Immigration Law Commons^™

The Pro Bono Collaborative Project Spotlight 12-20-2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Pro Bono Collaborative Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Cooperative Enforcement In Immigration Law, Amanda Frost

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

ABSTRACT: Immigration officials take two approaches to unauthorized immigrants: Either they seek to deport them, or they exercise prosecutorial discretion, allowing certain categories of unauthorized immigrants to remain in the United States without legal status. Neither method is working. The executive lacks the resources to remove more than a small percentage of the unauthorized population each year, and prosecutorial discretion is by definition an impermanent solution that leaves unauthorized immigrants vulnerable to exploitation at both work and home - harming not just them, but also the legal immigrants and U.S. citizens with whom they live and work.This Article: suggests a …

Newsroom: Governor Raimondo On Rwu Law 09-19-2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Proving Identity, Jonathan Weinberg

Pepperdine Law Review

United States law, over the past two hundred years or so, has subjected people whose race rendered them noncitizens or of dubious citizenship to a variety of rules requiring that they carry identification documents at all times. Those laws fill a gap in the policing authority of the state, by connecting the individual’s physical body with information the government has on file about him; they also can entail humiliation and subordination. Accordingly, it is not surprising that U.S. law has almost always imposed these requirements on people outside our circle of citizenship: African Americans in the antebellum South, Chinese immigrants, …

Anchors Aweigh: Analyzing Birthright Citizenship As Declared (Not Established) By The Fourteenth Amendment, Elizabeth Farrington

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Bureaucracy As The Border: Administrative Law And The Citizen Family, Kristin Collins

Faculty Scholarship

This contribution to the symposium on administrative law and practices of inclusion and exclusion examines the complex role of administrators in the development of family-based citizenship and immigration laws. Official decisions regarding the entry of noncitizens into the United States are often characterized as occurring outside of the normal constitutional and administrative rules that regulate government action. There is some truth to that description. But the historical sources examined in this Article demonstrate that in at least one important respect, citizenship and immigration have long been similar to other fields of law that are primarily implemented by agencies: officials operating …

“Illegal” Migration Is Speech, Daniel I. Morales

Indiana Law Journal

Noncitizens must comply with immigration laws just because citizens say so. The citizenry takes for granted its monopoly on immigration control, but the legitimacy of this arrangement has been called into question by cutting-edge political theorists. One prominent theorist argues, for example, that basic democratic principles require that noncitizens living outside the United States have a say in the formation of immigration law since they must obey it. This Article provides a legal response to these political theory developments, assimilating them, along with the facts on the ground, into an account of “illegal” migration as First Amendment speech.

If noncitizens’ …

Deported By Marriage: Americans Forced To Choose Between Love And Country, Beth Caldwell

Brooklyn Law Review

As the fiftieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia approaches, de jure prohibitions against interracial marriages are history. However, marriages between people of different national origins continue to be undermined by the law. The Constitution does not protect the marital rights of citizens who marry noncitizens in the same way that it protects all other marriages. Courts have consistently held that a spouse’s deportation does not implicate the rights of American citizens, and the Constitution has long been held inapplicable in protecting the substantive due process rights of noncitizens facing deportation. Given the spike in deportations over the past decade, hundreds …

Immigration And Disability In The United States And Canada, Mark Weber

College of Law Faculty

Disability arises from the dynamic between people’s physical and mental conditions andthe physical and attitudinal barriers in the environment. Applying this idea aboutdisability to United States and Canadian immigration law draws attention to barriers toentry and eventual citizenship for individuals who have disabilities. Historically, NorthAmerican law excluded many classes of immigrants, including those with intellectualdisabilities, mental illness, physical defects, and conditions likely to cause dependency.Though exclusions for individuals likely to draw excessive public resources and thosewith communicable diseases still exist in Canada and the United States, in recent yearsthe United States permitted legalization for severely disabled undocumented immigrantsalready in the …

Brief For The Florence Immigrant And Refugee Rights Project And Thomas & Mack Legal Clinic As Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioners, Mondaca-Vega V. Lynch, Hillary G. Walsh

Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Special Immigrant Juvenile Status: Refining State And Federal Practice, Justin Potesta

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

Each year, thousands of unaccompanied minors enter the United States. Upon arrival, these children face a complicated legal process defined by several exchanges between state and federal entities. This Article focuses on one avenue of relief available to these unaccompanied minors: Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. While SIJS provides a path to citizenship for abused, neglected, or abandoned minors, the protection is often misapplied or misunderstood. Focusing on practical improvements, this Article highlights key areas where state and federal entities can more appropriately and efficiently address the unique concerns presented by SIJS-eligible unaccompanied minors.

