While waiting: Legal-status-making, bureaucratic inscription, and migrants’ labor (im)mobility

Abstract This article examines how the legal-status-making trajectory operates as a key mechanism governing migrants’ labor mobility. The study draws on in-depth interviews with highly skilled migrants in the United States, who entered employer-sponsored pathways from temporary work authorization toward permanent residence. The author conceptualizes legal-status-making as a fluid trajectory, organized into a timeline of bureaucratic inscription milestones and timed by two waiting regimes. Government-led waiting is imposed by mandatory adjudication intervals (lotteries, queues, audits), and employer-led waiting is imposed by firm-specific rules governing sponsorship timing (tenure/level/performance-based gates). Given the non-portability of sponsorship applications and narrow lawful-presence and unemployment grace windows, these regimes raise the costs and risks of labor (im)mobility across the trajectory. In response, migrants practise legal-status-oriented projective agency: They time job changes around status-making timelines, compare employers’ sponsorship policies via peer networks, and anticipate legal risk using collective case knowledge. The analysis reframes migrant labor mobility as not merely market- or emancipation-driven, but also informed and conditioned by the bureaucratic inscription timelines through which legal status is made and sustained. The article also captures migrants’ lived experiences navigating paperwork and bureaucracy. While grounded in the U.S. case, the insights generalize to selective, competitive employer-sponsored regimes, where permanence is attained through sustained employer sponsorship, multi-step documentation, and year-long waits.