CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Turza, Lili |
|---|---|
| Title | Lived Experiences of Migrant Illegality, Local Bureaucratic Membership and Change of Status: The Case of Hungarian Immigrants in New York |
| Summary | The thesis explores the personal experiences and struggles of New York-based visa-overstayers from Hungary. Building on qualitative semi-structured interviews, the research is going to offer a glimpse into how undocumented status affects migrants’ lives in certain social contexts, their attempts and struggles to legalize themselves and their use of local ID cards, while also shedding light on the functioning of illegal employment agencies that recruit low-skilled middle-aged women from Hungary to work as cleaning ladies mainly in New Square and the Borough Park area of Brooklyn. The thesis argues that even though local bureaucratic membership policies are widely celebrated for being progressive measures in the direction of migrant inclusion on the scale of the city, local ID cards are rather controversial in nature, their practicality is questionable, and they can be possible sources of fear and uncertainty given the perceived mass surveillance by the federal government that makes people without legal status especially vulnerable. In addition to that, the empirical findings of the thesis will also engage with the brain waste phenomenon, the change of socio-political status, the role of individualism in integrating, and the widely held perception of the US being the “land of opportunity” as the stories of financial success lure many into making the decision to move to the United States without proper work permits, overstaying their tourist visas and by that becoming undocumented migrants. |
| Supervisor | Pogonyi, Szabolcs |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/turza_lili.pdf |
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