“We’re not going to be afraid of Immigration.” Juana spoke those words to her undocumented niece Sonia while they agonized over Sonia’s upcoming court hearing. Sonia had missed a previous hearing and might have a deportation order awaiting her. It was February 2025. But Juana advised against fear. She told her niece, We’ll go to court together.

This paper reaches for a theory of the state in order to think through the dilemmas faced by Central American immigrants in the rural and small-town Hudson Valley. To start, I focus on people who are at high risk of deportation and decide to go to court anyway. As Juana says, they are deciding not to be afraid. Why refuse to fear?

To search for an answer, I turn to 2021, when New York State created the Excluded Worker Fund, a COVID unemployment benefit designed specifically for undocumented New Yorkers. The shift from 2021 to 2025 – from state benevolence to mass deportation – can seem like a dramatic transformation in regimes. Immigrants, however, may be detecting an underlying continuity. In both periods, state intervention is managing the rural labor market by rewarding workers who have strong links to their employers. First trust and then loyalty (rather than enterprise) emerge as key dispositions. Through their refusal to fear, immigrants may demonstrate loyalty in the midst of danger. This paper turns an ethnographic eye to the practices and attitudes that rural New Yorkers develop in the current moment. By charting five tumultuous years in a single valley, we aim to understand what, during a time of change, ends up remaining the same.

Gregory Duff Morton is an economic anthropologist and social worker. He wants to know how people send value across borders in the Americas. He has engaged with welfare programs in Latin America, with Brazilian migrants who move back to the countryside, with Dominican seniors undergoing surgery in New York City, and, most recently, with Central Americans and the activists they meet in upstate New York. Morton has a special interest in the MST, Brazil’s landless movement, which brings small farmers together to occupy plantations. By thinking internationally about human services, he hopes, we can equip ourselves to confront the inequalities so characteristic of public life in the Americas.