Papers, Performance, and Making Immigration Matter.

There are meaningful similarities between the two nations, including the near-parallel development of a specialized field of immigration-centered legal activism amidst the rise of immigrant social movements and restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1970s. Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and Its Radiating Effects in the United States and France Leila Kawar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015) American By Paper: How Documents Matter in Immigration Literacy Kate Vieira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) When does immigration matter? Where immigration legislation is an obvious but relatively peripheral component of Vieira's work, it is central to Kawar's study of legal activists and immigration policy in the U.S. and France. Still, as Kate Vieira and Leila Kawar demonstrate, immigration - and in particular, immigration papers and immigration law - remains a site worth exploring and re-exploring. [Extracted from the article]