Immigration Law Commons^™

Protecting Syrian Refugees: Laws, Policies, And Global Responsibility Sharing, Susan M. Akram, Sarah Bidinger, Aaron Lang, Danielle Hites, Yoana Kuzmova, Elena Noureddine

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides an excerpt of a report that maps out how the Syrian refugee crisis is being played out in four of the main states hosting the refugees, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. This excerpt focuses on the laws and policies in the host states and how they are creating particularly devastating consequences for Palestinian refugees. The excerpt sets out the Report’s conclusions and recommendations, primarily the call for a global Comprehensive Plan of Action (cpa), with various components within and outside the Middle East region that build on existing legal obligations to better allocate responsibility for the refugee …

States And Status: A Study Of Geographical Disparities For Immigrant Youth, Laila Hlass

Faculty Scholarship

This article looks at the legal and practical challenges arising out of a particular immigration protection for abandoned, abused, and neglected child migrants called “Special Immigrant Juvenile Status” (SIJS). This benefit, which is a pathway to legal permanent residence and citizenship, is the only area within federal immigration law that requires a state court to take action in order for immigration authorities to consider an individual’s eligibility for relief. Using an original data set of roughly 12,000 SIJS applications from the Department of Homeland Security in June 2013, this article describes trends over time and by state regarding the number …

Lost At Sea, Daniela Caruso

Faculty Scholarship

A reflection on the existential loss experienced by many young persons in the aftermath of the Euro-zone crisis (often referred to as ‘the lost generation’) must also acknowledge, for the record and for reasons of relative salience, those who have recently drowned in the waters of southern Europe in their quest for a better future. This essay proposes to reconsider, for a moment, the relation between the obstacles that third country nationals (TNCs) encounter at our external frontiers and the increasing permeability of internal EU borders. Normally, one thinks of the two as structurally opposed: within its boundaries, the EU …

Illegitimate Borders: Jus Sanguinis Citizenship And The Legal Construction Of Family, Race, And Nation, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

The citizenship status of children born to American parents outside the United States is governed by a complex set of statutes. When the parents of such children are not married, these statutes encumber the transmission of citizenship between father and child while readily recognizing the child of an American mother as a citizen. Much of the debate concerning the propriety and constitutionality of those laws has centered on the extent to which they reflect gender-traditional understandings of fathers’ and mothers’ respective parental roles, or instead reflect “real differences” between men and women. Based on extensive archival research, this Article demonstrates …

The Arab-Israeli Conflict And International Law, Susan M. Akram, S. Michael Lynk

Faculty Scholarship

The Arab-Israeli conflict has become the most prominent arena of regional and international tension over the past century. Within the realm of international law, the conflict has contributed greatly to the development of international rule-making. The laws of war, the scope of international humanitarian and human rights law, the rights of refugees, the centrality of self-determination, the laws on terrorism and the content of modern treaty-making -- all have been significantly shaped by the norms established through the copious resolutions, diplomatic statements and legal commentary on the many features of the conflict. Yet, at the same time, the efficacy of …

Go West Young Woman!: The Mercer Girls And Legal Historiography, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a response to Professor Kerry Abrams’s article The Hidden Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Immigration Law, published in Vanderbilt Law Review. The Hidden Dimension tells the story of Washington Territory’s entrepreneurial Asa Shinn Mercer, who endeavored to bring hundreds of young women from the East Coast to the tiny frontier town of Seattle as prospective brides for white men who had settled there. Abrams locates the story of the Mercer Girls, as they were called, in the history of American immigration law. My response locates The Hidden Dimension in American legal historiography, both that branch of American legal historiography …

Egalitarianism And Exclusion: U.S. Guest Worker Programs And A Non-Subordination Approach To The Labor-Based Admission Of Nonprofessional Foreign National, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

Comprehensive immigration reform has been a top legislative priority for the last several years, and recent bills have contemplated the expansion of guest worker programs to adjust the status of undocumented immigrants and to control the future migrant flow. While there is a broad consensus that the current immigration system is broken, there is sharp disagreement about whether it is wise public policy to expand labor-based admissions in order to provide nonprofessional foreign nationals with an authorized means to migrate. This Article contributes to this debate by examining current guest worker programs, and recommends their reform through a “non-subordination” approach …

