Law Commons^™

When Federal Immigration Exclusion Meets Subfederal Workplace Inclusion: A Forensic Approach To Legislative History, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

What happens when a person is simultaneously viewed as an unauthorized immigrant without rights according to a federal regime and as an employee with rights according to a subfederal regime? In the wake of widespread and inconsistent adjudication of this issue, this Article sheds new light on this pressing question. To date, pertinent court battles and scholarship have led to a virtual stalemate and often focus exclusively on normative policy arguments. By contrast, this Article employs an empirically-grounded review of fifteen years of legislative history to analyze this paradox. This review illustrates that the denial of workplace protections to unauthorized …

Undocumented Workers: Crossing The Borders Of Immigration And Workplace Law, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] This Article endeavors to comprehensively outline the emerging field of immployment law. As this Article specifies below, this field broadly includes empirical, legislative, administrative, judicial, and other analytical inquiries and trends involving workers who bridge the divide between immigration law and workplace law. This Article also proposes directions for future research in this area. Namely, it raises a broad array of compelling questions that merit intensive scholarly, judicial, and policy analysis moving forward. As this Article will show, a hybrid analytical lens reveals otherwise obscured areas of inquiry. It thereby encourages scholars, policymakers, enforcement agency officials, and courts to …

Perfecting Public Immigration Legislation: Private Immigration Bills And Deportable Lawful Permanent Residents, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] This article examines why the historical relationship between immigration law and private bills has not continued following the enactment of the 1996 immigration laws for any of the affected immigrant groups. The article focuses on LPRs with criminal convictions in particular because their likelihood of deportation has increased dramatically as their access to executive discretion to avoid deportation has decreased. Since 1996, even if an LPR has lived in the United States since childhood, she can be subject to mandatory deportation for almost any criminal conviction – including misdemeanors, such as shoplifting or a bar fight. Since 1996, it …

Ice Was Not Meant To Be Cold: The Case For Civil Rights Monitoring Of Immigration Enforcement At The Workplace, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] As Professor Lee discusses, the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”), the main agency in charge of health, safety, and wage and hour protections for employees, has failed to ward off the negative effects of IRCA’s workplace-based immigration enforcement scheme. Part of the reason for this failure, as Professor Lee convincingly contends, is that ICE has the power to make enforcement decisions that affect the workplace rights of employees without consulting the DOL. For Professor Lee, the DOL’s relative impotence, coupled with ICE’s lack of regard for employees’ workplace rights in its immigration enforcement measures, allows “bad-actor” employers to trample …

Globalizing U.S. Employment Statutes Through Foreign Law Influence: Mexico’S Foreign Employer Provision And Recruited Mexican Workers, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

It is widely acknowledged that Mexican nationals comprise a growing portion of the U.S. workforce, both as authorized and unauthorized workers. The focus on Mexican workers who are currently within the United States overshadows the fact that U.S. employers—typically with the help of their Mexico-based agents—are regularly recruiting and hiring low-wage Mexican workers in Mexico to work in the United States (hereinafter referred to as “recruited Mexican workers”). For instance, it was reported in January 2008 that “Iowa meatpackers actively recruited workers in Mexico” to have enough workers so that they could ship pork “from Iowa slaughterhouses to the rest …

Laborers Or Criminals? The Impact Of Crimmigration On Labor Standards Enforcement, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] As we examine the criminalization of immigration, commonly referred to as “crimmigration” (Stumpf, 2006), it is essential to consider its impact on other areas of law and policy that involve immigrants but are not traditionally thought of as formal elements of either criminal law or immigration law. Why? As Hortensia’s story illustrates, crimmigration may unexpectedly affect protections and rights that relate to immigrants’ experiences but come from other areas of law and policy. This chapter explores the impact of crimmigration on labor standards enforcement. By labor standards enforcement, the chapter refers mainly to the wage and hour, health and …

U.S. Migrant Worker Law: The Interstices Of Immigration Law And Labor And Employment Law, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

The work visa program for temporary foreign workers in the United States is “not only the longest-running, but also the largest such program in the world.” Close to one million foreign workers receive work visas each year for both skilled and unskilled temporary jobs in the United States. Nevertheless, the number of foreign workers laboring in the United States that do not have the legal documentation necessary to work in the United States (“undocumented migrant workers”) dwarfs the number of temporary foreign workers that receive visas to work in the United States (“documented migrant workers”). As of 2008, there were …

Immigration Advocacy As Labor Advocacy, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] In this Article, we call for a comprehensive analytical framework that views immigration advocacy as labor advocacy. This framework has implications for the existing scholarship described above and for doctrinal analyses of legal cases relating to employees.’ immigration advocacy efforts.

Discovering “Immployment” Law: The Constitutionality Of Subfederal Immigration Regulation At Work, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] This Article develops two general preemption frameworks that feature federal employment law. It first devises and applies an implied-preemption analysis of subfederal employer-sanctions laws based on the preemptive force of FLSA and Title VII. In doing so, this Article reveals that the four subfederal employer-sanctions laws that have produced conflicting court decisions are unconstitutional because they stand as obstacles to fundamental policies underlying FLSA and Title VII. Specifically, these four subfederal laws, along with other subfederal laws that share their qualities, conflict with core federal employment policy goals of protecting employees from employment discrimination and encouraging valid employee-initiated complaints …

A Supreme Stretch: The Supremacy Clause In The Wake Of Irca And Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Kati Griffith

Kati Griffith

[Excerpt] Recently, the issues of immigration and immigration policy have garnered intense debate in the United States. Much of what Americans have discussed relates to border security, sanctions against employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers, and temporary and permanent paths to legalization for undocumented workers. This debate often overshadows a meaningful discussion about the future of workplace rights for undocumented workers who, despite their undocumented status, currently work in the United States and at times suffer labor and employment law violations in their workplaces. Unfortunately, the national immigration debate has not incorporated this discussion. Moreover, the current proposed federal immigration …

The Prodigal Illegal: Christian Love And Immigration Reform, Victor Romero

Victor C. Romero

Despite the impasse around immigration reform, most everyone believes the United States’ immigration system is broken. And most agree that the key issue is what to do with the eleven million or so undocumented persons currently residing in the United States. As a Christian immigration law teacher, I have been interested in the debate among the churches as to what such reform should look like. In this Article, I use Professor Jeffrie Murphy’s conception of agapic love as a lens through which to examine reform proposals. I then evaluate the two positions Christian churches have seemed to embrace—permanent legal status …

Mandatory Immigration Detention For U.S. Crimes: The Noncitizen Presumption Of Dangerousness, Mark Noferi

Mark L Noferi