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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race

Decitizenizing Asian Pacific American Women, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Margaret Hu Mar 2022

Decitizenizing Asian Pacific American Women, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Margaret Hu

Faculty Publications

The Page Act of 1875 excluded Asian women immigrants from entering the United States, presuming they were prostitutes. This presumption was tragically replicated in the 2021 Atlanta Massacre of six Asian and Asian American women, reinforcing the same harmful prejudices. This Article seeks to illuminate how the Atlanta Massacre is symbolic of larger forms of discrimination, including the harms of decitizenship. These harms include limited access to full citizenship rights due to legal barriers, restricted cultural and political power, and a lack of belonging. The Article concludes that these harms result from the structure of past and present immigration laws …


The Continuing Legacy Of The National Origin Quotas, Angela M. Banks Mar 2021

The Continuing Legacy Of The National Origin Quotas, Angela M. Banks

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.


Cowboys And Indians: Settler Colonialism And The Dog Whistle In U.S. Immigration Policy, Hannah Gordon Feb 2020

Cowboys And Indians: Settler Colonialism And The Dog Whistle In U.S. Immigration Policy, Hannah Gordon

University of Miami Law Review

The nineteenth-century Indian problem has become the twenty-first century border crisis. While the United States fancies itself a nation of immigrants, this rhetoric is impossible to square with the reality of the systematic exclusion of migrants of color. In particular, the Trump administration has taken the exclusion of migrants descended from the Indigenous inhabitants of Mexico and Central America to a reductio ad absurdum. This Note joins a body of scholarship that centers the history of genocide in the United States to examine what our settler colonial history means for today’s immigration law and policy. It concludes that the contemporary …


Undocumented Citizens Of The United States: The Repercussions Of Denying Birth Certificates, Anna L. Lichtenberger Jan 2018

Undocumented Citizens Of The United States: The Repercussions Of Denying Birth Certificates, Anna L. Lichtenberger

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming


Proving Identity, Jonathan Weinberg Jul 2017

Proving Identity, Jonathan Weinberg

Pepperdine Law Review

United States law, over the past two hundred years or so, has subjected people whose race rendered them noncitizens or of dubious citizenship to a variety of rules requiring that they carry identification documents at all times. Those laws fill a gap in the policing authority of the state, by connecting the individual’s physical body with information the government has on file about him; they also can entail humiliation and subordination. Accordingly, it is not surprising that U.S. law has almost always imposed these requirements on people outside our circle of citizenship: African Americans in the antebellum South, Chinese immigrants, …


Deported By Marriage: Americans Forced To Choose Between Love And Country, Beth Caldwell Dec 2016

Deported By Marriage: Americans Forced To Choose Between Love And Country, Beth Caldwell

Brooklyn Law Review

As the fiftieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia approaches, de jure prohibitions against interracial marriages are history. However, marriages between people of different national origins continue to be undermined by the law. The Constitution does not protect the marital rights of citizens who marry noncitizens in the same way that it protects all other marriages. Courts have consistently held that a spouse’s deportation does not implicate the rights of American citizens, and the Constitution has long been held inapplicable in protecting the substantive due process rights of noncitizens facing deportation. Given the spike in deportations over the past decade, hundreds …


Ownership Without Citizenship: The Creation Of Noncitizen Property Rights, Allison Brownell Tirres Dec 2013

Ownership Without Citizenship: The Creation Of Noncitizen Property Rights, Allison Brownell Tirres

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

At the nation’s founding, the common law of property defined ownership as an incident of citizenship. Noncitizens were unable lawfully to hold, devise, or inherit property. This doctrine eroded during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but few scholars have examined its demise or the concommittant rise of property rights for foreigners. This Article is the first sustained treatment of the creation of property rights for noncitizens in American law. It uncovers two key sources for the rights that emerged during the nineteenth century: federal territorial law, which allowed for alien property ownership and alien suffrage, and state …


¡Silencio! Undocumented Immigrant Witnesses And The Right To Silence, Violeta R. Chapin Sep 2011

¡Silencio! Undocumented Immigrant Witnesses And The Right To Silence, Violeta R. Chapin

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

At a time referred to as "an unprecedented era of immigration enforcement," undocumented immigrants who have the misfortune to witness a crime in this country face a terrible decision. Calling the police to report that crime will likely lead to questions that reveal a witness's inmigration status, resulting in detention and deportation for the undocumented immigrant witness. Programs like Secure Communities and 287(g) partnerships evidence an increase in local immigration enforcement, and this Article argues that undocumented witnesses' only logical response to these programs is silence. Silence, in the form of a complete refusal to call the police to report …


Immigration And The Meaning Of United States Citizenship: Whiteness And Assimilation, George A. Martinez Jan 2007

Immigration And The Meaning Of United States Citizenship: Whiteness And Assimilation, George A. Martinez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

At the outset of the twenty-first century, United States immigration policy has become one of the most pressing issues of our time. In recent years, we have witnessed, among other things, calls for dramatically restricting immigration in light of an alleged threat to American national identity, increased border enforcement associated with thousands of deaths on the United States/Mexico border, vigilante activity, special immigration procedures enacted for the "War on Terror," and mass marches protesting draconian immigration reform in cities across the United States. Against this background, this essay seeks to explore what immigration and the various issues it raises have …


Race Discourse And Proposition 187, John Sw Park Jan 1996

Race Discourse And Proposition 187, John Sw Park

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Proposition 187 inspired a visceral public discourse. Proponents and opponents of the measure discussed several themes important to contemporary political theory, particularly themes related to sovereignty and civil rights. This Note shows how participants in that debate-including people of color-spoke of "rights" in a way that denied the possibility for undocumented aliens to have rights. When citizens spoke, they did so in a way that implicitly linked rights to citizenship; in other words, they assumed that without citizenship, persons were not entitled to rights or rights-based claims. Ironically, the debate about Proposition 187 pointed to the achievements of a "civil …