"Between Punishment and Banishment: African Immigrants and Racialized Crimmigration"
This dissertation investigates how U.S. immigration enforcement operates as a racialized legal order that disproportionately targets Black immigrants, particularly those from African nations. While crimmigration scholarship has analyzed the convergence of criminal and immigration law, it has rarely centered anti-Blackness. My project addresses this gap by examining how African immigrants encounter, interpret, and resist surveillance, policing, prosecution, detention, and deportation.
I ask three questions: (1) How do African immigrants describe their experiences of enforcement, and how do these institutions together produce a sense of being both criminalized and deportable? (2) How do legal status, class, gender, and national background shape these encounters? (3) How do Black immigrants narrate their place within U.S. immigration and criminal justice systems, and how are these understandings reflected in everyday survival strategies and collective forms of resistance?
Drawing on interviews with African immigrants in New York City, as well as advocates, legal professionals, and participant observation, I develop the concept of deportable Blackness: the entwined conditions of racialized criminalization and immigration vulnerability that uniquely shape Black immigrant life. By centering immigrant narratives, this study demonstrates that immigration enforcement is not neutral but a racial project that amplifies anti-Blackness, while also highlighting practices of survival and resistance through which Black immigrants contest exclusion and reimagine belonging.
“Triple Consciousness: How Nigerian Immigrants Navigate Race, Identity, and Belonging”
Drawing on Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, this study introduces the concept of triple consciousness—capturing how Nigerian immigrants reconcile their Nigerian identity, Black racial identities, and aspirations for integration into mainstream American society. Based on 28 semi-structured interviews with first-generation Nigerian immigrants, the findings reveal four key dynamics: (1) confronting Blackness in America, (2) navigating race within American social institutions, (3) gendered social and economic networks, and (4) the role of Nigerian cultural capital in navigating racial dynamics. While acknowledging anti-Black racism, participants adopt strategies such as racial avoidance, cultural distinctiveness, and meritocratic beliefs to navigate racial boundaries. By centering first-generation Nigerian immigrants, this study challenges monolithic understandings of Black identity, illustrating the intersectionality and heterogeneity within the Black diaspora. These findings contribute to Black immigrant studies by reframing racial identity in America as a fluid and contested construct, shaped by transnational identities, cultural and ethnic capital, as well as structural racial dynamics.
These projects are supported by: