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Full-Text Articles in Immigration Law

The Juarez Wives Club: Gendered Citizenship And Us Immigration Law, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz Apr 2016

The Juarez Wives Club: Gendered Citizenship And Us Immigration Law, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

When US citizens sponsor their undocumented
spouses for lawful status, they find themselves at
the center of immigration petitions. They are
invasively scrutinized, treated with bureaucratic
indifference, and separated from their loved ones.
As this “politics of exception,” which often targets
migrants, is unleashed on US citizens, they learn
that their citizenship offers little protection from
dehumanizing treatment. Instead, restrictive
immigration criteria, designed in theory to boost
the value of US citizenship, in practice dehumanize
US citizens and can alienate them from feelings of
national belonging. This contradiction inevitably
emerges when shared lives disrupt the boundaries of
citizenship status, illuminating …


The Problem Of State Intervention In Post-Abolition Slavery: A Critique Of Consensus, Anthony Talbott, David Watkins Apr 2016

The Problem Of State Intervention In Post-Abolition Slavery: A Critique Of Consensus, Anthony Talbott, David Watkins

David Watkins

Slavery is now illegal by all states and under international law. Contrary to the hopes of abolitionists, this state of affairs has transformed rather than eradicated slavery as an institution. Furthermore, responses by states to post-abolition forms of slavery have often been less than ideal. This paper begins by comparing two state responses to slavery in the early 20th century: the federal peonage trials in Montgomery, Alabama from 1903-1905, and the federal response to an alleged epidemic of “white slavery” from 1909-1910, culminating in the passage of the White Slave-Traffic Act. Taken together, these responses engender pessimism about the state …


Moral Judgments, Expressive Functions, And Bias In Immigration Law, Emily Ryo Dec 2015

Moral Judgments, Expressive Functions, And Bias In Immigration Law, Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo

In a lucid and trenchant style characteristic of Professor Hiroshi Motomura’s writing, Immigration Outside the Law offers rich descriptive and prescriptive analyses of three major themes underlying debates about unauthorized migration: the meaning of unlawful presence, state and local involvement in the regulation of unauthorized migration, and the integration of unauthorized migrants into American society. This review advances several ideas that I argue are important to understanding these key themes. In brief, I suggest that a more comprehensive understanding of public debates about unauthorized migration requires examining lay moral judgments about unlawful presence, the expressive functions of immigration law, and …


Detained: A Study Of Immigration Bond Hearings, Emily Ryo Dec 2015

Detained: A Study Of Immigration Bond Hearings, Emily Ryo

Emily Ryo

Immigration judges make consequential decisions that fundamentally affect the basic life chances of thousands of noncitizens and their family members every year. Yet, we know very little about how immigration judges make their decisions, including decisions about whether to release or detain noncitizens pending the completion of their immigration cases. Using original data on long-term immigrant detainees, I examine for the first time judicial decision-making in immigration bond hearings. I find that there are extremely wide variations in the average bond grant rates and bond amount decisions among judges in the study sample. What are the determinants of these bond …