Is legal status a master status for migrant belonging? If not, how do other factors--such as social networks, religious participation, language and cultural familiarity--shape belonging? Over the past few years, some migration scholars have suggested that legal status is a "master status"which determines migrant outcomes (Gonzales 2015). Other literature suggests that migrant outcomes are determined by a variety of factors, asserting that migrant experiences can be better understood by studying the interaction between these factors (Enriquez 2017; Valdez and Golash-Boza 2020). Utilizing 73 semi-structured interviews with migrants in Utah, I compare the experiences of refugees, permanent migrants, temporary migrants, and unauthorized migrants through an interrelational perspective and evaluate how legal status and other factors shape their sense of belonging across legal, economic, social, and cultural spheres. In testing whether or not legal status is a "master status,"I find that legal status matters, though other factors are also salient. Numerous factors affect belonging (e.g., religion, language, and social networks) and within some spheres, these other factors outweigh legal status in shaping integration and belonging. These findings suggest that legal status is not always a "master status,"and migrants can access multiple pathways to achieve belonging beyond their legal status.

This dissertation reveals the origins of one of early US history’s most frequently evoked concepts: the northern “free state.” Beginning in the colonial era and ending with the Civil War, “Slavery Is Slavery: Early American Mythmaking and the Invention of the Free State” follows two threads simultaneously: first, the changing meaning of the term “free state,” and, second, the politics of enslavement and freedom in New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, the three states whose relationship to slavery seemed most unsure at the Founding. Relying on the methods of conceptual history, this dissertation reveals that for the first several decades of US history, “free state” signified a self-governing, republican entity, and the phrase only came to be associated with slavery after around the year 1820. Even then, the exact geography it represented remained contested, especially in the lower Mid-Atlantic. The confluence of a developing free labor economy and growing northern antislavery sentiment combined to create the conditions for the “free state” to take on a new meaning—the one historians have inherited and continue to employ today.

Indian-white relations in early Oregon are often viewed in terms of warfare and treatymaking, but these are only the most obvious aspects of a larger struggle to resolve cultural conflicts, settle land disputes, and establish order in a new territory. Additional understanding of both white attitudes toward Indians and of Indian exasperation with the settlers may be gained from a study of how criminal justice applied to the red man during the turbulent pre-reservation era. Prior to the coming of America settlers, Oregon Indians knew the justice of the Hudson's Bay Company. In dealing with personas accused of harming HBC personnel or property, Dr. John McLoughlin acted with firmness and persistence while taking cognizance of the Indian's own ideas of just treatment, The American leaders of later years sometimes imitated McLoughlin's firmness but failed to recognize the importance of Indian tradition. Dr. Elijah White, after bring appointed the first U.S. Indian agent for Oregon in 1842, presented the natives with a law code which largely ignored their own traditions and confused them by making major offenses of what had formerly been viewed as minor infractions. Dr. White assured his charges that the new law code came from God and was recognized by all civilized nations. A similar smugness was apparent in later leaders who were convinced that the court proceedings against Indian troublemakers could not help but make a deep and beneficial impression on the defendants' fellow tribesman. Such assurance sometimes blinded the whites to inequities in their application of justice to Indian-white disputes and this blindness contributed to friction between the races. Criminal justice for Indians was a more complex matter during Oregon's territorial period than it had been during the HBC era. To the Indians, the British had been trading partners, but the Americans were dispossessors. A sizable influx of settlers preceded the signing of the Indian treaties, and the presence of two divergent cultures on the same disputed ground made necessary some means of dealing with the disagreements which inevitably arose. But civil officials, army officers, judges, and Indian agents were still working out their respective spheres of influence while new settlers might be many miles away from any hands. The belief expressed by leading figures in the army and the Indian Bureau that whites were to blame for outbreaks of violence did not encourage irate settlers or miners to rely on these agencies to settle disputes with Indians, and citizens' courts, minors' committees, or indiscriminate reprisals were often only forms of "justice" employed. Indians noted the infrequencies of prosecution for whites who committed crimes against them and complained that the whites had one set of laws for themselves and another for the red man, Adverse public opinion worked against the efforts of Indian superintendent Joel Palmer to correct this grievance, and lawyers sometimes questioned whether Indian were, in fact, "persons" or whether their mistreatment could constitute a crime. Even Dick Johnson, a successful Indian farmer who abandoned his native culture and won the support of Palmer and of Jesse Applegate in his efforts to model his life on white men's ideals, had so little legal identity that his suspected murderers were not tried and one of them was allowed to take his farm. Segregation of land and of peoples was the distraction in which both the law and public opinion pointed in Oregon Territory. Consciously and unconsciously, whites encouraged Indians to accept a reservation solution to the problems generated by land-hunger and culture clash, and among these problems legal discrimination and vigilante justice figured prominently. Hatred of the Indians among many of the settlers contributed substantially to distortion and non-application of criminal justice, but even with favorable public opinion, as in the case of Dick Johnson, the law itself was insufficient for an Indian who did not remove himself from white society and accept the treaty protections of the reservation.

In late 19th century America, new schools of criminological thinking asserted that crime had its origins in a complex blend of environmental and social factors rather than in the moral deficiencies of the offender. Partly as a result of this new attitude the handling of offenses by juveniles became differentiated from adult cases, first through the construction of separate penal institutions and, beginning in 1899, through the establishment of courts specializing in juvenile cases. This study was undertaken to examine the attitudes of juvenile probation officers toward the Supreme Court’s Kent, Gault and Winship decisions which made a number of due process procedures mandatory in juvenile cases. Hypotheses were examined which asserted that (1) juvenile probation officers have a generally negative attitude toward due process, (2) probation officers with backgrounds in social work have more negative attitudes toward due process than do their colleagues with other types of backgrounds, and (3) within juvenile probation departments supervisors have more positive attitudes toward due process than do their subordinates.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

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