Murray on Zero Tolerance @murrayyxta

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, is publishing Zero Tolerance in the Texas Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy. Here is the abstract.

Zero Tolerance is a legal-literary work in which the author seeks to understand the motivations and thought processes of immigration detention agents who have participated in separating families at the border. It is a work of fiction, which is part of a collection of short stories titled Americas. Conventional legal scholarship, such as that written by Josh Chafetz, David E. Pozen, and Jennifer Nou, has addressed radical or troubling shifts in norms, which scholars describe as “norm destruction” and “norm decomposition.” This story treats norm destruction in the context of atrocities committed in immigrant detention centers in furtherance of the Attorney General’s “zero tolerance policy” against illegal immigration. It is part of a larger project that addresses the political and jurisprudential catastrophes of the past several years through the expressiveness permitted by art.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Batlan on the Gendered Origins of the Practice of Immigration Law, 1907-1940 @ChicagoKentLaw

Felice Batlan, Chicago-Kent College of Law, has published Deja Vu and the Gendered Origins of the Practice of Immigration Law, 1907-1940. Here is the abstract.

Donald Trump’s administration has provoked crisis after crisis regarding the United States’ immigration policy, laws, and their enforcement. This has drastically affected millions of immigrants in the U.S. and those hoping to immigrate. Stemming from this, immigration lawyers and immigrant advocacy organizations are challenging such policies and providing an extraordinary amount of direct pro bono legal services to immigrants in need. Yet the history of the practice of immigration law has been largely understudied. This article seeks to address this history by closely examining Chicago’s Immigrants’ Protective League between 1910 and 1940. The League provided free counsel to tens of thousands of poor immigrants facing a multitude of immigration-related legal issues during a time when Congress passed increasingly strict immigration laws often spawned by xenophobia and racism. The League, always headed by women social workers, created a robust model of immigration advocacy. Overtime, it combined the everyday legal representation of immigrants, the production of social science research and scholarship about immigration and immigrants, the lobbying of immigration officials and the federal government for better and less restrictive immigration laws, and the provision of a variety of social services to immigrants. It also did so during an era when only a handful of women were professionally trained lawyers. A close and thick reading of the League’s archival documents, manifests how the events of Trump’s immigration policies have a long and painful history. U.S. immigration law and its enforcement have consistently been cruel, inhumane, arbitrary, and capricious. Told from the ground up and focusing upon the day-to-day problems that immigrants brought to the League, one dramatically sees how immigration laws and practices were (and still are) like quicksand – changing and unstable— thwarting the legitimate expectations of migrants, at times, leaving people in a legal limbo, and at other times, destroying lives. The League, in response, participated in creating what would become the practice of immigration law. In doing so, it continually engaged in legal improvisation as it quickly responded to changing laws, rules, policies, and the needs of those trying to immigrate.

The full text is not available for download from SSRN.

Literature and the Judicial Opinion

Via Benjamin Woodring, news that Judge Michael Baylson went literary in his ruling in favor of the City of Philadelphia, finding that the federal government cannot cut off funding because the city insists it will only surrender undocumented immigrants if the feds have proper warrants. Here, courtesy of Dr. Woodring, is a link to Judge Baylson's opinion. It begins with quotations from Hamlet and Coriolanus and from Dr. Woodring's own article Liberty to Misread, published in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and continues to the Odyssey.

I think a lot of literature profs out there must be very pleased! More about the law and literature references in this opinion here in an Atlantic essay by Walt Hunter of Clemson University, one of the aforementioned lit profs.

Law and the humanities lives!

Munshi on Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive @GeorgetownLaw

Sherally Munshi, Georgetown University Law Center, is publishing 'You Will See My Family Became so American': Race, Citizenship, and the Visual Archive in Law and the Visual: Representation, Technologies, and Critique (Desmond Manderson, ed., 2018). Here is the abstract.

In 1932, the United States government sought to cancel the citizenship of Dinshah Ghadiali, an immigrant from India, alleging that Ghadiali “by reason of his not being a free white person or a person of African nativity or descent is, and was, ineligible racially for naturalization.” Ghadiali was one of dozens of Indian immigrants targeted for denaturalization in the wake of United States v. Thind (1923), in which the Supreme Court declared that “Hindus,” though capable of cultural assimilation, would remain visually unassimilable. At his denaturalization trial, Ghadiali submitted into evidence a series of photographs, assuring the judge, “You will see my family became so American.” How do these photographs purport to show that Ghadiali and his family had become “so American”? In this essay, through a through a close reading of Ghadiali’s photography, I explore a tension between the visualization of race—a practice at once institutionalized by law and inextricably bound with the medium of photography—and the performance of national belonging.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Kathrani on the "Blade Runner" Films and Asylum Law @PKathrani

Paresh Kathrani, Westminster Law School, University of Westminster, has published Do Androids Dream of Asylum? The Blade Runner Films (1982, 2017) and Fear of the 'Other' at 16 The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal 1 (2018). Here is the abstract.

One of the predominant themes of both Blade Runner movies from 1982 and 2017 is the fear of the ‘other’. At the same time as the replicants represent the most obvious other, both films’ enduring genius lie in how they use features like their soundtracks, images and storylines to make the other resonate. Asylum seekers and refugees too are often perceived as others and this film review uses international refugee law as a framework to explore some of the critical themes that arise in both the movies. It argues that there are common issues that underpin the treatment of persecuted people and replicants, especially stemming from otherness, and international refugee law is a good framework to explore these issues.

