Life course illegality: how the life course and aging shape the experience of illegality

Abstract Scholars have studied in detail how immigrants experience illegality in the US. Many have focused on immigrants’ fear of deportation as central to this experience. Their findings center on children, young adults, and working-age adults, ignoring the fastest-growing population of undocumented immigrants, those over 50. This article uses a life course approach to examine how the fear of deportation shifts in late adulthood and introduces a new conceptual model, life course illegality (LCI), to understand the change. First, this LCI model bridges past research on migrant illegality—with a focus on deportability—and ecological-based and age-stratified life course approaches to offer new understandings of how deportation fears shape lived experiences. Then, through semi-structured interviews with older undocumented immigrants, I identify three key mechanisms that shape the shifts in fear of deportation in late adulthood: embodiment of illegality, life transitions, and temporal morality with culturally defined age norms. These valuable insights reveal the complex dynamics of the fear of deportation. Ultimately, I argue that fear of deportation and its consequences are a function of one’s place in the life course and that the LCI model is best suited to understand these shifts.