Sociology Speaker Series Fall 2022: Lauren Duquette-Rury
Lauren Duquette-Rury
Wayne State University
Naturalizing Under Threat: Citizenship in the Age of Enforcement
Anti-immigrant rhetoric, hardline immigration policies, and policing threaten many immigrants’ social rights, security to remain, and sense of belonging in the United States. In this book talk, Professor Duquette-Rury explains the conditions under which people naturalize as a source of protection from and political reaction to state-sanctioned harms. Though there are nearly 10 million lawful permanent residents (LPRs) who are eligible to become naturalized American citizens, we know little about what motivates them whether or not to go down this path. Existing scholarship has helped us to understand what enables people to naturalize (i.e. resources, naturalization policy, marital status), but an empirically founded theoretical understanding of what factors mobilize people to make that decision remains incomplete. Drawing on original qualitative and quantitative data dating from 1907, the first year in which the federal government assumed administrative control over naturalization, to the present, Duquette-Rury offers a comprehensive assessment of the dynamic relationship between threatening contexts of reception and citizenship. The project reveals how many noncitizens pursue citizenship in response to the threat of interior immigration enforcement and removal, family separation, and discrimination. As a result, for many, citizenship has come to signify protection and security rather than an expression of national political identity. Understanding when and how the naturalization process becomes more consequential for eligible noncitizens, will help researchers reveal how shifting political tides and social attachments modify the value and subjective meanings people attach to American citizenship and provide new insight into social mobility and stratification, race and ethnic identity, and the composition of the next U.S. electorate.
Lauren Duquette-Rury is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Career Development Chair at Wayne State University. Her research sits at the intersection of international migration, race, and ethnicity, political sociology, and the sociology of development and uses mixed methods. Her scholarship has received awards and funding from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation and other notable outlets.