Worker Citizen: Legalization and Political Relocation Among the "Walk-Route" Undocumented Chinese in the United States

This paper examines how undocumented Chinese migrants who crossed the US–Mexico border, who call themselves zouxian ke ("walk-routers"), undergo political transformation through the process of legalization. Drawing on ethnography and interviews in Chicago Chinatown, I analyze how experiences of law mediates migrants' reinterpretation of freedom, work, and citizenship. The study proposes a model of political relocation, showing how legalization both displaces and reconfigures migrants' pre-migration political consciousness. While universalistic critiques of authoritarianism are suspended in the exercise of self-fitting into particularistic categories of protection in the US asylum regime—a process of liberal dislocation, community interpretation of the asylum adjudication as discretionary upon economic contribution fosters neoliberal relocation, where economic frustrations from China are channeled into notions of civic worth in terms of work ethic and self-sufficiency. Through routine negotiations of statutory and discretionary criteria of legalization in daily life and workplace, migrants re-substantiate the "freedoms" they see lacking in China as the freedom to work—as symbolized by the irony of "worker citizen" —subscribing to neoliberal ideals while distancing themselves from social equity claims. By connecting migrants' political trajectories across borders, the paper advances a transnational and sociolegal account of ideological formation that complicates binary models of incorporation and transnationalism.