Are They Human Children Or Just Border Rats?, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Immigration And Constitutional Consequences Of Post-9/11 Policies Involving Arabs And Muslims In The United States: Is Alienage A Distinction Without A Difference?, Susan M. Akram, Maritza Karmely

Faculty Scholarship

There has been much public and academic discussion on post-9/11 government policies and whether their impact on Arabs and Muslims in the United States is unconstitutional “racial profiling” or legitimate immigration control based on constitutionally permissible nationality distinctions. The main assumption underlying this debate is that the focus of the government's policies in the “war on terror” is noncitizens, even if principally Arabs and Muslims. Thus, the racial profiling issues center on the differences between the constitutional due process analysis applied to noncitizens and that applied to citizens. This Article challenges the above argument and a number of its underlying …

An Offer Of Firm Resettlement, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

The Attorney General lacks discretion to grant asylum to any refugee "if, prior to arrival in the United States, he or she entered into another nation with, or while in that nation received, an offer of permanent resident status, citizenship, or some other type of permanent resettlement." This rule, the doctrine of firm resettlement, is unique among the mandatory bars to asylum in the United States. It does not reflect a societal judgment about the moral fitness of an asylum applicant's character-as, for example, does the bar that prohibits granting asylum to persons with a history of violent criminal behavior. …

The Aftermath Of September 11, 2001: The Targeting Of Arabs And Muslims In America, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

THE DEMONIZING OF ARABS AND Muslims in America began well before the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001. It can be traced to deliberate mythmaking by film and media,² stereotyping as part of conscious strategy of 'experts' and polemicists on the Middle East,³ the selling of a foreign policy agenda by US government officials and groups seeking to affect that agenda,⁴ and a public susceptible to images identifying the unwelcome 'other* in its midst.⁵ Bearing the brunt of these factors are Arab and Muslim non-citizens in this country. A series of government laws and policies since …

Privacy And The Post-September 11 Immigration Detainees: The Wrong Way To A Right (And Other Wrongs), Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

In forthcoming work, I argue that this common-law privacy right should indeed attach to individuals arrested for or suspected of crime.9 I also argue that support for the right exists in a variety of judicial, statutory, and other sources, and that legislation to formally protect the right is warranted and constitutional. The reasoning is simple: being publicly named in connection with criminal allegations is stigmatizing, and the resultant personal harm-social, professional, emotional, other-lasts, and is difficult to justify when it is visited upon someone who is acquitted of the charges or against whom the charges are dismissed. Equally troubling is …

Palestinian Refugees And Their Legal Status: Rights, Politics, And Implications For A Just Solution, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

The Palestinian refugee problem is one of the longest-lasting refugee crises in the world——now exceeding fifty-three years——without a real solution in sight. Although at its core a political problem, the Palestinian refugee crisis is also a problem of legal distortion: Palestinian refugees fall into a legal lacuna that sets them outside minimal international protections available for all other refugee groups in the world. This paper provides background to the legal anomaly that sets Palestinian refugees apart; discusses the legal, practical, and political implications of that status; and proposes a framework and mechanisms aimed at promoting a rights-based solution for the …

Temporary Protection And Its Applicability To The Palestinian Refugee Case, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

Temporary protection is widely regarded as an international legal norm that is now obligatory on states in certain circumstances with regard to their treatment of refugees, or persons fleeing “refugee-like” situations.(1) As a recognized status, it is the most recent of the three major possibilities for protection of refugees which a state can offer - the other two being the now-universal obligation of non-refoulement (“non-return”) and the non-obligatory protection of political asylum.

Temporary protection has special significance to the Palestinian refugee case. Since all states examining the issue, as well as the relevant United Nations bodies, universally interpret the international …

Fora Available For Palestinian Refugee Restitution, Compensation And Related Claims, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

This summary focuses on where Palestinian refugees can bring individual restitution and compensation claims. It does not discuss fora where claims for realizing the right of return might be made, although such claims will be mentioned as appropriate in the context of the discussions of restitution/compensation fora. Palestinian refugees do not at present have any forum immediately available in which they can file individual claims for restitution and/or compensation for losses sustained as a result of their expulsion from their lands and homes in 1948. The forum in which such claims would ordinarily be made is the place where the …

Reinterpreting Palestinian Refugee Rights Under International Law, And A Framework For Durable Solutions, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

Background

The paper presented here is based on a much larger brief produced by two experts in international refugee law, Susan Akram and Guy Goodwin-Gill assisted by a team of law students at Boston University. Both the larger brief and the paper presented here argue for a re-interpretation of the current international refugee law which adequately expresses the principle of heightened protection for Palestinian refugees, a principle which had guided the drafting and consequent approval of international law and UN resolutions.

