Ongoing research by Isabella Fernandes Moreira Fontaniello, PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Campinas
The research investigates how the interaction between different institutional arenas, especially the federal government and state governments, incorporates, reproduces, or contests gender norms in defining belonging, distributing vulnerabilities, and configuring the rights of immigrant women in the United States between 2009 and 2024. The central question guiding the study is how the intertwining of federal guidelines and state immigration policy arrangements produces different regimes of (un)protection for immigrant women.
To answer this question, the study proposes three articulated objectives. First, it proposes the concept of “intersectional immigration federalism” as a theoretical contribution, understanding it as the multiscalar arrangement of migratory competencies through which vulnerabilities and rights for immigrant women are produced and distributed in a gendered, racialized, and hierarchized manner. Second, it maps how the federal guidelines of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations define structures of opportunity and constraint for state action in policies related to family, gender-based violence, care work, sexual and reproductive health, and derivative immigration status. Third, it analyzes the interaction between levels of government, examining how different state configurations challenge, adapt, or cooperate with these guidelines, reinforcing, transforming, or contesting gender norms in the institutional construction of the “immigrant woman” as a subject of recognition and rights or as a target of control.
The research builds on the hypothesis that intersectional immigration federalism in the United States constitutes the institutional structure that enables the formation of a regime of gendered “internal borders.” Federal guidelines delimit the states’ space for action, while competing political coalitions and local interests condition the adoption of more inclusive or restrictive responses, producing policy mosaics that fragment rights and unevenly distribute the conditions of protection, recognition, and vulnerability of immigrant women.
The methodology of this research articulates a multilevel comparative analysis with process tracing, in order to reconstruct how outcomes are produced by cause-and-effect mechanisms in a sequence of events (Bennett; Checkel, 2015). Through this, it seeks to identify how causal mechanisms, decision-making sequences, state coalitions, and institutional arrangements interact to produce or reverse specific policies.
This research is part of the broader “Crossing Borders” project program, empirically operationalizing its normative agenda.