Law Commons^™

Learning From Our Mistakes: Using Immigration Enforcement Errors To Guide Reform, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Immigration scholars and advocates frequently criticize our immigration system for imposing severe penalties akin to (or worse than) those in the criminal justice system — such as prolonged detention and permanent exile from the United States — without providing sufficient procedural protections to minimize enforcement errors. Yet there has been relatively little scholarship examining the frequency of errors in immigration enforcement and identifying recurring causes of those errors, in part because the data is hard to find. This Article begins by canvassing some of the publicly available data on enforcement errors, which reveal that such mistakes occur too frequently to …

Crimmigration Creep: Reframing Executive Action On Immigration, Jayesh Rathod

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In this Essay, I seek to build upon existing scholarship relating to DACA and DAPA, by offering an alternate lens through which to examine the programs. Specifically, I argue that DACA and DAPA, by naming and entrenching the “significant misdemeanor” bar to eligibility, contribute to a concerning expansion of “crimmigration law.” To be sure, neither program exists in codified law; nevertheless, the eligibility bars under DACA and DAPA are poised to wreak doctrinal havoc by upending the way particular criminal conduct is treated in the U.S. immigration system. In some respects, the DACA and DAPA bars are more stringent than …

Concord With Which Other Families: Marriage Equality, Family Demographics, And Race, Nancy Polikoff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Slavery By Another Name: 'Voluntary' Immigrant Detainee Labor And The Thirteenth Amendment, Anita Sinha

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During the McCarthy era, Congress passed an obscure law authorizing detained immigrants to work for a payment of one dollar a day. The government justified the provision, which was modeled after the 1949 Geneva Convention’s protections for prisoners of war, in the context of the period’s relative heightened detentions of noncitizens. Soon afterwards, the enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 diminished the use of detention drastically, and the practice of detainee labor lay dormant for decades. Modern changes to immigration law and its systems have rendered immigration detention today the largest mass incarceration movement in U.S. history. …

Riding The Wave: Uplifting Labor Organizations Through Immigration Reform, Jayesh Rathod

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In recent years, labor unions in the United States have embraced the immigrants’ rights movement, cognizant that the very future of organized labor depends on its ability to attract immigrant workers and integrate them into union ranks. At the same time, the immigrants’ rights movement has been lauded for its successful organizing models, often drawing upon the vitality and ingenuity of immigrant-based worker centers, which themselves have emerged as alternatives to traditional labor unions. And while the labor and immigrants’ rights movements have engaged in some fruitful collaborations, their mutual support has failed to radically reshape the trajectory of either …

Distilling Americans: The Legacy Of Prohibition On U.S. Immigration Law, Jayesh Rathod

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Since the early twentieth century, federal immigration law has targeted noncitizens believed to engage in excessive alcohol consumption by prohibiting their entry or limiting their ability to obtain citizenship and other benefits. The first specific mention of alcohol-related behavior appeared in the Immigration Act of 1917, which called for the exclusion of "persons with chronic alcoholism" seeking to enter the United States. Several decades later, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 specified that any noncitizen who "is or was ... a habitual drunkard" was per se lacking in good moral character, and hence ineligible for naturalization. Although the "chronic …

Problems Faced By Mexican Asylum Seekers In The United States, Anna Cabot

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Violence in Mexico rose sharply in response to President Felipe Calder6n's military campaign against drug cartels which began in late 2006. As a consequence, the number of Mexicans who have sought asylum in the United States has grown significantly. In 2013, Mexicans made up the second largest group of defensive asylum seekers (those in removal proceedings) in the United States, behind only China (EOIR 2014b). Yet between 2008 and 2013, the grant rate for Mexican asylum seekers in immigration court fell from 23 percent to nine percent (EOIR 2013, 2014b). This paper examines-from the perspective of an attorney who represented …

Procedural Hurdles And Thwarted Efficiency: Immigration Relief In Wage And Hour Collective Actions, Llezlie Green

