ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on cases from the United States and Canada where precarious citizenship is in part made, contested, and negotiated via automobility, at scale" in automobs removed from but certainly interfacing with formal citizenship policy. There has been insufficient attention paid to North American "non-driversility studies, and little research that deliberately and critically examines how automobility, citizenship, and racialization dovetail as co-constitutive and spatialized processes. California was one of the first American states to pass a law in the 1990s that prevented an estimated two million undocumented California drivers from obtaining or renewing driver's licences. In 2003, a bill was passed that removed these restrictions, but Arnold Schwarzenegger overturned the bill in his first act as governor. Like immigration governance, automobility's institutional frameworks are themselves diverse. But immigration control and migrant status is spatialized in part through automobility, giving texture to migrant inclusion and exclusion, deterrence, and membership.
