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Public Health And The Power To Exclude: Immigrant Expulsions At The Border, Sarah R. Sherman-Stokes

Faculty Scholarship

We are presently in the midst of a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, as Courts, and indeed the Biden Administration, are struggling to manage thousands of immigrants waiting to seek asylum in the midst of a global pandemic. Beginning in March of 2020, against the advice of public health experts, the U.S. Government closed the southern U.S.-Mexico border, disproportionately impacting would-be asylum seekers from Central America, who are now immediately expelled from the United States should they reach the border under a process known as “Title 42.” Not only do these expulsions lack a legitimate public health rationale, but they …

Oral Testimonies Of Female Emigrants From Northern Ireland: Finding The The Universal And Unique Stories Of Migration, Lisa Ahmed

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

The purpose of this paper is to add a nuanced understanding to the study of women and migration. By using oral testimonies to conduct this narrative research study I was able to add to growing body of knowledge on women and migration. This study focused on women who arrived in the United States from Northern Ireland, for family the migration process started in Germany. The terms migration, emigration and immigration are used in the paper to describe people in movement within and across national borders. This narrative illustrates some of the consequences when nation states use their power to facilitate …

Revisiting The New Politics Of Immigration, Catherine Dauvergne

All Faculty Publications

This article follows from the workshop that Professor Mireille Paquet organized in Montreal in June 2018, to discuss my book, The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Soci- eties (Cambridge, 2016; Dauvergne 2016). In relation to this event and the articles of this spe- cial issue, this paper embarks on revisiting The New Politics of Immigration, now more than three after it first appeared in print. In this paper, I reflect on whether my arguments stand up to the test presented by the events of the past three years. Recent events lead me to nuance some of …

Publicly Charged: A Critical Examination Of Immigrant Public Benefit Restrictions, Cori Alonso-Yoder

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Since the early days of the Trump Administration, reports of the President’s controversial and dramatic immigration policies have dominated the news. Yet, despite the intensity of this coverage, an immigration policy with far broader implications for millions of immigrants and their U.S.- citizen family members has dodged the same media glare. By expanding the definition of who constitutes a “public charge” under immigration law, the Administration has begun a process to restrict legal immigration and chill the use of welfare benefits around the country. The doctrine of public charge exclusion developed from colonial times and has reemerged in Trump Administration …

Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

In a two-year period, 1885-86, over 168 communities in America forcibly expelled Chinese residents from their midst. This essay, inspired by historian Beth Lew-Williams's book, THE CHINESE MUST GO, investigates the nineteenth-century purges of Chinese residents that occurred throughout the American west. I make three arguments. First, these acts of racial and political terror complicate our understanding of racial violence in America. Many of the actions were denounced, but they were also surprisingly effective in forcing business and political leaders to support the indefinite suspension of Chinese migration. Perpetrators faced almost no legal repercussions, and unlike for freed persons, racial …

Racial Purges, Robert L. Tsai

Michigan Law Review

Review of Beth Lew-Williams' The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

Enter At Your Own Risk: Criminalizing Asylum-Seekers, Thomas M. Mcdonnell, Vanessa H. Merton

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In nearly three years in office, President Donald J. Trump’s war against immigrants and the foreign-born seems only to have intensified. Through a series of Executive Branch actions and policies rather than legislation, the Trump Administration has targeted immigrants and visitors from Muslim-majority countries, imposed quotas on and drastically reduced the independence of Immigration Court Judges, cut the number of refugees admitted by more than 80%, cancelled DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and stationed Immigration Customs and Enforcement (“ICE”) agents at state courtrooms to arrest unauthorized immigrants, intimidating them from participating as witnesses and litigants. Although initially saying that …