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Wage theft and its frequent exploitative companions, trafficking and involuntary servitude, have seen substantial increases in recent years. Low-wage workers often bear the brunt of these practices. Vulnerable populations, such as immigrant workers, and more specifically, undocumented workers, experience wage theft and other forms of workplace-related exploitation at alarmingly high rates. Individual adjudications of these claims are neither efficient nor, in many cases, feasible, given attorneys’ aversion to shouldering the risks and costs in cases that may yield only limited attorneys’ fees. The collective adjudication of Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) claims, however, largely resolves these challenges and provides an …

Enforcing Masculinities At The Borders, Jamie Abrams

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“American men have no history,” declared pioneering masculinities scholar, Michael Kimmel. Masculinities, the study of how men relate to each other and construct their identities, can be used as a powerful sociological and legal tool to understand institutions, power structures, and human relations. While the history of American immigration law has revealed rich multi-dimensional narratives of class, race, and domestic and international politics, sparse historical work has considered the masculinities dimensions of immigration law.

This Article considers how unpacking the masculinities dimensions of our paradigmatic shifts in immigration policy might offer an additional - even unifying - dimension to previously …

Draconian Discrimination: One Man's Battle With U.S. Immigration Law For Fairness, Justice, And American Citizenship, Rachel Zoghlin

Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

A Season Of Change: Reforming The H2b Guest Worker Program, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

INTRODUCTION: Each year, as spring and summer arrive, Americans partake in range of seasonal traditions: beautifying their lawns and gardens; enjoying harvests of fresh fruits, vegetables, and seafood; and attending local fairs and festivals. Although these rituals have become part of the American cultural fabric, few know that they are supported by thousands of temporary guest workers who enter the United States each year under the H-2 visa program.' The H-a program allows U.S employers to petition for seasonal agricultural workers (via the H-2A program) and seasonal nonagricultural workers (via the H-2B program) to work in this country on a …

Protecting Immigrant Workers Through Interagency Cooperation, Jayesh Rathod

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Stephen Lee’s Monitoring Immigration Enforcement offers a promising prescription for resolving the long-standing tension between the workplace enforcement priorities of the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) and the efforts by the Department of Labor (“DOL”) to protect the rights of immigrant workers. Lee convincingly describes - often with the aid of rich historical examples - the origins of the chronic imbalance of power between DHS and the DOL, and the limitations of past efforts to synchronize the work of the respective agencies. Lee’s proposal for interagency coordination, in the form of ex ante monitoring by the DOL of worksite enforcement …

9/11 And The Transformation Of U.S. Immigration Law And Policy, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Picked Apart: The Hidden Struggles Of Migrant Worker Women In The Maryland Crab Industry., Jayesh Rathod, Adrienne Lockie

Reports

Every year, hundreds of Mexican women travel thousands of miles from their impoverished, rural home communities to work on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the state’s historic crab industry. Maryland crab companies have increasingly come to rely on these women, who enter the U.S. on temporary guestworker visas known as H-2B visas. This report describes these women’s experiences as H-2B migrant workers, and is the result of over 40 formal interviews conducted in both the U.S. and Mexico since 2008. By obtaining first-hand accounts from the workers, the report documents the forces and conditions that give rise to this …

Achieving Accountability For Migrant Domestic Worker Abuse, Janie Chuang

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Domestic work has become increasingly commoditized in the global economy. Migrant domestic workers' remittances constitute a rich source of revenues for their countries of origin, while their labor ameliorates the “care deficit” experienced in wealthier countries of destination. Despite the importance of their work, migrant domestic workers are some of the most exploited workers in the world. They are often discriminated against based on their gender, class, race, nationality, and immigration status, and they are excluded from labor law protections in most countries of destination.

This essay examines some of the underlying reasons for this mistreatment and neglect. After describing …

Billions (Yes, With A B) For Prevention, Victim Services, Law Enforcement, Underserved Populations And The Courts, And Looking Ahead To Vawa Iv, Leslye Orloff, Claudia Bayliff, Lisalyn Jacobs, Lynn Hecht Schafran, Juley Fulcher

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

[panelist] I feel like I have gone on a trip down memory lane. I want to take us back in time to give you an idea of what it looked like for immigrant women, women of color, and underserved communities in 1994, in terms of access to services and assistance for domestic violence and sexual assault. In those days there were very few programs-and we could probably count them on two, maybe four hands nationally-that were working specifically and had expertise working with immigrant victims, non-English-speaking victims, and women of color victims. Those programs were isolated from each other. In …

Beyond The 'Chilling Effect': Immigrant Worker Behavior And The Regulation Of Occupational Safety & Health, Jayesh Rathod

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This article forms part of a broader scholarly project that seeks to understand the root causes of immigrant worker injury and fatality trends in the U.S., and the ways in which legal norms and regulatory practices shape these trends. This particular contribution examines the broad range of attributes and experiences that influence immigrant worker behavior relating to occupational safety and health -- in the context of interactions with employers and regulatory bodies, and relating to the choices that workers themselves make about how to perform their work.

