Tag Archives: Immigration
Dec 10, 2019 Jill FamilyLexImmigration
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"
Nov 14, 2019 Juliet StumpfLexImmigration
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"
Mar 19, 2019 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
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"
Jan 17, 2019 Jill FamilyLexImmigration
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"
Sep 10, 2018 Jaya Ramji-NogalesLexImmigration
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"
Jul 20, 2018 Juliet StumpfLexImmigration
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"
Jun 6, 2018 Angela BanksLexImmigration
Ming H. Chen,
Leveraging Social Science Expertise in Immigration Policymaking, 112
Northwestern L. Rev. Online (forthcoming 2018), available at
SSRN.
In President Donald J. Trump’s first State of the Union address he framed immigrants as dangerous criminals—gang members and murderers. To address this public safety threat President Trump proposed building a wall along the Southern border, ending the visa lottery, and eliminating the majority of family-based green cards. Yet social science research dating back to the early 1900s has found that immigrant criminal activity is significantly lower than United States citizen criminal activity. Despite these robust social science findings, immigration policy makers continue to promote and adopt policies based on the idea that immigrants present a significant public safety risk to the American public.
Ming H. Chen’s forthcoming essay, Leveraging Social Science Expertise in Immigration Policymaking, offers a critical intervention at this time in immigration policymaking. Chen’s essay presents concrete strategies that immigration policymakers can utilize to ground immigration policymaking in facts and social science insights. Chen’s recommendations focus on the process by which immigration decisions are made and seek to bring traditional administrative and constitutional principles into the process. First, bring presidential policymaking into the administrative state. Second, use political mechanisms to improve the quality of evidence used in the immigration policymaking process. Finally, strengthen judicial review of immigration policy. Continue reading "The Need For Facts In Immigration Policymaking"
Nov 30, 2017 Jill FamilyLexImmigration
Ming Hsu Chen,
The Administrator-in-Chief: The President and Executive Action in Immigration Law, 69
Admin. L. Rev. 347 (2017), available at
SSRN.
Professor Ming Chen’s Administrator-In-Chief: The President and Executive Action in Immigration Law is an ambitious effort to peer inside the relationship between a president and administrative agencies. It is the executive branch equivalent to the legislative sausage. Professor Chen concludes that a president is on strongest footing when he “promot[es] practices of good government in agencies rather than trying to substitute his policymaking judgments for those of the agency.” (P. 359.) The article emphasizes that the president should focus on his control over three things: (1) coherent federal policy; (2) centralized agency discretion, ensuring consistency, and (3) coordinating actions across all agencies. The article concludes that procedural choices matter; the president should work hard to set a procedural example and to use his influence to encourage procedural choices that will strengthen the legitimacy of policies. Professor Chen argues that the normative justifiability of presidential policymaking rests on whether the president is promoting coherency, consistency and coordination.
While three case studies from the Obama Administration’s approach to immigration law guide the article’s analysis, the analysis includes lessons for any president. In developing these case studies, Professor Chen conducted interviews with government officials and immigration advocates. The subject of the first case study is President Obama’s use of agency guidance documents to announce the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (“DAPA”) policies. The second case study focuses on President Obama’s attempts to set removal and detention priorities. Professor Chen walks us through several incarnations of enforcement policies that attempted to express President Obama’s priorities for detention and removal. These policies called on local law enforcement to share information about individuals with federal immigration agents and to detain individuals while waiting for federal immigration officials to travel to a jail to take custody of an individual. The third case study examines the Obama Administration’s efforts to respond to a surge of asylum seekers at the Mexican border. Continue reading "Procedure Matters"
Oct 16, 2017 Angela BanksLexImmigration
Kerry Abrams,
Family Reunification and the Security State (forthcoming, 2017), available at
SSRN.Many Americans believe that one of the functions of United States immigration law is to facilitate family reunification. For example, the idea that if a non-citizen marries a United States citizen that person can reside in the United States with their U.S. citizen spouse. Yet another function of U.S. immigration law is border control to protect national security. Consequently, if the United States government deems a non-citizen a security threat, regardless of their relationship to a U.S. citizen, that non-citizen could be denied entry to the United States. The relationship between these two immigration law functions—family reunification and national security—has varied throughout American history.
Kerry Abrams’ forthcoming article, Family Reunification and the Security State, provides a framework for understanding the “shifting and complex relationship” between these two immigration law functions. (P. 1.) Professor Abrams identifies three periods of U.S. history in which the relationship between these two immigration law functions has varied. During the age of the unitary family there was little tension between the two immigration law functions, and family unity was paramount. In the subsequent age of security, the State’s concern about national security threats increased and family reunification was subordinated to border control. We are currently in the age of balancing in which family rights are viewed as individual constitutional rights that must be balanced with the State’s interest in border control. The implications of these shifts are highly visible today as citizens challenge President Trump’s executive order limiting migration from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen based on their interest in family reunification. Continue reading "Protecting the Right to Family Life in Immigration Law"
Jul 3, 2017 Juliet StumpfLexImmigration
Jennifer M. Chacón,
Producing Liminal Legality, 92
Denver U. L. Rev. (forthcoming), available at
SSRN.
Jennifer Chacon’s Producing Liminal Legality is a must read, and not only because the title so aptly reflects the liminality of the article itself. The work is betwixt and between criminal and immigration law, between formal and functional analysis, pointing back in history and forward towards social change. It appears in a symposium issue, itself a liminal form of academic discourse, suspended between the immediacy of the academic blog post and the timeless stand-alone academic article. In light of the seemingly permanent status of liminal legality, this article promises to be both hot and timeless, with an illumination in every section.
Chacón draws from the cresting edge of the social science around liminal legal subjects, using it to uncover and critique the legal mechanisms that produce liminal legality. She describes the liminal legal statuses that are proliferating within immigration law and beyond it. Liminal legal categories function in two ways: “to effectuate administrative resource conservation through community-oriented risk management strategies” and to allow governmental actors to assert control over identified populations in ways that avoid the rights-protective schemes of the twentieth century. Continue reading "Living in Liminal Legality"