2019 - Japanese Pamphlets Inventory - Draft

Japanese-American Pamphlet Inventory

An inventory of a series of pamphlets published from 1906 through 1925 focused on the presence of Japanese in America, the perception by some that Japan was taking steps to take over America, the great lengths gone to deprive Japanese residing in the United States of land either by purchase or lease and even citizenship, the depiction of Japanese as inferior humans in terms of intellect and morals standing, agreement and laws enacted to limit the ability of Japanese to participate in the economy, anti-Japanese organizations, speeches before various legislative bodies in opposition to the Japanese, Japanese responses to the …

Immigration Unilateralism And American Ethnonationalism, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper arose from an invited symposium on "Democracy in America: The Promise and the Perils," held at Loyola University Chicago School of Law in Spring 2019. The essay places the Trump administration’s immigration and refugee policy in the context of a resurgent ethnonationalist movement in America as well as the constitutional politics of the past. In particular, it argues that Trumpism’s suspicion of foreigners who are Hispanic or Muslim, its move toward indefinite detention and separation of families, and its disdain for so-called “chain migration” are best understood as part of an assault on the political settlement of the …

Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Immigration Enforcement's Failed Experiment With Penal Severity, Teresa A. Miller

Teresa A. Miller

This article traces the evolution of “get tough” sentencing and corrections policies that were touted as the solution to a criminal justice system widely viewed as “broken” in the mid-1970s. It draws parallels to the adoption some twenty years later of harsh, punitive policies in the immigration enforcement system to address perceptions that it is similarly “broken,” policies that have embraced the theories, objectives and tools of criminal punishment, and caused the two systems to converge. In discussing the myriad of harms that have resulted from the convergence of these two systems, and the criminal justice system’s recent shift away …

Crimmigration-Counterterrorism, Margaret Hu

Scholarly Articles

The discriminatory effects that may stem from biometric ID cybersurveillance and other algorithmically driven screening technologies can be better understood through the analytical prism of “crimmigration-counterterrorism”: the conflation of crime, immigration, and counterterrorism policy. The historical genesis for this phenomenon can be traced back to multiple migration law developments, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. To implement stricter immigration controls at the border and interior, both the federal and state governments developed immigration enforcement schemes that depended upon both biometric identification documents and immigration screening protocols. This Article uses contemporary attempts to implement an expanded regime of “extreme vetting” …

Bridging Bisexual Erasure In Lgbt-Rights Discourse And Litigation, Nancy C. Marcus

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

LGBT rights are at the forefront of current legal news, with “gay marriage” and other “gay” issues visible beyond dispute in social and legal discourse in the 21st Century. Less visible are the bisexuals who are supposedly encompassed by the umbrella phrase “LGBT” and by LGBT-rights litigation, but who are often left out of LGBTrights discourse entirely. This Article examines the problem of bisexual invisibility and erasure within LGBT-rights litigation and legal discourse. The Article surveys the bisexual erasure legal discourse to date, and examines the causes of bisexual erasure and its harmful consequences for bisexuals, the broader LGBT community, …

Assessing The Velocity, Scale, Volume, Intensity And “Creedal Congruence” Of Immigrants In Setting A Nation’S Admissions Policy, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

Table of Contents Death of the “Melting Pot” The Rejection of Assimilation and the Rise of “Identity Sects” Western Europe and the US Face Significant Challenges to Their Creeds and Cultures The Radicalizing Search for Identity and Meaning The Velocity, Scale and Difference of Migrant Entry Into Dissimilar Cultures Assimilation Is Not Easy Under the Best of Circumstances ISIS, al-Qaeda and The Old Man of the Mountain What Are the Creedal Values For Which Western Nations Should Expect Commitment from Immigrants and Citizens? “Warning! Do Not Approach!” Beyond Non-Assimilation to Cultural Transformation The Right to Preserve a “Cultural Ecosystem” The …

Elusive Equality: Reflections On Justice Field’S Opinions In Chae Chan Ping And Fong Yue Ting, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

