What the Trump Administration Means for Immigration Scholarship

For my final research paper in the Autumn 2024 offering of LSJ 329: Immigration, Citizenship and Rights, I analyzed what social factors limit the realization of citizenship, particularly drawing upon the experiences of mixed-status families within the United States. Citizenship is limited when the state categorizes legality based on race, immigrant status, or other discriminatory policies. These distinctions create second-class citizenship and a profound social illegality that ultimately hinders an individual’s full realization of citizenship (Flores and Schachter 2019, 36). This othering of legal citizens contributes to legal consciousness, where individuals recognize that they are considered inferior in the eyes of the law regardless of their documentation, and cannot access the same rights as their white or non-immigrant counterparts. As I’ve read and watched the news since the Trump Administration took office, I’ve wondered how vulnerable citizens may be impacted by recent executive orders and overarching policy shifts, particularly mixed-status couples, birthright citizens to immigrant parents, and second-class citizens.

Second-class citizenship is defined as the dissonance between the formalized ideals of citizenship and its practical manifestations. This dissonance also weaponizes citizenship as a tool of othering and marginalization; despite citizenship initially intending to create an in-group and an out-group, second-class citizenship positions the out-group within a nation, rather than external to it. According to scholar Irene Bloemraad in her book Does Citizenship Matter?: “When states can distinguish citizens from noncitizens, the status carries consequences (Bloemraad 2017, 546).” Although this sense is exacerbated in authoritarian states, democracies nevertheless weaponize categorical citizenship. Bloemraad uses access to voting in the United States as a microcosm for other acts contingent on citizenship; individuals fail to access the ballot box because of education level, economic status, or criminal history, and marginalized communities face severe systemic barriers to cast their ballots (Bloemraad, 2017, p. 533). Although these individuals technically possess citizenship, they cannot access all the rights associated with it. These dynamics of citizenship, migration, and race culminate in the idea of legal consciousness, or how a citizen understands their own legality relative to the law. Legal consciousness intersects with the limits of citizenship because it explores how individuals are impacted by their actual versus experienced citizenship statuses. Someone’s legal consciousness can be shaped by external factors, such as how their race and identity is perceived by U.S. society, and internal factors, like their family members’ relative legal consciousness and the associated emotions; the idea of legal consciousness emphasizes how citizenship is not a concrete experience.

Within his few weeks in office, President Trump has enacted multiple executive orders that aim to dramatically alter immigration policy within the United States. Specifically, President Trump barred asylum for new arrivals to the Southern border, suspended the Refugee Admissions Program, and reenacted the requirement that asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their case is considered (Kanno-Youngs, Shear and Weiland, 2025). These policies pose particular challenges for those seeking immigration to the United States, but for members of mixed-status families, the risk to birthright citizenship marks a dramatic shift in how legal and social citizenship is attained. Given that birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment, it currently appears that President Trump cannot abolish the right via an executive order. Nevertheless, the President’s attempt to dramatically alter the accessibility of U.S. citizenship signals the Administration’s goals of exacerbating existing citizenship insecurities.

As I reflect on my initial research project in light of recent political actions, I am struck by how contingent the livelihoods of non-citizens and members of mixed-status families are on the actions of the federal government. A key theme throughout my Autumn research on immigration policy was the instability and general anxiety surrounding accessing the rights of a citizen, either through legal channels or mere social networks. I ultimately wonder how these policies will influence immigration scholarship as researchers attempt to clarify policies that are fundamentally unstable.

References:

Bloemraad, I. 2017. “Does Citizenship Matter?” In The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, edited

by Ayelet Shachar, and others. Oxford University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198805854.001.0001.

Flores, R.D., and Schachter, A. 2019. “Examining Americans’ Stereotypes about Immigrant

Illegality.” Sage Journals. 18 (2): 36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504219854716.

Kanno-Youngs, Zolan, Michael D. Shear and Noah Weiland. 2025. “Trump’s Executive Orders:

Reversing Biden’s Policies and Attacking the ‘Deep State’” New York Times, January 23.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/us/politics/trump-executive-orders-list.html.