The Human Rights of Non-citizens 17 durable, meaningful belonging, even among those who did not qualify for Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) status. Through the youths’ stories, Coutin was able to point to the mechanisms through which “educational institutions were potentially empowering,” but also that schools, colleges, and universities could be sites where “illegalization, precarizaton, and uncertainty occurred.” Coutin suggests that similarities in experiences of those who came before or after DACA was enacted point to the inadequacy of temporary measures, which are “insufficient to counter both the intensity of illegalization, and the financial pressures of paying for college.” Coutin calls for us to imagine a reality when college campuses can be “truly sanctuaries” that make achieving a higher education accessible for all youth regardless of immigration status or income. Finally, Chapter 12 by Jaya Ramji-Nogales, “Constructing Human Rights: State Power and Migrant Silence,” also begins by charting the gaps in current law. RamjiNogales traces the evolution of the concept of rights in international law, both the promise of its ideals and the disappointment of reality. Despite claims to be universal, the state-centric nature of international human rights law “prioritizes the power of the state while erasing the interests of migrants.” The purported universality of human rights “mask[s] political choices that prioritize certain interests over others.” Ramji-Nogales calls for a “radical rethinking” of human rights law through the vehicle of “a new human rights treaty focused on migrants rather than states.” Although states are unlikely to be supportive of a new treaty, efforts to create a new treaty would have an expressive function and could also “help to frame the debate, persuade the public, and focus activist energies in lobbying states for change.” More fundamentally, the project of a new treaty would help advance a rethinking of human rights law by foregrounding the voices and experiences of migrants themselves. She explains: “An emancipatory approach to international human rights law might instead take the human seriously, beginning from the perspective of the law’s subject: the migrant. A reimagined canon would identify and foreground the voices of those in precarious situations, asking what protections are needed to minimize their vulnerability.” The pieces by Blitz and Ramji-Nogales, together with those by Coutin and Kanstroom, decenter the state and emphasize the voices of those most affected by the law’s gaps. In chapters by both Kanstroom and Ramji-Nogales’, the state is the cause of the harm, not its solution. Coutin draws from interviews with Salvadoran immigrants and DACA recipients, illustrating the impact of illegalization on migrants’ lived experiences and how they have resisted these pressures and harms. Blitz and Ramji-Nogales emphasize the importance of centering on these experiences to create bottom-up solutions that can better respond to the harms of the law. To the extent that human rights is seen as a solution in each of these chapters, it is a different (and potentially more powerful) vision of human rights than one typically sees. In each of these, human rights is not operating as law, but as a vehicle for care. This vision of human rights emphasizes the responsibilities that individuals have to https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press