sociologist, migration scholar
About the Book
More children than ever are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum worldwide. In the past decade, over a half million children have fled from Central America to the United States, seeking safety and a chance to continue lives halted by violence. Yet upon their arrival, they fail to find the protection that our laws promise, based on the universally shared belief that children should be safeguarded. A meticulously researched ethnography, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. Chiara Galli debunks assumptions about asylum, including the idea that people are being denied protection because they file bogus claims. Instead, the United States interprets asylum law far more narrowly than what is necessary to recognize real-world experiences of escape from life-threatening violence, particularly those experiences unique to children in Central America. Galli reveals the formidable challenges of lawyering with children and exposes the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy.
About the Research
Precarious Protection is based on over six years of research conducted between 2015 and 2020 and spanning the starkly different political and legal contexts of the Obama and Trump administrations. I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in various legal clinics in Los Angeles, shadowing immigration attorneys and other nonprofit staff as they prepared their young clients’ asylum applications and helping out as volunteer legal assistant and Spanish-English interpreter. I also conducted over120 semi-structured interviews with unaccompanied minors, their attorneys, and other key actors.
Awards
Pacific Sociological Association, Distinguished Scholarship Award 2024
American Sociological Association, Children and Youth Section, Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award 2024
Midwest Sociological Society, Distinguished book
Finalist for the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America 2025
Precarious Protections is a work that examines the disconnect between reasons for exit and context of reception as it works out through the intake and legal processes confronting … unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in the United States. The overall impression I was left with was of a Kafkaesque parody of an asylum system that was originally intended to allow for imperiled persons fleeing circumstances where they had every reason to fear for their lives to reestablish and rebuild within a rich and powerful nation-state, governed by the rule of law, which upholds global norms and expectations of civil society. That the system is described realistically was both refreshing and deeply disturbing … I would certainly recommend Precarious Protections as top-priority reading.