Under Watch: Migrant Legal Consciousness, Survival, and the Everyday Politics of Urban Space In New York City

Background and Purpose:
Research across sociology and sociolegal studies has shown that law is not only encountered through formal institutions but through everyday experiences that shape how individuals interpret risk, authority, and belonging (Ewick & Silbey 1998; Menjívar 2014). For migrants, legality is often lived as an ongoing condition of uncertainty that extends into work, mobility, and access to resources. At the same time, urban governance relies on surveillance and discretionary enforcement practices that disproportionately affect racialized and immigrant communities (Rios 2011; Stuart 2016). While prior research has examined fear and avoidance, less attention has been paid to how individuals navigate systems in contexts where visibility is unavoidable. This study examines how migrant street and subway vendors interpret and respond to overlapping enforcement regimes in New York City, with attention to how these dynamics shape everyday decision-making and well-being.

Methods:
This study draws on one year of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around the Roosevelt Avenue–Jackson Heights subway station in Queens. Data include sustained participant observation of vendors’ daily routines, documentation of enforcement patterns, and fieldnotes capturing spatial and social interactions. The research also includes participant observation with a vendor-led community organization during know-your-rights outreach, as well as semi-structured interviews with migrant vendors and organizers. Interviews explore work practices, encounters with enforcement, and understandings of legality and risk. Data are analyzed thematically using an inductive approach supported by NVivo.

Findings:
Findings indicate that enforcement is experienced as a constant and layered presence rather than as isolated events. Vendors described navigating multiple authorities—including police, transit officials, and sanitation inspectors—whose roles were often unclear in practice. As a result, individuals relied less on formal legal knowledge and more on interpreting environmental cues such as officer presence, spatial layout, and shifts in activity.

Participants consistently emphasized that legal vulnerability was unpredictable and not resolved through compliance alone. Even those with permits reported feeling exposed to enforcement, while others described their lack of legal status as structurally produced by limited access to licenses. Despite these risks, vendors continued working in highly visible public spaces due to immediate economic necessity. Rather than withdrawing, they adjusted their behavior—relocating, lowering visibility, or temporarily dispersing—while sharing information through social networks.

These strategies reflect a form of ongoing adaptation to structural constraints. Legal consciousness emerged as a practical orientation grounded in survival, where individuals continuously assessed risk while maintaining their ability to work and support themselves and their families.

Conclusion and Implications:
These findings suggest that immigration enforcement operates as an infrastructural and multiscalar condition embedded within everyday urban governance. Legal consciousness is shaped through ongoing spatial calibration in environments where exposure is unavoidable and survival depends on continued presence. By foregrounding visibility as a site of both constraint and negotiation, this study bridges migration and urban sociology, showing how border logics are reproduced through the routine management of city space.