This dissertation, entitled "Agency and Action: Immigrant Lives and Immigrant Politics in the Deportation Nation," examines the ways in which undocumented Mexican immigrants manage and contest the threat of apprehension and deportation in two communities in California. This project employs a comparative ethnographic approach, including in depth interviews with 61 immigrant respondents in two cities in one county and participant observation in both places over the course of three years. In this study, I make three interrelated arguments: First, the "post-border" turn in immigration enforcement demonstrates that the state has geographically displaced but not resolved a growing contradiction between neoliberal economic demands for the free movement of capital and competing national security demands for control over the movement of people. Second, I argue that the increasingly local character of immigration enforcement renders it susceptible to local political climates; this both opens up and closes down avenues to greater inclusion for immigrant communities. Various structural conditions and biographical idiosyncrasies increase or decrease the likelihood of four types of immigrant resistance: avoidance/insulation, "everyday" resistance, advocacy, and collective mobilization. Third, at the level of subjectivity, I characterize immigrants who engage in political activism as "instrumental activists": willing to participate in social movement organizing, not out of a generalized commitment to social justice, but motivated by material and mundane desires for the betterment of self and family that largely align with largely normative visions of work and family life.

Earlier studies of immigration have focused on the mechanisms of social control that circumscribe the life chances of immigrants. In this dissertation, I take a different tack and examine the forms of agency within immigrant communities as people manage intensified risks in their daily lives. While there is a growing literature examining various forms of immigrant agency, these studies tend to focus on only one type of immigrant agency, producing varied empirical portraits of the efficacy and impact of immigrant agency and political activity. I explicitly examine the relationships among four different types of immigrant agency in order to examine the biographical idiosyncrasies and structural conditions that influence the form that immigrant agency will take. These developments raise important questions about shifting forms of state power, the status of race relations in the U.S., and the place of immigrants in liberal democratic and capitalist societies.