Temporal Liminality: How Temporal Parameters in Immigration Policy Adversely Affect the Lives and Futures of Precariously Documented Immigrant Young Adults

Abstract

In this article, I build on liminal legality to highlight how 1.5-generation Latinx immigrant young adults who benefited from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) confronted an additional dimension of uncertainty, which I describe as temporal liminality. Temporal liminality captures the way time itself––through bureaucratic cycles, political threats, and temporary protections––was moralized and weaponized, producing waiting, deferral, and arrested development. Drawing on interviews with DACA recipients in North Carolina and Massachusetts, I show how temporal liminality shaped three central domains: work and career, family and intimate relationships, and travel and mobility. These findings reveal how the state’s regulation of time foreclosed opportunities, reordered life trajectories, and deepened the strains of precarious legality. By centering temporality, this article advances scholarship on immigrant incorporation by demonstrating how moralized timelines, stolen opportunities, and bureaucratic timelines structured the everyday lives and futures of immigrants with uncertain legal status.