Law Commons^™

The New Sanctuary Movement: When Moral Mission Means Breaking The Law, And The Consequences For Churches And Illegal Immigrants, Kara L. Wild

Kara L. Wild

Are the churches involved in the New Sanctuary Movement -- a movement that hides illegal immigrants in churches to prevent them from being deported -- acting legally? If not, is there a way that they could pursue their goals in a legal manner? The author explores the movement's goal, to win public sympathy and eventual legality for the nation's illegal immigrant population by using methods that were popular during the successful 1980s Sanctuary Movement. The author examines the differences between the 1980s Movement and the current one, the likelihood of success for the New Sanctuary Movement's legal arguments, and the …

Two Years Later, How Far Have We Come: A Review Of The 2006 Measures Of Improvement To The Immigration Courts And Board Of Immigration Appeals, Christina M. Workman

Christina M Workman

I have attaches for your review a copy of “How Far Have We Come: A Review of the 2006 Measures of Improvement to the Immigration Courts and Board of Immigration Appeals”. In this article I first explore the causes of large disparities in asylum denial rates both between and within Immigration Courts across the United States. In one Court alone, one judge grants asylum 9% of the time, while another judge on that same Court grants asylum 91% percent of the time. Critics of the Immigration Courts, including Federal Appellate Courts, have citied reasons including but not limited to poor …

“Otherness” As The Underlying Principle In Israel’S Asylum Regime, Tally Kritzman-Amir

Tally Kritzman-Amir

This paper aims to be one of the first thorough descriptions of the developing asylum system in the State of Israel. The argument presented in this paper is that, despite the inherent moral and doctrinal differences between asylum and immigration regimes, the Israeli asylum system is essentially an extension of Israel’s immigration and citizenship regime, as it excludes the non-Jewish refugees and frames the refugee as the “other.”

I begin this paper with a description of the Israeli immigration and citizenship regime. I show how the Israeli regime favors and includes Jews, and discriminates and excludes non-Jews, with the exclusion …

Revisiting Germany's Residenzpflicht In Light Of Modern E.U. Asylum Law, Paul Mcdonough

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Note explores whether the E.C. treaties, nonetheless, provide the European Court of Justice (ECJ) sufficient competence to use the Reception Directive as a vehicle to assess the Residenzpflicht in relation to the Refugee Convention. It concludes that, through the Residenzpflicht, Germany denies refugees lawfully present their Convention right to free movement within its territory, and that the ECJ can order the restoration of this right.

Untold Stories: Gender-Related Persecution And Asylum In South Africa, Lindsay M. Harris

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article explains the particular difficulties that female asylum seekers and survivors of gender-related persecution face, reaffirming the need for the practical and sensitive application of international and domestic gender guidelines. Extensive research into client files and interviews with key decision makers prove that, despite scholarship suggesting that women may be advantaged in asylum proceedings, a focus on gender is still needed in the South African context. While there are undoubtedly problematic elements of the 1998 Refugees Act warranting its revision, the addition of gender as an additional category under the refugee definition, as proposed by the recent Refugees Amendment …

Update On Asylum Law: New Hope For Victims Of Domestic Violence , Sandra A. Grossman, María Mañón

The Modern American

No abstract provided.

Pulling The Trigger: Separation Violence As A Basis For Refugee Protection For Battered Women, Marisa Cianciarulo, Claudia David

American University Law Review

For over a decade, women seeking asylum from persecution inflicted by their abusive husbands and partners have found little protection in the United States. During that time, domestic violence-based asylum cases have languished in limbo, been denied, or occasionally been granted in unpublished opinions that have not provided a much-needed adjudicative standard. The main case setting forth the pre-Obama approach to domestic violence-based asylum is rife with misunderstanding of the nature of domestic violence and minimization of the role that society plays in the proliferation of domestic violence. Fortunately, however, a recent Obama-administration legal brief indicates that women fleeing countries …

Lost In The Maze Of Appeals: The Eleventh Circuit's Review Of Decisions By The Board Of Immigration Appeals, Amy L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarship

The Eleventh Circuit reviews decisions made by the Board of Immigration Appeals with a very lenient substantial evidence test that incorporates the idea of compulsion. In other words, the record must compel an opposite conclusion for a decision to be overturned as opposed to merely being unsupported by substantial evidence. This article details the job of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the types of claims it hears, and the types of review applied to it by the Eleventh Circuit. A study of 251 cases from 1990 through 2008 suggests that the Eleventh Circuit hardly ever overturns the Board of Immigration …

Shelter From The Storm: An Analysis Of U.S. Refugee Law As Applied To Tibetans Formerly Residing In India, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Bisexuals Need Not Apply: A Comparative Appraisal Of Refugee Law And Policy In Canada, The United States, And Australia, Sean Rehaag

Articles & Book Chapters

This paper offers an analysis of refugee claims on grounds of bisexuality. After discussing the grounds on which sexual minorities may qualify for refugee status under international refugee law, the paper empirically assesses the success rates of bisexual refugee claimants in three major host states: Canada, the United States, and Australia. It concludes that bisexuals are significantly less successful than other sexual minority groups in obtaining refugee status in those countries. Through an examination of selected published decisions involving bisexual refugee claimants, the author identifies two main areas for concern that may partly account for the difficulties that bisexual refugee …

Socio-Economic Rights And Refugee Status: Deepening The Dialogue Between Human Rights And Refugee Law, Fatma E. Marouf, Deborah Anker

Scholarly Works

Over the past two decades, international human rights law has provided an increasingly useful framework for interpreting key criteria of the definition of a refugee. A human rights-based approach to analyzing refugee status helps to increase consistency and uniformity in decision making by state parties regarding who qualifies for international protection.

Michelle Foster's book, International Refugee Law and Socio-economic Rights: Refuge from Deprivation (Cambridge U. Press 2007), comes at a critical time, not only because of increasing acceptance of the connection between refugee law and human rights law and significant developments in the current understanding of economic and social rights, …

Asylum In A Different Voice: Judging Immigration Claims And Gender, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

An extensive statistical study of disparities in asylum adjudication throughout the United States reveals gross disparities in rates of asylum grants by region of country, experience of adjudicators, prior employment, and other factors. One of the most robust findings was one of gender disparities in adjudication rates. If the adjudicator of claims for asylum was female there was a 44% greater likelihood that asylum would be granted. This chapter in the book reporting these findings reflects on this significant finding of gender differences in judging and discusses, in light of the author's prior work on gender differences in lawyering, whether …

Bah V. Mukasey, Sandrine Dehaeze

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Incorporating A 'Best Interests Of The Child' Approach Into Immigration Law And Procedure, Bridgette A. Carr

Articles

United States immigration law and procedure frequently ignore the plight of children directly affected by immigration proceedings. This ignorance means decision-makers often lack the discretion to protect a child from persecution by halting the deportation of a parent, while parents must choose between abandoning their children in a foreign land and risking the torture of their children. United States immigration law systematically fails to consider the best interests of children directly affected by immigration proceedings. This failure has resulted in a split among the federal circuit courts of appeals regarding whether the persecution a child faces may be used to …