For immigration scholars, Justice Field is perhaps best remembered for his majority opinion in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Chinese exclusion, and credited for introducing the plenary power doctrine to immigration law. Yet, despite the opinion’s xenophobic rhetoric reflecting his personal views of the Chinese, Justice Field dissented in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, reasoning that, once they became lawful residents, the Chinese were entitled to be treated as equals under the law regardless of citizenship, a position supported by his earlier federal circuit court opinion in Ho Ah Kow v. …

Elusive Equality: Reflections On Justice Field’S Opinions In Chae Chan Ping And Fong Yue Ting, Victor C. Romero

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Elusive Equality: Reflections On Justice Field’S Opinions In Chae Chan Ping And Fong Yue Ting, Victor C. Romero

Victor C. Romero

For immigration scholars, Justice Field is perhaps best remembered for his majority opinion in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Chinese exclusion, and credited for introducing the plenary power doctrine to immigration law. Yet, despite the opinion’s xenophobic rhetoric reflecting his personal views of the Chinese, Justice Field dissented in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, reasoning that, once they became lawful residents, the Chinese were entitled to be treated as equals under the law regardless of citizenship, a position supported by his earlier federal circuit court opinion in Ho Ah Kow v. …

History Repeats Itself: Parallels Between Current-Day Threats To Immigrant Parental Rights And Native American Parental Rights In The Twentieth Century, Vinita B. Andrapalliyal

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Immigrant parents are currently burdened with unique risks to their parental rights, risks that bear little relation to their ability to care for their children. Recent developments in family and immigration law, historical cultural prejudices against non-Western parenting traditions, and poor immigrants’ limited access to the U.S. legal system are largely to blame. This Note explores the inadequacies in our legal system contributing to the struggles of immigrant parents to maintain family unity and connects the current situation to the disproportionate number of terminations of parental rights within the Native American community in the mid-twentieth century. It suggests that a …

Race And Immigration, Then And Now: How The Shift To "Worthiness" Undermines The 1965 Immigration Law's Civil Rights Goals, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay looks at how far immigration reform has come from the explicit civil rights character of the 1965 immigration law that reshaped America. The optimism surrounding that law’s dismantling of national-origins barriers to immigration proved to be overstated in the intervening decades, as the factors determining an immigrant’s “worth and qualifications” too often became proxies for race. After briefly looking at work done by critical race theorists tracing some of ways race and immigration have long intersected in immigration legal history, the article closely examines modern-day immigration reform proposals, particularly the Senate bill that remains the most complete articulation …

Beyond Saints And Sinners: Discretion And The Need For New Narratives In The U.S. Immigration System, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

Beyond Saints and Sinners examines the forces affecting the exercise of discretion in American immigration courts, and argues that in this present age of immigration anxiety, the same facts that place an individual in deportation proceedings may constitute the reasons a judge will, relying on discretion, deny them relief for which they are otherwise eligible. The article explores the polarized narratives told about "good" and "bad" immigrants, the exceptionally difficult task of adjudicating in overburdened immigration courts, and the ways in which these polarized narratives interact with psychological short-cuts, or heuristics, that affect judicial exercises of discretion. After engaging in …

The Domestic Face Of Globalization: Law's Role In The Integration Of Immigrants In The United States, Alfred C. Aman, Graham Rehrig

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article applies a global perspective to immigration in the United States, focusing in particular on law’s role in the integration of immigrants into U.S. society. The global perspective illuminates the relationship of immigration to other forms of transnationalism, as well as to the situation of non-immigrant minorities and the working poor. We review the history of immigration law in the United States as well as the main elements of current debate. Drawing on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection, as well as the preemption doctrine, we suggest specific ways in which immigration law might optimally evolve in the future. …

An Environmental Justice Critique Of Comparative Advantage: Indigenous Peoples, Trade Policy, And The Mexican Neoliberal Economic Reforms, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Carmen G. Gonzalez

