Gabrielle Clark

Gabrielle Clark is a scholar of law and American capitalism who focuses on labor migration. She is an assistant professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles. Earlier this year, the National Endowment of Humanities awarded her a fellowship to complete her book, Lineages of the Deportable Labor State: Migrant Workers and the Law in American History. This is the project she brings to CASBS.

Lineages is the first book to examine how the US built a deportable labor state to govern migrants as workers from agriculture to the knowledge economy. Under threat of repatriation and without access to the welfare state, “Braceros,” H, L, and J visa workers, as well as undocumented laborers, have all been subject to the deportable labor state. As employers around the world increasingly rely on vulnerable labor migrants, Lineages shows us how employers reproduce this second-class labor force: by dominating an extensive legal machinery, from the border to the workplace. 

Clark’s publications on migrant labor law and other themes in law and American capitalism can be found in journals such as Law & Policy, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Law & Social Inquiry, The American Journal of Legal History, New Labor Forum, and Antipode.