civic engagement to position their clients as contributing members of society who deserve legal status. The final section illustrates how the production of these narratives generates a range of professional and ethical dilemmas for lawyers. This examination of how law is developed within a confining legal framework that is at the same time not totally institutionalized extends the “law in action” paradigm, which has been animated primarily by analyses of how legal actors tailor the idiosyncratic details of discrete cases to match existing precedents.