Deservingness: Challenging Coloniality in Education and Migration Scholarship

Abstract

Rhetoric, policy, and debate about immigration and immigrants are saturated with the trope of deservingness. In nation/states built on stratification, deservingness acts as a discourse of racialization, narrating across racially minoritized groups to re-instantiate the benefits for the racially majoritized. In this theoretical essay, I draw from legal case law and educational research and policy to explore the trope of deservingness as a form of racialized legitimacy. I suggest that the ubiquity of deservingness demands a decolonial reckoning with the specifics of how it is deployed relative to differently racialized peoples in a settler society, how they are racially minoritized and majoritized, and fundamentally, how that creates connected yet distinct social locations, rights, and relationships to self, others, the state, and land. Looking within and across how deservingness is leveraged against groups enables deeper comprehension not just of deservingness but of the larger settler structure.