The author argues that the current lack of legal protection of Palestinian refugees derives from the misinterpretation of the …

Orientalism Revisited In Asylum And Refugee Claims, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the stereotyping of Islam both by advocates and academics in refugee rights advocacy. The article looks at a particular aspect of this stereotyping, which can be seen as ‘neo-Orientalism’ occurring in the asylum and refugee context, particularly affecting women, and the damage that it does to refugee rights both in and outside the Arab and Muslim world. The article points out the dangers of neo-orientalism in framing refugee law issues and asks for a more thoughtful and analytical approach by Western refugee advocates and academics on the panoply of Muslim attitudes and Islamic thought affecting applicants for …

Foreword To Amicus Brief On The Status Of Palestinian Refugees Under International Refugee Law, Guy Goodwin-Gill, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

Palestinian refugees have a status that is unique under international refugee law. Unlike any other group or category of refugees in the world, Palestinians are singled out for exceptional treatment in the major international legal instruments which govern the rights and obligations of states towards refugees: the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol; the Statute of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and, specifically with regard to the Palestinians, the Regulations governing the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. Almost all states …

Recommendations For Durable Solutions For Palestinian Refugees: A Challenge To The Oslo Framework, Susan M. Akram, Terry Rempel

Faculty Scholarship

For more than five decades Palestinian refugees have been denied international protection. Some five million persons, comprising two-thirds of the Palestinian people, and nearly one-third of the global refugee population, have remained without a durable solution to their plight. More than half of all Palestinian refugees lack basic day-to-day protection, such as physical security, freedom of movement, and access to employment. Today, the Palestinian refugee problem is one of the largest and longest running refugee problems in the world.

Scheherezade Meets Kafka: Two Dozen Sordid Tales Of Ideological Exclusion, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

More than two dozen immigrants' in the United States are facing deportation² or removal ³ proceedings based primarily on evidence that the Immigration and Naturalization Service ("INS") has refused to disclose because it is "classified.", ⁴ The use of secret evidence in deportation proceedings is the most powerful tool in an apparently systematic attack by U.S. governmental agencies on the speech, association and religious activities of a very defined group of people: Muslims, Arabs, and U.S. lawful permanent residents of Arab origin residing in this country. Evidence emerging from these cases indicates that the government is spending thousands of …

The World Refugee Regime In Crisis: A Failure To Fulfill The Burden-Sharing And Humanitarian Requirements Of The 1951 Refugee Convention, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Musarat-Akram provided several examples which illustrate the crisis of the international refugee regime. Specifically, they illustrate, first, that the protections offered so generously in the language and purpose of the 1951 Refugee Convention⁷ are more European and-Western-centered than ever before.

Second, they illustrate some of the restrictionist policies by which Western and industrialized states have succeeded in confining huge refugee flows to the most impoverished and least developed states in the world.

Third, they illustrate that the initial limitations inherent in the 1951 Refugee Convention have now been exacerbated by state practice which interprets the Convention language and …

The Eichmann Trial, The Jewish Question, And The American-Jewish Intelligentsia, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

The abduction, trial, and execution of Adolf Karl Eichmann by the state of Israel, fifteen years after the shutdown of the crematoria at Auschwitz, challenged the American Jewish intelligentsia to confront the Jewish question.4 What does it mean to be a Jew in America and who is an American Jew? Is the Jewish history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust also a part of American-Jewish history? Is there a lesson in the destruction of European Jewry-the triumph of anti-Semitism, the failure of assimilation-relevant to American Jews? Is there a national component to being Jewish? Are Jews a people? If so, is …

Dispute Over The United States’ Denial Of A Visa To Yasir Arafat, Sadiq Reza

Faculty Scholarship

On November 26, 1988, the United States denied a visa to Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), when he sought to enter the United States to attend the forty-third session of the United Nations (UN) in New York. The denial rekindled a forty-year-old dispute between the United States and the UN over the extent to which the United States may, under the terms of the Agreement Between the United Nations and the United States of America Regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations (Headquarters Agreement), restrict entry to persons seeking to enter the …