Immigration Law Commons^™

Invisible: My Experiences With The Undocumented And Abused, Anna Paden Carson

VA Engage Journal

As a legal advocate at Tapestri, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia this summer, I saw many of my immigrant and refugee clients consumed by fear, desperation, and insecurity, and I quickly realized that many of the women I helped only contacted Tapestri because they truly had nowhere else to turn. They were victims of domestic violence and usually living in America undocumented, making the seriousness of their situations that much more intense and pressing. These women were trapped and alone, and Tapestri’s role was to help them in any way we could.

This article explores what I learned throughout my eight-week …

Disparate Treatment Of Mexican Unaccompanied Alien Children: The United States' Violation Of The Trafficking Protocol, Supplementing The Un Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, Alejandra Aramayo

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Student Comment: Exchange Cooperation For Visas: Flaws In U.S. Immigration System Criminalizes Trafficking Victims, Laurie Culkin

University of Baltimore Journal of International Law

This student comment explores the Palermo Protocol to the United Nation’s Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, and the United State’s response, the Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act (TVPA). Under the TVPA, the U.S. made a temporary, nonimmigrant visa, the T-Visa, available to trafficking victims illegally located in the U.S., provided that the victim cooperates with law enforcement to prosecute their trafficker. Though at first blush the TVisa seems like a valuable resource to victims who would otherwise find no immigration relief for violations of criminal and immigration law as a result of their victimization, but in practice the flawed process to …

Immigration Policy And The Rhetoric Of Reform: “Deport Felons, Not Families,” Moncrieffe V. Holder, Children At The Border, And Idle Promises, Terri R. Day, Leticia M. Diaz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

“Jim Crowing” Plyler V. Doe: The Resegregation Of Undocumented Students In American Higher Education Through Discriminatory State Tuition And Fee Legislation, David H.K. Nguyen, Zelideh R. Martinez Hoy

Cleveland State Law Review

This law review article examines the re-segregation of undocumented students in education, more specifically, re-segregation through state laws and policies impacting their attendance at American colleges and universities. Under no fault of their own, undocumented students are marginalized even further after graduating from high school, since they are not afforded the same benefits as their peers to attend college. This article explores the current landscape of these laws and policies after providing background on Plyler v. Doe and state and federal attempts to challenge education for undocumented students.

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

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Exploited At The Intersection: A Critical Race Feminist Analysis Of Undocumented Latina Workers And The Role Of The Private Attorney General, Llezlie Green

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Undocumented Latina workers experience wage theft and other workplace exploitation at alarmingly high rates. The stock stories associated with immigrant workers often involve male day laborers or female domestic workers and fail to capture the experiences of women toiling in the farms, restaurants, factories, and home and business cleaning services that employ hundreds of thousands of immigrant women. The resulting invisibility of undocumented Latina women in the typical narratives parallels the paucity of undocumented Latina workers who make legal claims against their exploitative employers. Their distinct experiences are characterized by multiple intersecting vulnerabilities based upon their ethnicity, gender, and immigration …

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

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

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. …

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

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & 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

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

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 …

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

Faculty Scholarship

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 …

The Mirage Of Immigration Reform, Marcia A. Yablon-Zug

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Status Of Nonstatus, Geoffrey Heeren

Articles

Millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States have no legal immigration status and live in constant fear of deportation. There are millions more who do have some sort of status, like lawful permanent residency, asylum, or a nonimmigrant visa. In between is the netherworld of nonstatus. Here live noncitizens who possess government documentation but few rights. They have no pathway to lawful permanent residence or citizenship and cannot receive most public benefits. If nonstatus is denied or revoked by a prosecutor or bureaucrat, there is no right to a hearing or an appeal. If the Executive Branch discriminates in …

Intergrating Skills And Collaborating Across Law Schools: An Example From Immigration Law, Anna R. Welch

Faculty Publications

This Essay discusses the design and implementation of introductory Immigration Law courses taught at two different law schools, Western State College of Law in Orange County, California and the University of Maine Law School in Portland, Maine. Although the courses took place on opposite coasts and did not engage in a formal partnership that was visible to students, the authors deliberately planned the courses in close collaboration with one another behind the scenes. In doing so, the courses shared the explicit goal of increasing students’ exposure to practical lawyering skills while reinforcing students’ understanding of the substantive immigration laws. This …

Zealous Advocacy: Pushing Against The Borders In Immigration Litigation, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the forces that undermine zealous advocacy in the context of immigration court, and connects the context-specific issue of immigration defense to debates in the ethics literature about the possible justifications for zealous advocacy. As state bar rules and legal cultures and sub-cultures de-emphasize or remove the duty of zealousness, zealousness becomes increasingly counter-cultural. The article explores those trends, and shows (drawing on existing criminal defense ethical literature) why zealousness is justified in the adversarial and consequential immigration context. The article examines why a broadly understood and well-elaborated standard of zealous advocacy for immigration lawyers would be useful, …

Supply And Demand: Immigration Of The Highly-Skilled And Educated In The Post-9/11 Market, 48 J. Marshall L. Rev. 419 (2015), Julia Funke

