Reciprocal Legibility: How School Social Workers Broker Equity for Legally Precarious Immigrant Students

In this article, we explore how school social workers recognize and respond to the precarity of immigrant students in their schools, with particular attention to how they broker resources to improve educational equity for those who are undocumented. We introduce the concept of “reciprocal legibility,” which we define as the ability of school social workers to recognize the multidimensional needs of immigrant students while concurrently elevating their own visibility and trustworthiness among students who may otherwise avoid seeking help from mainstream institutions. Drawing on qualitative responses from a survey of school social workers (n=324), we aim to answer the following questions: What needs of immigrant students are legible to school social workers, and how do they increase their awareness of these needs? How do these social workers increase the legibility of their own presence and their brokering capabilities to immigrant students?