Tag Archives: Immigration
Mar 19, 2026 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
What do we learn by reading the international law of migration from the perspective of migrants from the Global South? Deftly weaving together various strands from legal and social science literature to produce a brilliant new theoretical tapestry, Usha Natarajan’s book chapter, Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and Migration, offers a relational and contextual take on that question. She suggests three new ways of understanding international law in this sphere: as a harmful relationship between control and protection; as a constructor of categories that limit contestation; and as a phenomenon destructively co-constitutive of migration. This critique lays the groundwork for her proposal to build an international law of migration that is “more expansive, evidence-based and ethically consistent . . . as advocated for by TWAIL scholars.”
TWAIL is a movement of international legal academics that coalesces around a shared critique of the Global North’s domination of knowledge production in the field. TWAILers offer a diverse set of viewpoints and methodologies, yet share a commitment to foregrounding the perspectives of the people of the Third World in international law through policy-making, practice, and scholarship. Prof. Natarajan offers the reader both a useful overview of existing TWAIL literature on international migration law and an important new framing of that work, elucidating the synergies that emerge when the range of TWAIL insights are put in conversation with each other. Continue reading "Beyond the Sovereign Prerogative: TWAILing Global Migration"
Jul 28, 2025 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
What would a theory of migration that takes seriously the lived expertise of migrants and their families contribute to the scholarly conversation? Drawing from extensive qualitative interviews in Mexico with community members who journeyed to the United States to seek work and those they left behind, Prof. Ragini Shah has a compelling answer: a theory of migration as extraction. The thesis of her new book, Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities, builds on prior work on decolonizing migration and migrations as reparations, evolving those critiques into a comprehensive theory of migration.
This brilliant new work begins with the voices of migrants themselves, offering insightful quotes and a firsthand understanding of the journey to El Norte and its impact on individuals, families, and communities. One of the invaluable contributions that this qualitative work offers is a clear description of the emotional cost of migration as extraction. The interviews provide powerful insights into this profound price that families paid and continue to pay, and the ongoing impacts on migrant communities. Prof. Shah describes a vicious cycle of dispossession, dismemberment of family relations, and exploitation, as well as a story of agency on the part of migrants. Continue reading "Migration as Extraction"
Apr 17, 2025 Rachel RosenbloomLexImmigration
With the Trump Administration threatening to carry out a wave of mass deportations, understanding the history of federal attempts to secure state and local cooperation in immigration enforcement feels more urgent than ever. Immigration law scholars have devoted considerable attention in recent years to the federal government’s deepening cooperation with state, county, and local law enforcement agencies, part of a growing focus within immigration law scholarship on the intersection of immigration law and criminal law (or “crimmigration law”). In large part, the story that legal scholars have told centers on the past three decades, a period in which both immigration detention and federal-state cooperation have dramatically expanded.
A new book from historian Brianna Nofil, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration, makes a persuasive case for understanding such cooperation along a much longer timeline. Centering on the county jail, the book tells “a national story about local institutions” (P. 14), one that offers new insights into the dynamics of immigration federalism and the symbiotic relationship between the criminal legal system and the ostensibly civil regime of immigration law. Continue reading "Immigration Detention Through the Lens of the County Jail"
Feb 17, 2025 Betsy FisherLexImmigration
When is a citizen stateless? This is not a children’s joke with a clever punchline; living with an entitlement to but without recognition as a citizen is the lived experience of untold numbers of people globally. It is also a matter of scholarly debate: are such individuals, entitled to nationality but unrecognized by their state, stateless? Or are they merely de facto stateless? Some have argued that such individuals are stateless, and that the term de facto statelessness is unhelpful. These scholars can point to the international definition of statelessness as someone ‘not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.’ The argument goes, if someone is entitled to nationality, but not considered as a national, they are stateless, full stop. Others point to the 1954 Convention’s failure to protect de facto stateless people as proof of its inadequacy to protect people without state protection.
Ghost Citizens joins this conversation, noting Prof. Jamie Chai Yun Liew’s view ‘that the legal fact of being conferred citizenship is important. As such, persons should be considered stateless until they are legally recognized as a citizen.’ But her monograph pushes further, arguing that we must also explore why the state determines who is a citizen to start with. Here, she joins the theoretical contributions arguing that genuine links to a state should establish a stateless person’s claim to citizenship. Continue reading "Stateless Citizens and State Authority"
Oct 2, 2024 Juliet StumpfLexImmigration
“History,” Max Beerbohm said, “does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.”
This quote may (or may not) be an entirely accurate reflection of stare decisis, the notion that stability in the law relies on courts faithfully following past precedent. But the quote makes room for the recognition that stare decisis carries racist precedent from centuries past to perpetuate modern systemic racial subordination in modern immigration law. Ahilan Arulanantham’s Reversing Racist Precedent, forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, proposes a systemic disinfectant for this problem: applying constitutional limitations on race-based state action to racist judicial precedent. Continue reading "Disinfecting Judicial Racism"
Aug 9, 2024 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
Immigration law as a field of scholarly inquiry is largely critical of the status quo, with much of the literature describing inequities authorized by law and implemented through policy. An increasing number of these works foreground the work that race performs in perpetrating and perpetuating injustice in the immigration system. Yet there remains a profound silence around the question of blackness in migration. Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations begins to dismantle that silence, presenting the reader with “the unasked question” in the field of migration studies. (P.1.) This critique of antiblackness upends existing assumptions and presents important new directions for scholarly inquiry in immigration law.
