Immigration Law Commons^™

A National Study Of Immigration Detention In The United States, Emily Ryo, Ian Peacock

Emily Ryo

Highly Skilled Immigration In The United States In An Age Of Globalization: An Institutional And Agency Approach, Marcela F. González

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation proposes an institutional and agency approach in order to answer a new question to a new set of conditions, processes, and architecture of the new immigration trend for highly skilled immigration in the United States that emerged in the 1990s. The complexification of visa policies for highly skilled immigrants since the 1990s forces many immigrants to follow a multi-step legal pathway to acquire legal permanent residency: first, immigrants have a variety of temporary legal statuses or no legal status, and in a subsequent stage they achieve legal permanent residency. The central question that organizes the dissertation has two ...

Introduction To A Special Issue On The Impact Of Immigrant Legalization Initiatives: International Perspectives On Immigration And The World Of Work, Maria Lorena Cook, Shannon Gleeson, Kati L. Griffith, Lawrence M. Kahn

Articles and Chapters

This article is the third in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. The series features articles that analyze the state of research and future directions for important themes the journal has featured over its many years of publication. In this issue, we also feature a special cluster of articles and book reviews on one of the most critical labor market issues across the globe—the legalization and integration of immigrants into national labor markets.

Despite the urgent need for immigration reform in the United States, there is a paucity of US research that looks at ...

“Pernicious [E]Ffects”: Discretionary Decision-Making In Queer Immigration To Canada, Renata Colwell

Western Journal of Legal Studies

Over the past sixty-five years, Canada’s official attitude towards queer immigration has undergone dramatic changes, from overt exclusion to ostensible welcome. However, discretionary decision-making has remained a constant component of the evolving immigration frameworks affecting queer immigrants, with negative repercussions for queer applicants. From 1952 to 2017, queer immigration to Canada has been plagued by arbitrariness, unaccountability, unpredictability, and administrative scope for discriminatory exercises of discretion by decision-makers, resulting in harms that range from stress and vulnerability to unjust exclusion. In charting future courses to improve immigration outcomes for queer applicants and refugee claimants who seek to join us ...

A Nation Of Informants: Reining In Post-9/11 Coercion Of Intelligence Informants, Diala Shamas

Brooklyn Law Review

This article challenges the adequacy of the existing legal and regulatory framework governing informant recruitment and coercion practices to protect fundamental rights, informed by the Muslim-American experience. It looks at the growing law enforcement practice of recruiting informants among Muslim-American communities for intelligence gathering purposes. Although the coercion of law-abiding individuals to provide information to federal law enforcement agencies for intelligence gathering purposes implicates significant rights, it is left unregulated. Existing, albeit limited, restraints on the government agents’ ability to coerce individuals to provide information either assume a criminal context, or are driven by historical concerns over FBI corruption. As ...

Demanding Due Process: Time To Amend 8 U.S.C. § 1226(C) And Limit Indefinite Detention Of Criminal Immigrants, Allison M. Cunneen

Brooklyn Law Review

Under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(c), Congress mandates that the Attorney General detain criminal immigrants upon release from prison. The statute neither provides a temporal limitation to detention nor does it afford a criminal immigrant periodic bond hearings to determine whether he or she is a flight risk or danger to the community. Thus, until an immigration judge decides whether a criminal immigrant should be removed from the United States, that person remains detained. With the unprecedent backlog in immigration courts, criminal immigrants are waiting longer for a removal hearing, which means longer time spent in detention with no ...

Re-Victimization And The Asylum Process: Jimenez Ferreira V. Lynch: Re-Assessing The Weight Placed On Credible Fear Interviews In Determining Credibility, Alana Mosley

Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice

No abstract provided.

The Economics Of Immigration Reform, Howard F. Chang

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I draw upon economic theory and recent empirical work on the economic and fiscal effects of immigration to evaluate some recent proposals for immigration reform in terms of their effects on the economic welfare of natives in the United States. In particular, I consider the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy (RAISE) Act, a bill that would cut immigration to half of its current level. President Donald Trump has endorsed the RAISE Act and has insisted that many of its provisions be part of any legislation legalizing the status of unauthorized immigrants granted relief under the ...

'I Simply Do Not Believe...': A Case Study Of Credibility Determinations In Canadian Refugee Adjudication, Sean Rehaag

Sean Rehaag

Refugee determinations often turn on a single question: Is the refugee claimant telling the truth? While there are other factors that refugee adjudicators must consider, determining whether the claimant's story is credible remains central to virtually all refugee hearings. In light of the key role credibility assessments play in refugee determinations, scholars are paying increasingly more attention to how refugee adjudicators assess credibility.

This article contributes to the growing body of research on this subject by examining the full caseload of one refugee adjudicator at Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) over a three-year period. That adjudicator, David ...

Enforcing/Protection: The Danger Of Chevron In Refugee Act Cases, Maureen A. Sweeney

Faculty Scholarship

United States immigration courts that decide asylum cases are situated within the Justice Department – a law enforcement agency deeply invested in enforcing border control – and are subordinate to the Attorney General, the nation’s politically appointed chief law enforcement officer. This institutional subjugation of immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals challenges the system’s integrity and leaves people seeking protection promised by international treaty to the whims of an enforcement agency. Courts exacerbate the problem when they give Chevron deference to those Justice Department decisions rather than reviewing them rigorously. Given the prosecutorial nature of the Justice Department ...