CFP: The Body and Human Rights: A Symposium to be Held at Friends House, Kings Cross, London, February 12, 2018 @Bruneluni @DimitriosGian

From the mailbox (via the ever-vigilant Thom Giddens!):

 CALL FOR PAPERS
 The Body and Human Rights

A symposium to be held at
Friends House, 173-177 Euston Rd, Kings Cross, London NW1 2BJ on Monday 12 February, 2018

 Hosted by Brunel University London's Global Lives Research Centre, Knowing Our  Rights research project, and Britain in Europe think tank.
Convened by Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos and Meredith Jones
 In recent decades the body has become a major area of research across many disciplines, especially in the arts and social sciences. Feminist scholars have made important interventions in the ways that bodies are represented, managed, regulated, treated medically, and modified. Simultaneously, human rights scholars have engaged with challenging questions of how the human body should be legally understood and defined, and what may legitimate the State to become involved with individual choices about what to do with one's body (or how individuals might protect their autonomy from state invasions). This symposium will draw together these two areas. We invite scholars from any discipline to submit abstracts for 15-minute papers that address the body and human rights. Topics may include (but are by no means limited to):

Refugee Bodies and Borders
Transgender Issues
Abortion / Contraception
Body Modifications
Healthcare / Surgery
Euthanasia
Slavery
Egg harvesting / sperm donation
Incarceration
Torture
 Please send titles and brief abstracts for consideration to meredith.jones@brunel.ac.uk by Wednesday 10 January.

Chin and Tu on Comprehensive Immigration Reform in the Jim Crow Era: Chinese Exclusion and the McCreary Act of 1893

Gabriel "Jack" Chin, University of California, Davis, School of Law, and Daniel K. Tu have published Comprehensive Immigration Reform in the Jim Crow Era: Chinese Exclusion and the McCreary Act of 1893 at 23 Asian American Law Journal 39 (2016). Here is the abstract.

This paper discusses the first immigration amnesty, the McCreary Act of 1893, which regularized the status of tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants to the United States. The Chinese migrants became deportable because they failed to register as required by the Geary Act, based on advice of counsel that the law, applicable on racial grounds, was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, in an era in which racial discrimination was more intense today than it is now, and in which Congress had determined that Chinese immigration should end, Congress agreed to let those here remain, on conditions, rather than taking the opportunity to rid the country of Chinese.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Waldron @JeremyJWaldron on Immigration, Culture, and Community

Jeremy Waldron, New York University School of Law, has published What Respect is Owed to Illusions About Immigration and Culture? Here is the abstract.

Against the background of my own general skepticism about cultural arguments in favor of immigration restrictions, I consider the possibility that such arguments may be redeemed by focusing on the damage unrestricted immigration may do to "imagined" cultural community as opposed to "actual" cultural community. There is plenty to explore here, but the paper ends with the suggestion that arguments about "imagined community" will operate differently and will be subject to greater constraints than well-founded arguments about the impact of immigration on actual culture.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Ngara on Language and the Immigration Debate

Emily C. Torstveit Ngara, University of Baltimore School of Law, is publishing Aliens, Aggravated Felons and Worse: When Words Breed Fear and Fear Breeds Injustice in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Here is the abstract.

As presidential candidates casually and inaccurately throw the term “anchor baby” into public discourse, the time is right to examine the Immigration and Nationality Act for many other examples of misleading language in the statute. This article undertakes the critical task of examining how the language of immigration law, using prevailing immigration metaphors, manipulates perceptions of noncitizens. From the use of the term “alien” to describe any noncitizen and emphasize otherness, to describing “prosecutorial” enforcement decisions to strengthen the alien-as-criminal narrative, these word choices are significant. This is especially true when noncitizens are interacting with the criminal justice system. These words and metaphors find their way into the collective subconscious and impact cognitive bias against immigrant communities. This article identifies several terms that are particularly problematic, then advocates for alternative language that more accurately reflects of the definitions provided by the INA.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Rhetoric of Immigration Jurisprudence

Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, Willamette University College of Law, has published Alien Language: Immigration Metaphors and the Jurisprudence of Otherness, at 79 Fordham Law Review 1545 (2011. Here is the abstract.

Metaphors tell the story of immigration law. Throughout its immigration jurisprudence, the U.S. Supreme Court has employed rich metaphoric language to describe immigrants attacking nations and aliens flooding communities. This Article applies research in cognitive linguistics to critically evaluate the metaphoric construction of immigrants in the law.

Three conceptual metaphors dominate legal texts: IMMIGRANTS ARE ALIENS, IMMIGRATION IS A FLOOD, and IMMIGRATION IS AN INVASION. In order to gauge the prevalence of these metaphors, the Article engages in a textual analysis of modern Supreme Court opinions and presents original empirical data on the incidence of alienage terminology in federal court decisions. The Article explains how immigration metaphors influence not only judicial outcomes, but also social discourse and the broader debate over immigration reform. As such, the theoretical study of language has very practical consequences for the people defined by immigration metaphors.

The Article concludes by proposing an oppositional metaphoric framework based on the concepts of migration and economic sanctuary. These metaphors describe immigration in terms of movement, work, and community, in contrast to existing legal metaphors that describe immigration in terms of danger, attack, and criminality. Thus, while today’s immigration metaphors signify a loss of economic security and cultural hegemony, the proposed terms emphasize immigrants’ economic contributions and potential for social belonging. This process of evaluation and substitution diminishes the power of existing metaphors to conflate and essentialize, while creating space in the legal imagination for new frames to emerge.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.