Tag Archives: Immigration

Rescue Based in Liberty and Dignity

Shalini Bhargava Ray, The Law of Rescue, 108 Cal. L. Rev. 619 (2020).

The Law of Rescue connects aiding migrants to the body of law governing rescue generally. Professor Shalini Bhargava Ray proposes a new theoretical framework for the law of rescue based on her examination of prosecutions for migrant rescue. Her framework de-emphasizes economic interests and lifts up considerations of liberty and dignity.

While “[t]he law of rescue was not designed to express, promote, or protect the human dignity of beneficiaries or the liberty of rescuers,” (P. 623) Professor Ray argues that it should be redesigned to do so. Her new framework would balance three considerations: (1) the rescuer’s liberty to engage in the rescue; (2) the beneficiary’s need for rescue; and (3) the potential third-party harm flowing from a consensual rescue. Continue reading "Rescue Based in Liberty and Dignity"

Resistance is Not As Useless As We Believed

Daniel Farbman, Resistance Lawyering, 107 Cal. L. Rev. 6 (2019), available at SSRN.

“Resistance is useless,” said the Vogon guard to Ford and Arthur, the intergalactic protagonists of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That statement turned out to be pretty accurate. Despite Ford’s attempt at resistance through searing critique of the bureaucratic system that the Vogon guard serves, he and Arthur are summarily pushed through the airlock into the starry void.1

Perhaps what Ford needed was the lesson in Daniel Farbman’s Resistance Lawyering:  that resistance staged from within an unjust and illegitimate system, rather than from the outside, can be dramatically effective. Farbman illustrates this through examining resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the sharp edge of a system that shaped both the racial trajectory of this nation and our national yardstick of the meaning of injustice. Continue reading "Resistance is Not As Useless As We Believed"

Long-Term Residence as Evidence of De Facto Membership

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Americans In Waiting: Finding Solutions for Long Term Residents, 46 Notre Dame J. Leg. 29 (2019).

In 2018 the Pew Research Center reported that approximately two-thirds of all unauthorized migrant adults in the United States have lived here for more than ten years. The average length of residence is fifteen years. The unauthorized migrant population has become a more settled population rather than a temporary population and mass deportation is politically impossible. In light of these realities it is critically important to seriously explore a pathway to lawful immigration status and/or citizenship for this population. Wadhia’s recent article in the Notre Dame Journal of Legislation argues that long-term residence should be a basis for access to regularizing immigration status in the United States. This argument is rooted in the historical use of long-term residence as the basis for a variety of forms of relief in immigration law.

Americans in Waiting: Finding Solutions for Long Term Residents offers a detailed overview of the role that long-term residence has played in the past, the role that it currently plays, and the role that it could play to address the immigration status of the almost 11 million unauthorized migrants in the United States. Long-term residence in the United States has been recognized as a mitigating factor in deportation cases since 1891 when Congress authorized the deportation of individuals who became a public charge within one year of arrival. The one-year statute of limitations was later extended to five years and this approach to deportation grounds was continued in 1917 when crime-based deportation grounds were adopted. Continue reading "Long-Term Residence as Evidence of De Facto Membership"

Watch This Space: AI at the Border

Petra Molnar, Technology on the margins: AI and Global Migration Management from a Human Rights Perspective, 8 Cambridge Int’l L. J. 305 (2019).

As scholars of immigration law have been busy digesting the firehose of law and policy changes shooting out of the Trump administration, the use of new technologies at the border has been proliferating. Petra Molnar’s new article, Technology on the margins: AI and Global Migration Management from a Human Rights Perspective, reminds us that we must begin to pay closer attention to these developments and how they are deployed and regulated. Building on her excellent report, Bots at the Gate, the article provides a timely and useful roadmap of the relevant technologies and their very real risks. Though in the end Molnar is more sanguine than I about the potential of human rights law to mediate these risks, she rings a crucially important warning bell that we would all do well to keep an ear out for over the roar of the firehose.