Drawing upon scholarship from multiple disciplines, the article encourages a more robust understanding …

The Dual Purposes Of The U Visa Thwarted In A Legislative Duel, Jamie Abrams

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Congress created the U visa non-immigrant classification to achieve the dual purposes of both strengthening law enforcement’s ability to pursue domestic violence cases and protecting victims. This article reveals how the gatekeeper function of the law enforcement certification in the U visa petition, as set out in the interim final regulations, undermines Congress’s dual purposes and thwarts the statutory framework entirely. The law enforcement certification provisions of the U visa interim final regulations irreparably shift considerable centralized power to law enforcement personnel, subjecting the certification process to inconsistent application and misapplication.

U Visas allow undocumented non-immigrants who are victims of …

Inter-American System, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Immigrant Labor And The Occupational Safety & Health Regime; Part I: A New Vision For Workplace Regulation, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article is the first in a series of three articles that together form a scholarly project that unearths the causes of recent trends in immigrant worker fatalities and injuries in the U.S., and presents recommendations for reversing it. The article examines how the history, structure, and operations of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have, at times, obscured the workplace safety concerns of immigrant workers and have left these workers with no meaningful voice in the regulatory process. The article presents a set of regulatory imperatives to guide OSHA’s future work with respect to immigrant workers. These …

Immigration Legal Research, Billie Jo Kaufman

Way2Search! Topical Instruction Series

No abstract provided.

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 …

Protecting The Labor And Employment Rights Of Immigrant Workers, Anita Sinha, Rebecca Smith, Cynthia Mark

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Barriers To Immigrant Laborers' Access To Workplace Rights, Anita Sinha

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Lifesaving Welfare Safety Net Access For Battered Immigrant Women And Children: Accomplishments And Next Steps, Leslye Orloff

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The United States is currently experiencing one of the largest waves of immigration in its history. Contrary to common assumptions, more than half of new immigrants are women. Despite this fact, U.S. immigration policy and most agencies serving immigrants have remained blind to gender differences and have treated all immigrants alike.

Domestic Violence And Us Asylum Law: Eliminating The 'Cultural Hook' For Claims Involving Gender-Related Persecution, Anita Sinha

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In this Note, Anita Sinha examines the treatment of asylum claims involving gender-related persecution. Analyzing the three most recent decisions published by the Board of Immigration Appeals, Sinha illustrates that these cases have turned on whether the gender-related violence can be linked to practices attributable to non-Western,'foreign" cultures. Sinha argues that cases involving gender-related persecution can be given full consideration of asylum law only when their adjudication is based on an understanding of the political and institutional character of violence against women, rather than on" cultural" culpability. In making this argument, Sinha examines recent amendments to the regulations governing asylum …

Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical Constitutional And Theoretical Meanings Of Alien Suffrage, Jamin B. Raskin

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No abstract provided.

The Revitalization Of The Common-Law Civil Writ Of Audita Querela As A Post-Conviction Remedy In Criminal Cases: The Immigration Context And Beyond, Ira Robbins

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Introduction: An alien lawfully enters the United States in 1972. He gets a job, gets married, and becomes a productive worker in the community. He is subsequently convicted of a felony, such as making false statements on a loan application. As a result, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brings deportation proceedings against him. The individual will seek any means possible to vacate the conviction, in order to stay in this country.' This Article explores whether the writ of audita querela. primarily used to provide post-judgment relief in civil cases at common law, can be used to challenge criminal convictions …

International Legal Standards Relating To The Rights Of Aliens And Refugees And United States Immigration Law, Robert K. Goldman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Rights Of Aliens In The 1980'S, Juan E. Mendez

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.