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Immigration Law Commons

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Administrative Law

University of Michigan Law School

Citizenship

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Full-Text Articles in Immigration Law

Easing The Guidance Document Dilemma Agency By Agency: Immigration Law And Not Really Binding Rules, Jill E. Family Sep 2013

Easing The Guidance Document Dilemma Agency By Agency: Immigration Law And Not Really Binding Rules, Jill E. Family

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Immigration law relies on rules that bind effectively, but not legally, to adjudicate millions of applications for immigration benefits every year. This Article provides a blueprint for immigration law to improve its use of these practically binding rules, often called guidance documents. The agency that adjudicates immigration benefit applications, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), should develop and adopt its own Good Guidance Practices to govern how it uses guidance documents. This Article recommends a mechanism for reform, the Good Guidance Practices, and tackles many complex issues that USCIS will need to address in creating its practices. The recommended …


The Shifting Border Of Immigration Regulation, Ayelet Shachar Jan 2009

The Shifting Border Of Immigration Regulation, Ayelet Shachar

Michigan Journal of International Law

While American immigration law is still largely informed by the doctrine of plenary power, which holds that "[a]dmission to the United States is a privilege granted by the sovereign" (as the Supreme Court asserted in Knauff more than fifty years ago), what has dramatically changed in recent years is the location of "our gates," which no longer stand at the country's territorial edges. Instead, the border itself has become a moving barrier, a legal construct that is not tightly fixed to territorial benchmarks. This shifting border of immigration regulation, as we might call it, is selectively utilized by national …