My work is on the legal, ethical, and political frameworks around migration and citizenship. In particular, I am interested in how narratives of ‘deservingness’ have come to dominate discussions about migration, refugee-status, and citizenship. “Deservingness” is in some ways a common-sense idea but it has interesting effects when it becomes the point of connection between ethics, law, administration, and individual welfare at the border. It expands or limits people’s life-chances by supplying the legally binding, but conceptually ambiguous, answer to the fraught question of who gets to live where. I examine how negotiations of morality intersect with constructions of race, gender, religion, class, and state borders. Deservingness enables administrators to classify people into categories, but also has the effect of justifying hierarchies, exclusions, and injustices through law.

The book project, Undeserving Subjects: The Global Politics of the Margins of Citizenship, investigates how legal categories of protection are interconnected with notions of “deservingness.” It explores how notions of deservingness have shaped rights in the human rights, refugee, and stateless international protection regimes between the early 1940s and the late 1960s. Moreover, exposing the overlap of international law and national contexts, it investigates how deservingness has animated US immigration policy in relation to the gaps in the international definition of the refugee. It especially considers the construction of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in relation to the US intervention in El Salvador, the advocacy of Haitian TPS recipients to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, and the potentialities and shortcomings of the refugee status and the TPS to address increasing displacement connected to climate change. As a result, the book develops an original conceptualization of deservingness as part of a larger methodological approach to the study of moral values in global politics. It also presents a concrete history of the formation of international protection regimes and their mutual dependencies that makes evident that notions of deservingness shape the mutually constitutive boundaries between political subjectivities, rights, and institutions. I argue that deservingness empowers officials in governments, NGOs, and IOs to incentivize rights claimants to take personal and individual responsibility for structural inequality and injustice, reinforcing narrow narratives on rights and movement while sidelining broader conceptions of political responsibility.