UIC Law Review

Post-9/11 immigration law and policy has had a significant impact on immigrants residing in the U.S. lawfully. Specifically, individuals applying for and immigrating using nonimmigrant employment and education visas have seen a markedly changed environment. Since this directly affects the U.S. economy, its impact cannot be underestimated. Therefore, the sections that follow will address the immigration of the highly skilled and educated in the post-9/11 market, specifically focusing on H-1B visas. Section II will begin with an explanation of the current U.S. immigration system, highlighting the restrictions on employment-based visas. Next, Section III will provide an overview of the H-1B …

A Dry Hate: White Supremacy And Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric In The Humanitarian Crisis On The U.S.-Mexico Border, Kristina M. Campbell

Journal Articles

Beginning with the passage of its anti-immigrant “Show-Me-Your-Papers” law in April 2010, S.B. 1070, much has been written about the hostile political climate toward noncitizens in the State of Arizona specifically and the U.S.-Mexico border generally. However, the recent influx of refugees from Central America to the United States has seen a resurgence in the anti-immigrant rhetoric, which is particularly disturbing since a large percentage of the individuals fleeing violence and poverty are children. In this vein, one aspect of the genesis of S.B. 1070 and other anti-immigrant laws that have not received a great deal of attention is the …

Inhospitable Hosts: Fundamental Flaws In Recruitment Practices Of H-2a Guest Workers And Recommendations For Change, Elyse T. Watkins

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Medical Repatriation: The Dangerous Intersection Of Health Care Law And Immigration, Katelynn Donelson

Journal of Health Care Law and Policy

No abstract provided.

A Cost-Benefit Analysis Of The Federal Prosecution Of Immigration Crimes, Kit Johnson

Faculty Articles

Immigration crimes are the most prosecuted federal crimes in America. This Article examines the benefits of the federal prosecution of immigration crimes (training, deterrence, and signaling/expression) and balances those benefits against the costs of such prosecutions (court- house costs, alternative prosecution, and incarceration). I conclude that deportation immediately following a conviction for an immigration crime appears to capture the key benefit of this system (signaling/expression) while alleviating its greatest expense (incarceration).

Vast Hordes...Crowding In Upon Us: The Executive Branch's Response To Mass Migration And The Legacy Of Chae Chan Ping, Kit Johnson

Faculty Articles

In this essay, we consider how Chae Chan Ping v. United States influences the Executive Branch’s policy response to mass migration, even today. The fear of mass migration reflected in the opinion, and the Court’s articulation that our government must protect its citizenry from “vast hordes...crowding in upon us,” is a message that still resonates. When it comes to policy, the Chinese Exclusion case is more modern than one might expect. In fact, we see the fingerprints of Chae Chan Ping in the Obama Administration’s current practice regarding the detention and processing of family migrants from Central America, and in …

Unappealing: An Assessment Of The Limits On Appeal Rights In Canada's New Refugee Determination System, Sean Rehaag, Angus Gavin Grant

Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series

Canada’s refugee determination system was revised in 2012. One key feature of the new process is a quasi-judicial administrative appeal, on matters of both fact and law, at the Refugee Appeal Division (RAD) of the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). Under the new process, however, many claimants are denied access to the RAD.

This article assesses these limits on access to the RAD, drawing mostly on quantitative data obtained from the IRB and Citizenship and Immigration Canada through access to information requests. Our aim is to provide evidence-based analysis and recommendations for reform. Essentially, our conclusions are that the bars …

The History Of Prosecutorial Discretion In Immigration Law, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

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

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Chae Chan Ping At 125: An Introduction, Kit Johnson

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Case: Chae Chan Ping V. United States, 130 U.S. 151 (1889)

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Immigration’S Plenary Power Doctrine Endures, David A. Martin

Oklahoma Law Review

The plenary power doctrine, traditionally traced to the Supreme Court’s decision in Chae Chan Ping, has persisted despite a steady and vigorous stream of scholarly criticism. This essay undertakes to explain why. First, the Court’s strong deference to the political branches does not derive from the concept of sovereignty. Justice Field’s opinion for the Court invoked sovereignty not to trump rights claims but to solve a federalism problem — structural reasoning that locates the immigration control power squarely in the federal government, though not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. The Chae Chan Ping Court’s deference to the political branches instead …

Scalia’S Short Reply To 125 Years Of Plenary Power, Michael Scaperlanda

Oklahoma Law Review

With its plenary power doctrine, the Supreme Court erred by rejecting the universal in favor of the particular. Liberal immigration theorists, on the other hand, make the opposite error by rejecting the particular in favor of the universal. Drawing on classic international law publicists and the Catholic philosophical tradition, this essay argues that the two concepts—the state’s greater duty toward its own citizens (the particular) and equal dignity and worth of all human beings (the universal)—go hand in hand: complementing each other and giving the state a qualified right to limit immigration along with a qualified duty to admit vulnerable …

Elusive Equality: Reflections On Justice Field’S Opinions In Chae Chan Ping And Fong Yue Ting, Victor C. Romero

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Immigration In The Supreme Court, 2009-13: A New Era Of Immigration Law Unexceptionalism, Kevin R. Johnson

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.