The Other Dreamers: International Students,
Temporary Workers and the Limits of Legality
Temporary Workers and the Limits of Legality

"The Other Dreamers" is a doctoral research project that examines how international students navigate the Optional Practical Training work program as a path to legal permanent residence and ultimately citizenship. The nonimmigrant to immigrant adjustment process constitutes a complex legal rite of passage through which nonimmigrants can be made into immigrants. Through long-term ethnography, interviews, and interpretative policy analysis, I trace these local processes of immigration adjustment and subjectivity formation – that is, how non-state actors administer and enact local policies and narratives that render legal, national citizenship accessible to individuals otherwise prohibited from immigrating. Examination of the various limen that separate student from citizen sheds light on an understudied process of noncitizen incorporation, regimes of migration policy work that straddle federal governance and institutions of higher education, and shifts in migrant labor markets.
For more information, please email me at k.eva.weiss@temple.edu.
For more information, please email me at k.eva.weiss@temple.edu.
Explore the international student experience
with my friend and collaborator, Sadeepa
When You Fall from a Tree (trailer)
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