Immigration Law Commons^™

But For Borders: The Protection Gap For Internally Displaced Persons, Anita Sinha

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Internal displacement, encapsulating the phenomenon of people who are dislocated from their homes but remain within the border of their countries of origin, was once a forced migratory occurrence interchangeable with cross-border migration. This changed after the Second World War with the promulgation of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which was premised on an insistence of making a legal line in the sand based on which side of a border displacement ultimately transpires. Internally displaced persons (IDPs)—in recent history, presently, and in the projected future—far outpace the number of people displaced outside the border of their …

Immigraft, Jayesh Rathod, Anne Schaufele

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Pursuing the American dream is a costly endeavor. From the initial journey to the United States, to navigating the complicated immigration system, to labor exploitation, to scams targeting recent arrivals, immigrants pay heavily into the formal and informal sectors. As explored in this Essay, however, their pay-out does not stop there: the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also charges and retains funds in unjustified ways, resulting in tens of millions of dollars transferred from the pockets of vulnerable immigrants and their families to the sprawling immigration bureaucracy. This Essay introduces the term immigraft to capture this phenomenon, defined as …

Defining Detention: The Intervention Of The European Court Of Human Rights In The Detention Of Involuntary Migrants, Anita Sinha

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article examines the European Court of Human Rights' intervention in the detention of involuntary migrants. It analyzes the use of "carceral migration control" in response to a migration "crisis," and argues that the actual crisis in the region is one of politics and policies rather than the magnitude of migration. It explores the consequences of a crisis moniker for migration, including shortsighted migration policies, entrenched caricatures of migrants as threatening, and excessive emphasis on punitive rather than humanitarian responses. Responding to migration as a crisis has led states in Europe and elsewhere to shift the movement of people across …

Arbitrary Detention? The Immigration Detention Bed Quota, Anita Sinha

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

When President Obama took office in 2009, Congress through appropriations linked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) funding to “maintaining” 33,400 immigration detention beds a day. This provision, what this Article refers to as the bed quota, remains in effect, except now the mandate is 34,000 beds a day. Since 2009, DHS detentions of non-citizens have gone up by nearly 25 percent. To accommodate for this significant spike over a relatively short period of time, the federal government has relied considerably on private prison corporations to build and operate immigration detention facilities.

This Article takes a comprehensive look at …

Beyond A Snapshot: Preventing Human Trafficking In The Global Economy, Janie Chuang

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Current legal responses to the problem of human trafficking often reflect a deep reluctance to address the socio-economic root causes of the problem. Because they approach trafficking as an act (or series of acts) of violence, most responses focus predominantly on prosecuting traffickers, and to a lesser extent, protecting trafficked persons. While such approaches might account for the consequences of trafficking, they tend to overlook the broader socioeconomic reality that drives trafficking in human beings. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to reframe trafficking as a migratory response to current globalizing socioeconomic trends. It argues that, to be effective, counter-trafficking …