The free market reforms adopted by Mexico in the wake of the debt crisis of the 1980s and in connection with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have jeopardized the physical and cultural survival of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, increased migration to the United States, threatened biological diversity in Mexico, and imposed additional stress on the environment in the United States. Despite these negative impacts, NAFTA continues to serve as a template for trade agreements in the Americas. Unless this template is fundamentally restructured, future trade agreements may replicate throughout the Western hemisphere many of the economic, ecological and social …

Lessons Learned, Lessons Lost: Immigration Enforcement's Failed Experiment With Penal Severity, Teresa A. Miller

Journal Articles

This article traces the evolution of “get tough” sentencing and corrections policies that were touted as the solution to a criminal justice system widely viewed as “broken” in the mid-1970s. It draws parallels to the adoption some twenty years later of harsh, punitive policies in the immigration enforcement system to address perceptions that it is similarly “broken,” policies that have embraced the theories, objectives and tools of criminal punishment, and caused the two systems to converge. In discussing the myriad of harms that have resulted from the convergence of these two systems, and the criminal justice system’s recent shift away …

Day Labor Markets And Public Space, Gregg Kettles

Gregg Kettles

Day laborers standing on street corners have become a more common, and more controversial, sight in many U.S. cities. Taking them to be evidence of public disorder and illegal immigration out of control, some communities have responded by adopting the strategy of exclusion. They have revived the enforcement of ordinances against loitering and vagrancy, and changed traffic rules to discourage drivers from stopping to pick up workers. Other communities have responded by adopting the strategy of shelter. Viewing street corner day laborers as vulnerable, these communities have opened indoor work centers that offer job placement and other services. Both of …

The Turner Thesis, Black Migration, And The (Misapplied) Immigrant Explanation Of Black Inequality, John Valery White

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Proxies For Loyalty In Constitutional Immigration Law: Citizenship And Race After September 11, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

The purpose of this article is to share some thoughts about using citizenship and race as proxies for loyalty in constitutional immigration discourse within two contexts: one historical and one current. The current context is the profiling of Muslim and Arab immigrants post-September 11, and the historical context is the distinction the Constitution draws between birthright and naturalized citizens in the Presidential Eligibility Clause.

Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune: The Deportation Of "Aggravated Felons", Valerie Neal

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Any foreign national who is convicted of an "aggravated felony," as that term is defined in the Immigration and Nationality Act, is subject to deportation from the United States. Deportation of so-called "aggravated felons" is in no way contingent upon the particular facts and circumstances in a given case. More troublingly, on the judiciary has no authority to review a deportation order based "aggravated felony" grounds. In the past decade, Congress has expanded the definition of "aggravated felony" to encompass many minor crimes that are neither aggravated nor felonious.

The deportation of foreign nationals on "aggravated felony" grounds is effectively …

The Selective Deportation Of Same-Gender Partners: In Search Of The "Rara Avis", Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

This article seeks to explore the possibility that a selective deportation of a same-gender partner who has overstayed her visa constitutes an outrageous case under the AADC test. Its modest goal is to discourage the INS from ever pursuing such a strategy, knowing that there are probably many who believe that same-gender overstays, even if civilly united in Vermont, are not the ideal candidates for "suspect class" status under U.S. constitutional law. That notwithstanding, common sense and sound doctrine suggest that, despite the many anti-gay and anti-immigrant decisions handed down over the last twenty years, the Court will not hesitate …

Call And Response: The Particular And The General, John A. Scanlan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Scheherezade Meets Kafka: Two Dozen Sordid Tales Of Ideological Exclusion, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

More than two dozen immigrants' in the United States are facing deportation² or removal ³ proceedings based primarily on evidence that the Immigration and Naturalization Service ("INS") has refused to disclose because it is "classified.", ⁴ The use of secret evidence in deportation proceedings is the most powerful tool in an apparently systematic attack by U.S. governmental agencies on the speech, association and religious activities of a very defined group of people: Muslims, Arabs, and U.S. lawful permanent residents of Arab origin residing in this country. Evidence emerging from these cases indicates that the government is spending thousands of …

Critical Race Theory-The Last Voyage, Dan Subotnik

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.