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This chapter focuses on cases from the US and Canada where precarious citizenship is in part
made, contested and negotiated via automobility, at scales removed from but certainly
interfacing with formal citizenship policy. In both countries, employers in low-wage sectors rely
on undocumented migrant workers as well as guest worker programs, though the scale and
proportion between these populations in each jurisdiction differs. US guestworker programs (H2-
A & H2-B visas) are relatively small, dwarfed by the undocumented worker population (Passel
2006). Conditions in US and Canadian guestworker programs vary, but both are characteristic of
distinctly modern, globalized forms of state-managed labour migrant arrangements
(Hahamovitch 2003). As “foreign workers” according to Canadian law, guestworkers face no
overt legal constraints on their entitlements to drive, own private vehicles or their physical
mobility. Yet, they rarely gain independent access to private cars. In contrast, undocumented
migrants in the US are more likely to rely on and use private cars despite lacking federal
immigration status. The purpose of highlighting migrants’ divergent automobility entitlements
serves to discuss how multiple, inter-scalar and inter-jurisdictional forces co-constitute migrants’
citizenship and physical mobility through automobility.