Search results

Granting ‘sanctuary’ in the United States to those fleeing poverty and violence is rooted in a deep history of hospitality and compassion. As we are witnessing a rise in xenophobia accompanied by policies of exclusion, we also see a rising number of ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ limiting their cooperation with immigration authorities that many communities consider are using extremely harsh and punitive measures to detain and deport irregular migrants. As this chapter will demonstrate, there has been a dramatic increase through ‘immigration federalism’ of the number of these jurisdictions in cities, states and municipalities since the first practices of ‘sanctuary’ in the 1980s as result of the waves of forced migration due to the civil wars in Central America. The author also proposes that those entities granting ‘sanctuary’ to irregular migrants should also apply practices of ‘compassionate migration’ as described in the chapter to expand their protections further and include them in their communities.

This chapter examines the conundrum of juvenile immigration law and policy and argues that it is a present-day manifestation of “child-saving” in rhetoric, disposition, and human capital harm. In support of this thesis, the chapter reviews the pertinent human rights, law, and social science evidence, and it concludes that the maintenance of the nation’s existing immigration policy only makes sense within the context of the intentions of the 19th century child-saving movement. To substantiate this view, the political-economic drivers of contemporary US immigration policy (i.e., its child-saving dynamics) are explored. The chapter concludes by speculatively addressing the character (i.e., the form and quality) of modern-day juvenile immigration policy as child-saving informed by the philosophy and criticism of Psychological Jurisprudence (PJ).

Purpose – Some local governments are asking their police departments to enforce federal immigration law more aggressively. However, there is little research or policy guidance available to assist police in balancing local immigration enforcement with the norms of community-oriented policing.

Methodology – This paper presents results from a national survey of municipal police chiefs.

Findings – The survey responses indicate substantial differences in the way that police departments are approaching unauthorized immigration.

Implications – The highly varied nature of policing practice on this issue is a function of the lack of clear policy guidance and models for local enforcement of immigration law.

This article identifies children’s rights as a neglected area in citizenship literature, both in socio-legal scholarship and in British nationality case law. It analyzes reasons for this neglect and posits that there exists a dichotomy in approaches to the wellbeing of children in the UK. The characterization of children’s interests and subsequent obligations owed by states to children are different in nationality law from other areas of law, notably, family law. Through our case study of the registration of children as British citizens, we argue that in the UK formal legal membership may appear achievable “in the books” but remains elusive in “law in action.” Children’s interests should be just as central to citizenship studies and nationality case law as to family law cases. A new approach to acquisition of British citizenship by children, with the best interests of the child as a critical evaluative principle at the heart of decision making, will usher in a new era. In the absence of such reconceptualization, children remain passive subjects of nationality law and their voices are unheard in processes of acquisition of citizenship.

Drawing on 61 interviews with Mexican immigrants and ethnographic participant observation conducted over three years, I compare social movement organizing in two cities in one California County: one more progressive and the other more repressive. I profile two campaigns waged by Mexican immigrants and their allies in response to two threats posed by police: (1) car impoundments of undocumented, unlicensed drivers’ vehicles and (2) police killings. As political process theory was extended to authoritarian settings, scholars have demonstrated that both growing political opportunity and threat stimulate mobilization. Building on this trend in the literature, this study’s contribution lies in its specification of the relationship among political opportunities, threat, and mobilization tactics. I argue increasing local political opportunity gives rise to more collaborative protest tactics, while relatively more threatening environments yield more confrontational tactics. Because opportunity and threat are not objectively assessed, nor do they automatically inspire protest, I also consider the role of state targets, formalized SMOs, and the influence of coalition partners on tactics. Ethnographic methods are particularly useful for understanding the way organizers and activists, from within organizations that favor distinct tactical repertoires, perceive and attribute threat and opportunity, shedding light on the micro- and meso-level dynamics that shape the social form of mobilization.

This chapter examines the influence of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy on some of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the past three decades. Mobilizing the epistemic community framework, it demonstrates how network members, acting as amici curiae, litigators, academics, and judges worked to transmit intellectual capital to Supreme Court decision makers in 12 federalism and separation of powers cases decided between 1983 and 2001. It finds that Federalist Society members were most successful in diffusing ideas into Supreme Court opinions in cases where doctrinal distance was greatest; that is, cases where the Supreme Court moved the farthest from its established constitutional framework.

Like popularized stories amplifying the dangers associated with stranger-predator street crime, immigrant-as-criminal narratives are as widespread as they are inconsistent with the best available data. A growing body of research suggests that immigration not only does not increase crime, it may reduce it. Building on what Scheingold referred to as political criminology, our analysis suggests that the continued salience of immigrant-as-criminal narratives tells us more about politics and power, the symbolic life of the law, and the multifaceted importance of proximity to understanding debates about crime and punishment, than it tells us about how to construct more effective immigration or crime control policies.

In the 1982, ruling of Plyler v. Doe the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that undocumented children cannot be denied a public education. Yet, as this chapter is being written in 2015, states across the United States have passed statutes preventing the education of these children and by practical extension documented children and their families. A package of Executive Actions by President Obama in November of 2014 modestly benefited and impacted the rights of undocumented immigrants, but did not challenge the state laws affecting school children and university students. In this chapter, we will review the rights to education of immigrant children. We will review the national scene as it stands amidst confusion in the absence of meaningful immigration reform by the U.S. Congress and the puzzle of the states arbitrarily denying rights flowing from the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, carefully articulated in Plyler. We intend to present a blunt portrait of rights denied and children left behind.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states in 2018 that safeguarding “civil liberties is critical” to their official duties. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS, as its website explains,

reviews and assesses complaints from the public in areas such as: physical or other abuse; discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability; inappropriate conditions of confinement; infringements of free speech; violation of right to due process … and any other civil rights or civil liberties violation related to a Department program or activity.

My chapter tracks the centrality of deportability in shaping the civil liberties and rights that DHS is tasked with enforcing. Over the course of the twentieth century, people on US soil saw an expanding list of civil liberties and civil rights. Important scholarship concentrates on the role of the courts, state and federal governments, advocacy groups, social movements, and foreign policy driving these constitutional and cultural changes. For instance, the scholarship illustrates that coming out of World War I, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect something the Justices labeled “irresponsible speech.” The Supreme Court soon changed course, opening up an era ever since of more robust First Amendment rights. What has not been undertaken in the literature is an examination of the relationship of deportability to the sweep of civil liberties and civil rights. Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, federal immigration policymakers began multiplying types of immigration statuses. A century later, among many others, there is the H2A status for temporary low-wage workers, the H2B for skilled labor, and permanent residents with green cards. The deportability of each status constrains access to certain liberties and rights. Thus, in 2016, when people from the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS act, they are not enforcing a uniform body of rights and liberties that applies equally to citizens and immigrants, or even within the large category of immigrants. Instead, they do so within a complicated matrix of liberties and rights attenuated by deportability, which has been shaped by the history of the twentieth century.