A Better Balance For Federal Rules Governing Public Access To Appeal Records In Immigration Cases, Nancy Morawetz

New York University Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

In the first year of the Trump Administration, the courts played a critical role in reviewing and shaping federal immigration policy. When nonprofits and states filed prominent cases challenging the “travel ban,” the public could follow the court process in real time, as new filings were published on the web. But this access to filings is highly unusual for immigration cases. Due to Federal Rules promulgated in 2009, there are special restrictions on access to immigration filings that mean that filings in cases that are less prominent are impossible to access electronically. Thus, as immigration enforcement continues to ratchet up ...

The Impact Of Domestic Violence On Immigrant Women, Shawna C. Quast

DePaul Journal of Women, Gender and the Law

No abstract provided.

Modern Application Of The Islamic Principle Of Brotherhood: An Assessment Of The Syrian Refugees’ Relocation Solution In Egypt, Shams Al Din Al Hajjaji

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article argues that the Islamic principle of Brotherhood provides a feasible basis to solve the Arab refugee crisis. The Islamic solution is based on relocating Syrian refugees to Egypt. The solution has many positive factors that make it the most promising solution among the various other proposed solutions. The Syrian refugee crisis has been one of the major challenges for many Western countries, who have found themselves between a rock and a hard place, faced with two options. The first option involves agreeing to host the massive waves of refugees, to honor their principles of human dignity and morality ...

Legal Responses To The European Union’S Migration Crisis, Graham Butler

San Diego International Law Journal

The European Union (“EU”) imposes on itself its own constraints in which it performs as an external actor, and yet, there is little acknowledgment of this imposed constraint. It is the post-2015 migration crisis, an unexpected occurrence, which has brought the fields of EU external relation law and EU migration law together. Europe’s external border, on both land and sea, has tightened through legal acts of non-traditional nature, namely, the resort to securitisation and militarisation. Challenges, such as mass irregular migration, require more than just individual responses from a few selected Member States that are directly affected by the ...

The Uncertain Future Of Australia’S Pacific Solution, Chandra Roam

San Diego International Law Journal

The plight of a refugee is one that many of us will never understand. However, the ugly truth is that there is a global rise in the number of displaced persons seeking asylum. By the end of 2015, the number of displaced persons surpassed post World War II numbers, prompting developed nations around the world to enforce, amend, or implement policies targeted at controlling the flood of refugees at their borders. This Comment examines the policies of Australia, a nation that has had strict immigration policies in place for decades. Specifically, it discusses the Australian stance on refugee migration and ...

The Health Of Migrant Farmworkers In The Pacific Northwest: Access, Quality, And Health Disparities, Marleny Silva

Global Honors Theses

The health and well-being of migrant farmworkers have been neglected in the U.S. despite the prevalent reliance on undocumented foreign labor to fill the needs of the agricultural industry. In 1942, the U.S. signed a bilateral agreement with Mexico which allowed the recruitment of Mexican workers for temporary work in U.S. fields until the end of the program in 1964. This program contributed to the increase of Mexican migration even after its termination and reaffirmed our nation’s dependence on migrant farm workers, both documented and undocumented. Due to their undocumented status, undocumented migrant farmworkers experience neglect ...

Ganging Up On Immigration Law: Asylum Law And The Particular Social Group Standard - Former Gand Members And Their Need For Asylum Protections, Claudia B. Quintero

University of Massachusetts Law Review

The Refugee Act of 1980 was a significant piece of legislation for the development of asylum law, and the United States’ commitment to human rights and humanitarian concern for the struggles of refugees worldwide. The Act recognized the urgent needs of persons fleeing persecution in their homelands, asylees, and their need for protection and resettlement. The protections afforded in the Act extended to asylum seekers that were persecuted on the basis of (1) race, (2) religion, (3) nationality, (4) membership in a particular social group, or (5) political opinion. However, Congress did not define “membership in a particular social group ...

Sky Is The Limit: Protecting Unaccompanied Minors By Not Subjecting Them To Numerical Limitations, Deborah S. Gonzalez Esq.

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming

Death By Fifty Cuts: Exporting Lunn V. Commonwealth To Maine And The Prospects For Waging A Frontal Assault On The Ice Detainer System In State Courts, Sean Turley

Maine Law Review

As long as the future of federal immigration policy remains unsettled and the use of ICE detainers to capture and deport suspected noncitizens remains widespread, practitioners should focus their attention on waging a frontal assault against the legality of ICE detainers on state law grounds by arguing that they constitute warrantless arrests that are prohibited by state statute. The recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in Lunn v. Commonwealth provides a model for how to wage such an attack—not only in states with similar common law and statutory frameworks that are unlikely to resolve the issue legislatively, like Maine ...

Equal Protection And Scrutinizing Scrutiny: The Supreme Court’S Decision In Sessions V. Morales-Santana, Jonathan Burt

Utah Law Review

This Note attempts to synthesize the cases on 8 U.S.C. § 1409(c) and provide a workable framework for intermediate scrutiny in the equal protection realm. Intermediate scrutiny, like all levels of scrutiny, is an ends-means balancing test. Under intermediate scrutiny, the ends must be “important.” The interest cannot be “hypothetical” or “invented post hoc in response to litigation.”234 Instead, it must be the actual reason behind the statutory classification and this must be clearly demonstrated by the government. On the other side, the means must “substantially relate” to the asserted interest. The means chosen cannot result from ...