Mapping Citizenship: Status, Membership, And The Path In Between, D. Carolina Núñez

Utah Law Review

The concept of citizenship poses an interesting asymmetry: though all citizens receive the same rights and obligations on equal terms, citizenship is not distributed to individuals on equal terms. In the United States, some are citizens by virtue of birth within the national territory or birth to citizen parents. Others must undergo the process of naturalization. Different citizenship rules appear to solve for different variables, and it is not clear whether and how those variables relate to one another. This Article begins unraveling the paradox. It argues that the apparent paradox results from a failure to understand the relationship between …

Trending @ Rwulaw: Deborah Gonzalez's Post: Reaching The American Dream -- With An Rwu Law Team!, Deborah Gonzalez

Law School Blogs

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No Country For Some Men?: Statelessness In The United States And Lessons From The European Union, Lia G. Melikian

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

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

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

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Give And Take? Procedure, Practicalities, And Policy In Naturalization Appellate Jurisdiction, Kelsey Frobisher

Oklahoma Law Review

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Substantive Due Process For Noncitizens: Lessons From Obergefell, Anthony O'Rourke

Journal Articles

The state of Texas denies birth certificates to children born in the United States — and thus citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment — if their parents are undocumented immigrants with identification provided by their home countries’ consulates. What does this have to do with same-sex marriage? In a previous article, I demonstrated that the Court’s due process analysis in United States v. Windsor is particularly relevant to the state’s regulation of undocumented immigrants. This short essay builds upon my earlier analysis by examining Obergefell v. Hodge’s applications outside the context of same-sex marriage. Obergefell’s due process holding, I …

Citizenship, Aliengage, And Ethnic Origin Discrimination In Employment Under The Law Of The United States, Mack A. Player

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

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Voiceless Victims: Sex Slavery And Trafficking Of African Women In Western Europe, Melanie R. Wallace

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

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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 …

Race And Immigration, Then And Now: How The Shift To "Worthiness" Undermines The 1965 Immigration Law's Civil Rights Goals, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay looks at how far immigration reform has come from the explicit civil rights character of the 1965 immigration law that reshaped America. The optimism surrounding that law’s dismantling of national-origins barriers to immigration proved to be overstated in the intervening decades, as the factors determining an immigrant’s “worth and qualifications” too often became proxies for race. After briefly looking at work done by critical race theorists tracing some of ways race and immigration have long intersected in immigration legal history, the article closely examines modern-day immigration reform proposals, particularly the Senate bill that remains the most complete articulation …

War Of The Words: Aliens, Immigrants, Citizens, And The Language Of Exclusion, D. Carolina Nunez

BYU Law Review

Words communicate more than their ordinary dictionary meaning. Words tell us about individuals' and communities' conscious and subconscious perceptions. The words we use are evidence of how we think, which, in turn, ultimately determines what we do. In this paper, I examine and compare the usage of the words "immigrant," "alien," and "citizen" to make observations on the nature of membership and belonging in the United States. While it is perhaps intuitive that these words carry very different connotations, here I use corpus linguistics to explore those connotations. I rely on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a database of …

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

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

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 …

Immigration's Family Values, Kerry Abrams, R. Kent Piacenti

Faculty Scholarship

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Ownership Without Citizenship: The Creation Of Noncitizen Property Rights, Allison Brownell Tirres

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

At the nation’s founding, the common law of property defined ownership as an incident of citizenship. Noncitizens were unable lawfully to hold, devise, or inherit property. This doctrine eroded during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but few scholars have examined its demise or the concommittant rise of property rights for foreigners. This Article is the first sustained treatment of the creation of property rights for noncitizens in American law. It uncovers two key sources for the rights that emerged during the nineteenth century: federal territorial law, which allowed for alien property ownership and alien suffrage, and state …

Defining American: The Dream Act, Immigration Reform And Citizenship, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

The grassroots movement propelling the DREAM Act and immigration reform forward reveals how the definition of citizenship is undergoing a dramatic transformation, in ways both inspiring and troubling. The DREAM movement depends upon the compelling but exceptional stories of passionate, high-achieving, law-abiding youth who already define themselves as being American, and worthy of legal status. Situating this narrative in the rich literature of citizenship, the article shows how the DREAM movement effectively exposes the disjuncture between the DREAMers' identity as Americans and their lack of legal immigration status. The article celebrates how this narrative succeeds as a contrast to the …

Easing The Guidance Document Dilemma Agency By Agency: Immigration Law And Not Really Binding Rules, Jill E. Family

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Immigration law relies on rules that bind effectively, but not legally, to adjudicate millions of applications for immigration benefits every year. This Article provides a blueprint for immigration law to improve its use of these practically binding rules, often called guidance documents. The agency that adjudicates immigration benefit applications, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), should develop and adopt its own Good Guidance Practices to govern how it uses guidance documents. This Article recommends a mechanism for reform, the Good Guidance Practices, and tackles many complex issues that USCIS will need to address in creating its practices. The recommended …

Defining American: The Dream Act, Immigration Reform And Citizenship, Elizabeth Keyes

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

From Citizenship To Custody: Unwed Fathers Abroad And At Home, Albertina Antognini

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The sex-based distinctions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) have been remarkably resilient in the face of numerous equal protection challenges. In Miller v. Albright, Nguyen v. INS, and most recently United States v. Flores-Villar — collectively the "citizenship transmission cases" — the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the INA’s provisions that require unwed fathers, but not unwed mothers, to take a series of affirmative steps in order to transmit citizenship to their children born abroad.

The conventional account of these citizenship transmission cases is that the Court upholds sex-based distinctions that would otherwise fail …

Crossing The Final Border: Securing Equal Gender Protection In Immigration Cases, Michelle L. Sudano

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

No abstract provided.