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According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the world is experiencing the greatest refugee crisis in recorded history alongside increasingly restrictive limits on asylum seekers and refugees. In 2020, the US administration established a ceiling for refugees of 18,000 people, the lowest number on record, and only 11,814 refugees were admitted to the United States. The Biden administration has expressed commitments to building a coherent asylum and refugee system and quickly reversing recent detrimental policies. But the administration has cautioned how quickly change might occur, given how “agencies and processes…have been so gutted.”¹

2016 to 2020 included an overwhelming series of changes to laws and policies affecting asylum seekers, often with little documented planning or communication, wreaking severe effects on conditions for asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border. These changes had significant consequences for human rights, most notably the linchpin right of access to information. At the US–Mexico border, must the right “to seek, receive and impart information” be fulfilled in order to fulfill the right to asylum?

While information professionals are not expected to be experts in law, they are experts in understanding the link between access to information and the realization of justice and human rights. This chapter investigates the role of the information professional in the fulfillment of the right to asylum, particularly in the context of contemporary asylum seekers at the US–Mexico border, volatile information landscapes, and the legal and historical framework in the United States for seeking asylum.

One of the most important, least-known documents of the American Revolution was a 25-page pamphlet published in Amsterdam early in 1787: An Explanatory Message Concerning the Funds by Pieter Stadnitski. ¹ Within a year of its publication Peter Stadnitski's Message quite literally revolutionized American sovereign finance. My paper will summarize in detail the report's content and analyze its arguments in light of Dutch archival materials including deeds, newspaper reports, and letters, as well as congressional records from American sources. It will describe what Dutch investors knew (and did not know) of the state of American public finance and American political landscape, and the Dutch financial community's view of the American future. Its essential argument is that thanks initially to Stadnitski's persuasive case and ultimately to the success of the trusts he pioneered, Dutch investment specialists came to see the American republic as a safe haven at a time that Dutch Republic's own future seemed increasingly perilous. If their dream of achieving a new Golden Age through trade and investment with the new nation ultimately proved illusory, the effects of Dutch capital in creating financial stability for the United States government and igniting the first peacetime economic expansion in American history were revolutionary indeed.

This article begins by exploring the development of extraterritoriality in the United States. It notes the expansion of extraterritorial provisions within federal criminal legislation and how these provisions permit prosecutors to proceed with criminal actions for conduct occurring outside this country. It also reflects on the use of an “objective territorial principle” by the judiciary, that permits criminal prosecutions whenever the conduct of the actor has a substantial effect in the United States. As an alternative to using “objective territoriality,” this article advocates for using a “defensive territoriality” approach. This article stresses the benefits of using a “defensive territoriality” approach to decide whether to prosecute an extraterritorial crime.

This chapter aims to analyze whether European security shapes future American grand strategy or not. For restrainers, the present American grand strategy has to be revisited due to the fact that there is no balance of power logic for further American presence in Europe. Moreover, China is a great power to be balanced in Asia. The chapter problematizes the assumptions provided by restrainers. It will argue that the United States has been acting in Europe as the pacifier, and it has a deep-seated interest in European peace. European security has been built upon the American preponderance of power, and a potential imbalance of power is a threat to the United States. While Russia is a revisionist power in Europe intended to change the status quo in Europe, China is a great power in Asia. However, the United States has both sufficient material power and allies to balance Russia and China simultaneously, and pivoting to Asia requires no American pullback in Europe.

Against the prevalent assumption that the United States is and has been a nation-state, this article proposes to reconceptualize it as an empire-state, a state encompassing hierarchically differentiated spaces and peoples. In addition to being descriptively more apt, an empire-state approach provides a firmer basis for understanding the United States as a racial state, a state of white supremacy. Drawing on evidence from constitutional law, I examine the early development of the U.S. empire-state, the long 19th century. The article demonstrates how U.S. state formation has always entailed the racial construction of colonial spaces, specifically “territories” and American Indian lands. Through an extended consideration of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 Supreme Court case associated almost exclusively with African Americans and hardly ever with empire, I argue for a unified framework to analyze the different but linked racial subjections of colonized and noncolonized peoples. The article concludes with several implications of an empire-state approach to the United States.

Indian immigrants in the United States and other wealthy countries are successful in entrepreneurship. Using Census data from the three largest developed countries receiving Indian immigrants in the world – the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada – we examine the performance of Indian entrepreneurs and explanations for their success. We find that business income of Indian entrepreneurs in the United States is substantially higher than the national average and is higher than for any other immigrant group. Approximately half of the average difference in income between Indian entrepreneurs and the national average is explained by their high levels of education while industry differences explain an additional 10 percent. In Canada, Indian entrepreneurs have average earnings slightly below the national average but are more likely to hire employees, as are their counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Indian educational advantage is smaller in Canada and the United Kingdom, contributing less to their entrepreneurial success.