Join the Department of Geography for the Colloquium Series talk with Lise Nelson on ‘Illegality’ and the Transformation of Low-Wage Labor Regimes in the Context of Rural Gentrification.

Over the last three decades, domestic amenity or lifestyle migration across the United States has accelerated processes of rural gentrification, shifting landscapes of production to landscapes of consumption--from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Highlands, North Carolina. This talk explores how employers recruit low-wage, mostly undocumented Latine immigrants to work in gentrifying rural communities historically “off the map” of immigrant settlement, drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Colorado and Georgia. I trace how, over time, employers transformed their business model to reach new levels of profitability predicated on access to racially marked, “illegal” workers even as public, commodified images of these places celebrated them as sites of luxury, recreation, and whiteness. I contribute to debates about rural gentrification, geographies of immigrant settlement, and to the ways scholars theorize immigrant networks, illegality, and labor in the contemporary United States. 

Lise Nelson is Professor in the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona. She is author of Illegality and the Production of Affluence: Undocumented Labor and Gentrification in Rural America (2025—University of California Press). She was a member of the geography faculty at the University of Oregon between 2001-2013.