The article begins, as it should, with a basic description of the “class of technologies that assist or replace the judgment of human decision-makers.” Automated decision-making has the potential to impact adjudication processes and outcomes by the full range of immigration actors, from border patrol to immigration courts. But what technologies are contained within this category? Molnar lists four: artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated decision systems, and predictive analytics, describing them as technologies that can be taught and can learn. Along with the description, she raises the key concern about the opacity of how exactly these decisions are made. As Frank Pasquale and others have asked, what is in that algorithm? Bias, perhaps? Molnar makes the important connection between the literature that critically examines automated decision-making and immigration adjudication. She notes that these technologies present the same risks as human decision-makers: accountability, bias, discrimination, error, and transparency, reminding us not to be fooled by the algorithm’s veneer of scientific objectivity. Continue reading "Watch This Space: AI at the Border"

Creatively Searching for Fairness

Fatma Marouf, Invoking Common Law Defenses in Immigration Cases, 66 UCLA L. Rev. 142 (2019).

Immigration lawyers search for ways to squeeze fairness out of a system that bristles at the concept. Professor Marouf’s article, Invoking Common Law Defenses in Immigration Cases, is a wonderful contribution to this immigration law tradition of creatively searching for fairness in the system. The harshness of immigration law creates the need for Professor Marouf’s contribution. The value of her contribution stems not only from her creative approach, but because her efforts serve as a reminder that immigration law desperately needs reform to become fair.

Professor Marouf is driven to explore the applicability of common law defenses in immigration cases precisely because immigration law is not fair. If consequences were proportional, if more robust relief from removal were available, or if the grounds of removal were not so broad, there would be less of a need for creative approaches such as Professor Marouf’s. As Professor Marouf states in her article, “all possible defenses must be explored.” Continue reading "Creatively Searching for Fairness"

Crowd-Sourcing Decolonization

Tendaye Achiume, Migration As Decolonization, 71 Stan. L. Rev. 1509 (2019).

At last—an article that squarely confronts the unquestioned authority of nation states to exclude economic migrants, and that moves the discussion beyond the red cape of open borders. Tendayi Achiume deconstructs the stone foundations of sovereignty in her ambitious and thought-provoking article, Migration as Decolonization.

Above the fever pitch of international debate surrounding global migration, one truth seems unassailable: that it is the prerogative of the sovereign state to exclude economic migrants. Faced with this unbreachable barrier, the battle around immigration moves elsewhere, pitched instead around how broadly to define the categories of those privileged to cross international borders—which citizens, residents, workers, humanitarian refuge-seekers, among others. Separated from the sound and fury of this debate is a silence around when purely economic migrants—“those who enter the territory of a foreign state in order to pursue better life outcomes”—have any legal claim to cross borders.

Achiume’s thesis is that the process of decolonization, which is ensnared in inequitable neocolonial relationships, must continue through the right of individual self-determination through economic migration. This right has boundaries. It belongs to individuals from nations subjected to the inequity-producing rules and institutions of colonization, who seek to better themselves within nations that hold “colonial advantage” over the country from which the individual originates. The journey to this conclusion takes three moves. Continue reading "Crowd-Sourcing Decolonization"

Out of the Mouths of Babes

International and domestic laws aimed at protecting children involved in human smuggling generally operate under the assumption that these children are vulnerable and defenseless prey to dangerous and violent criminals, for whom they work against their will. In her recent article, “Circuit Children”: The Experiences and Perspectives of Children Engaged in Migrant Smuggling Facilitation on the US-Mexico Border, sociologist Gabriella Sanchez uses original qualitative fieldwork to upend or at least nuance this claim that sits at the heart of current anti-smuggling laws. The children whose stories she tells offer a much more complex picture of their role in helping others navigate the U.S.-Mexico border.