As the Introduction to this edited volume explains, blackness should be the starting point for any study of mobility. But we cannot just “add blackness and stir”; the editors insist that we must begin by interrogating the antiblackness at the heart of the U.S. immigration system. (P. 11.) It is only through this more profound inquiry that we can begin to understand all borders and bordering processes, and to combat the antiblack violence enabled and obscured by the vast silence that greets questions of blackness and mobility. (Pp. 1, 14). Continue reading "Dismantling Silence Around Blackness and Mobility"
Dec 5, 2023 Angela BanksLexImmigration
Gun violence remains a serious issue in the United States. The Gun Violence Archive reports that between January 1, 2023, and May 1, 2023 there have been 185 mass shootings that injured 744 people and killed 252 people. In 2008, the United States Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms, separate and apart from militia service in Heller v. District of Columbia. This right is held by “the people.” Yet, the Court has simultaneously held that noncitizens are not part of “the people” guaranteed a right to bear arms. In the Second Amendment context “the people” has been defined as citizens. Pratheepan Gulasekaram’s forthcoming article in the Vanderbilt Law Review explores the Supreme Court’s expansion of individual gun rights while shrinking the Court’s conception of “the people.” Gulasekaram offers a more capacious interpretation of “the people” and his analysis offers an approach for noncitizen inclusion in other core constitutional rights.
The Second Amendment’s “People” Problem begins with a history of federal regulation of gun possession and noncitizens. Gulasekaram demonstrates how the restrictions implemented stemmed from a desire to limit specific ideologies and subversive activities. Noncitizens in this context were viewed as threats to the constitutional order. Under a pre-Heller Second Amendment that focused on organized armed defense of the constitutional order, noncitizens viewed as a threat could not be viewed as “the people” who would protect the constitutional order. In Part II, Gulasekaram demonstrates how Heller’s emphasis on an individual right to self-defense does not lend itself to the same wholesale exclusion of noncitizens from “the people.” Part III presents Gulasekaram’s argument that once the right to bear arms is rooted in an individual right based on self-protection, the rationale for connecting gun rights to citizenship status disappears. Continue reading "Noncitizens as “The People”"
Jun 15, 2023 Juliet StumpfLexImmigration
Keeping secrets is so middle school.
When the secret is law, though, the problems mature and proliferate. Faiza Sayed’s The Immigration Shadow Docket uncovers a nest of secret law in the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)’s practice of deciding almost 100% of its cases as unpublished, nonprecedential decisions. These decisions are available to government lawyers but not to immigrants or their lawyers, and that makes steam come out of my head.
The BIA decides about 30,000 cases each year, but publishes only 30 of them. Those published decisions are authored either by three-member panels, or by the Board en banc, and they lay out the legal reasoning and findings of the Board. The few published decisions are accessible to the public and citable.
The remaining tens of thousands of decisions of immigration cases are issued by single members of the Board. Sayed calls this the “immigration shadow docket.” The vast majority are summary affirmances and orders, and they cannot be cited as precedent—at least, not by advocates for immigrants. In practice, however, government attorneys and immigration judges access them and cite them in briefs and decisions. Thus, the steam. Continue reading "America’s Secret Immigration Law"
Apr 12, 2023 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
Scholarly examinations of sanctuary for immigrants tend to focus on destination states in the Global North, where the concept implicates support for the immediate needs of immigrants in a specific location—such as a church, or throughout a city—and in some cases policy advocacy efforts. Few scholars writing in the Global North have explored how this concept translates to the Global South, where most migration and transit occurs, and where a substantial amount of work is happening to support migrants despite the more profound costs to those residing in countries with more limited resources. Alexandra Délano Alonso offers the reader a shift in the epistemology of migration, taking us to locations in the Global South where this work is taking place. In Sanctuary in Countries of Origin: A Transnational Perspectives, she investigates the concept of sanctuary through a case study of her home country of Mexico, determining that the term is an uneasy fit and that the practice of sanctuary is more transformative in the Mexican context.
Délano begins with an examination of historical sanctuary practices in Mexico, noting that, much like in the United States, the main actors have been migrant shelters, churches, and community organizations, but that Mexicans are more likely to use the terms hospitality, shelter, and welcome to describe the support offered to migrants. Given that the Spanish definition of sanctuary tends to focus narrowly on religious spaces, she questions its political power in popular discourse. Délano also asks the key question about sanctuary that Mexicans raised in response to the Central American caravans in 2018, namely, whether sanctuary can exist in a location that is unsafe and under-resourced even for locals. She also explores the complexity and contradiction in the political discourse around these caravans, noting an about-face between governments, from a discourse of hospitality for asylum seekers to the assertion just a few months later that Mexico is not a sanctuary or a “country of open doors” by the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Continue reading "Whither Sanctuary? Shifting the Sites of Knowledge Production"
Dec 15, 2022 Jill FamilyLexImmigration
An immigration lawyer’s work is rarely easy. The outcomes are high stakes, and the statutes are complex and harsh. The law is unstable because immigration law relies heavily on shifting agency memos. Backlogs and case completion times seem only to multiply. Clients understandably are on edge, and lawyers try to help them comprehend a maddening system. Immigration law is a challenging practice area, no matter who occupies the White House. During the Trump administration, however, the executive branch made things especially difficult as it focused its power on grinding the system to a halt.
In the midst of the Trump administration, asylum lawyers participated in a survey administered by Professors Lindsay Harris and Hillary Mellinger. Harris and Mellinger’s main finding is high levels of burnout and secondary traumatic stress among the asylum attorneys who responded to the survey. These attorneys scored higher, meaning more burnout, than social workers, hospital doctors, nurses, prison wardens, and immigration judges. In Asylum Attorney Burnout and Secondary Trauma, Harris and Mellinger report their methods and findings, and make recommendations for alleviating the status quo. Continue reading "The Immigration Lawyers are Not “Alright”"