While many scholars have decried the carceral turn in human smuggling laws, Sanchez offers a key piece of evidence demonstrating the fundamental problems with this move to criminalization. It is, as has been far too obvious of late, easy for politicians and governments to demonize actors in the migratory process, both migrants and those who help them to move. But the carceral approach masks the structural forces that render migration both necessary and nearly impossible to undertake lawfully for individuals who do not win the birthplace lottery. Sanchez’s body of work highlights the humanity and dignity of the individuals who facilitate migrant journeys—who might, from a different perspective, be viewed as part of a modern-day Underground Railroad. Though she refrains from hitting the reader over the head, the unmistakable take-away from her work is that these individuals are not the source of the problem; they are doing the best they can in the face of structural and geopolitical forces beyond their control. Continue reading "Out of the Mouths of Babes"

Translating Economics for Immigration Policy

Howard F. Chang, The Economics of Immigration Reform, 52 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 111 (2018).

Scholarship that translates and connects one discipline to another is a special treasure. The need for this type of scholarship is especially great in immigration law. Immigration law is interwoven with many other disciplines, but immigration law scholars often are so occupied with the extreme complexity and immediacy of the legal discipline that it can be difficult to branch out. I’m selfishly fond of The Economics of Immigration Reform by Howard Chang because it does a great service to those of us who needed a lucid and approachable explanation of the economics behind immigration law reform. Professor Chang explains in detail why immigration restrictionists are wrong when they argue that less immigration makes economic sense. If less immigration is desirable, it is not for economic reasons.

Professor Chang uses economic theory to evaluate recent legislation proposed to restrict legal immigration. Along the way, Professor Chang examines two major economic studies that both concluded that immigration produces a positive fiscal impact, one from 1997 and one from 2017. In the process of using the studies to evaluate proposed limits on immigration, Professor Chang teaches us that the assumptions underlying any economic study affect outcomes. Continue reading "Translating Economics for Immigration Policy"

Populist Judicial Reasoning

Under the Trump administration, each week brings a new attack on due process and on substantive protections for migrants. Sacred cows such as Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans, which had been extended by Democratic and Republican administrations alike for the past two decades, are dispatched with alacrity. Attorney General Sessions appears intent on destroying the immigration adjudication system, demanding that immigration judges meet unrealistic case completion goals and reversal rates while limiting the resources available to the system. Migrants’ rights are a constant source of litigation, from highly anticipated Supreme Court judgments to battles fought through amicus briefs before the Attorney General.

Beyond the momentary relief of deft political satire, a comparative glimpse across the pond can provide helpful perspective on the situation at home. Vladislava Stoyanova’s forthcoming article reminds us that we are not the only nation facing populist movements that “exploit public anxieties over migration” in order to “curb[] immigration and restrict the rights of migrants.” Her rigorous and painstaking analysis of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) decisions prompts analysis of larger philosophical questions about law’s paradoxical approach to migrants’ rights and offers a provocative new concept: populist judicial reasoning. Continue reading "Populist Judicial Reasoning"

Modernizing Immigration Enforcement

Amanda Frost, Cooperative Enforcement in Immigration Law, 103 Iowa L. Rev. 1 (2017).

Public rhetoric about immigration paints the issues in stark terms. Immigrants are either criminals and terrorists or they are family members, workers, and survivors of persecution. Immigration is either our secret sauce, the key to our national prosperity, or it is the sleeper cell in our midst, the smooth-talking snake. It is about inclusion or exclusion, banishment or return, belonging or outcast. Immigrants are virtual citizens, or vicious vipers. They are law-abiding; they are lawless.

Amanda Frost’s Cooperative Enforcement in Immigration Law describes how this dichotomy in the discourse plays out in approaches to deportation policy. Deportation policy, she observes, is stuck in two parallel grooves. It demands either unfettered deportation of unlawfully present noncitizens, or the exercise of prosecutorial discretion to permit prescribed groups of noncitizens to remain in the United States without a recognized status. Continue reading "Modernizing Immigration Enforcement"

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