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The object of this research is the reconstruction of the existing legal response by European Union states to the phenomenon of immigration. It seeks to analyse the process of conferral of protection.

One main dimension is selected and discussed: the case law of the national courts. The study focuses on the legal status of immigrants resulting from the intervention of these national courts.

The research shows that although the courts have conferred an increasing protection on immigrants, this has not challenged the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the states to decide, according to their discretionary prerogatives, which immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in their territories. Notwithstanding the differences in the general constitutional and legal structures, the research also shows that the courts of the three countries considered – France, Germany and Spain – have progressively moved towards converging solutions in protecting immigrants.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the different legal orders analysed.

Research on behavioral functioning among Mexican-origin children primarily uses an individual-centered approach that ignores the residential context. In addition, most studies have been unable to consider an important measure of inequality for this population, legal status; and mental health of children with undocumented parents is underexplored. We address these gaps by investigating the influence of parental legal status and neighborhood characteristics on Mexican-origin children’s behavioral functioning using a multilevel approach.

We use data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study and 2000 decennial census. Our primary focus is variation in internalizing and externalizing behavior problems among Mexican-origin youth (N = 2,535) with mothers who are undocumented, documented or naturalized citizens, or US-born using multilevel models.

The multilevel results show the importance of considering parental legal status. Mexican children of unauthorized mothers are more likely to exhibit internalizing and externalizing problems than all other groups of Mexican children. Furthermore, neighborhood-concentrated disadvantage is significantly associated with internalizing behavior problems, and neighborhood-concentrated affluence is significantly associated with externalizing behavior problems. In short, the results demonstrate the importance of considering both parental legal status and neighborhood contexts for understanding behavior problems of Mexican-origin children.

Our findings suggest that Mexican children’s mental health outcomes – measured by internalizing and externalizing behavior problems – vary significantly by parental legal status and neighborhood contexts. This study provides important nuances for public policy for health care prevention and interventions.

This chapter examines the lives of Central American immigrant workers, with a focus on the paramount position of legal status in immigrants’ lives.

The legal context into which Central American immigrant workers arrive creates the various legal statuses they hold, which in turn dictate the kind of jobs they can obtain, where they live and, in general, shape their prospects in the United States. Although many Central Americans have held various forms of temporary protection from deportation, such relief is temporary and therefore subject to multiple extensions, applications, forms, and renewals, which serve to accentuate these immigrants’ legal uncertainty. Given their legal predicament and the consequent truncated paths to mobility, many Central American immigrant workers live in poverty; indeed, they are more likely to live in poverty than other foreign born. At the same time, they have high labor force participation rates. Their high rates of poverty coupled with high labor force participation rates indicate that their jobs do not pay much. In spite of these circumstances, they remit a significant portion of their earnings to their non-migrating family members in the origin countries.

The largely unchanged occupational and sectorial concentrations of Central Americans in the U.S. economy over the last two decades underscores the critical implications of legal status for immigrant incorporation and socioeconomic mobility.

This chapter exposes the vulnerabilities imposed by a precarious legal status and highlights the importance of more secure legal statuses for immigrant workers’ potential integration and paths to mobility.

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.

Psychotherapy with refugees in the western world is quite often complicated because many refugees live without a secure residency status. It is difficult to have a structured therapeutic perspective when doing psychotherapy with these patients because of their fears and daily problems. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate psychotherapy results for 190 traumatized refugees (40 per cent without a secure residency).

To measure the outcome of the psychotherapies the paper used HAM-D and CGI at baseline and at the end of the therapeutic process.

The study shows that, although refugees without a legal status had more depressive symptoms and lived with much higher psychosocial stress, psychotherapy was as effective as for traumatized refugees with a legal status.

Heterogeneity, convenience sampling and retrospective completion of some of the baseline assessments.

Psychotherapeutic treatment of refugees has a clear positive effect on them and should be applied even in those without legal residence status in the host country.

This is the first study assessing the effectiveness of daily practice psychotherapy for refugees with and without a legal status in a comparative fashion.

Purpose: Fear of deportation and its relationship to healthcare access has been less studied among immigrant Latinx men who have sex with men (MSM), a population at risk for HIV and characterized by their multiple minority statuses. The first step is to accurately measure their fear of deportation.

Approach: We used an exploratory sequential mixed methods design. Eligibility criteria were that research participants be ages 18–34 years; Latinx; cisgender male; having had sex with another male; residing in the District of Columbia metro area; and not a US citizen or legal permanent resident. In Study 1, we used in-depth interviews and thematic analysis. Using participants' interview responses, we inductively generated 15 items for a fear of deportation scale. In Study 2, we used survey data to assess the scale's psychometric properties. We conducted independent samples t-test on the associations between scale scores and barriers to healthcare access.

Findings: For the 20 participants in Study 1, fear of deportation resulted in chronic anxiety. Participants managed their fear through vigilance, and behaviors restricting their movement and social network engagement. In Study 2, we used data from 86 mostly undocumented participants. The scale was internally consistent (α = 0.89) and had a single factor. Those with higher fear of deportation scores were significantly more likely to report avoiding healthcare because they were worried about their immigration status (p = 0.007).

Originality: We described how fear of deportation limits healthcare access for immigrant Latinx MSM.

Research implications: Future research should examine fear of deportation and HIV risk among immigrant Latinx MSM.

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promised to reduce inequalities in insurance coverage between Latinos and non-Latinos by expanding coverage, it also excluded a large portion of noncitizen immigrants. Past research has demonstrated that among Latinos, further inequalities have developed between citizens and noncitizens after the ACA took effect, but it is unclear if this pattern is unique to Latinos or is evident among non-Latinos as well. I use data from the 2011 to 2016 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) (n = 369,386) to test how the relationship between citizenship status (native citizen, naturalized citizen, or noncitizen) and insurance coverage changed after the ACA, adjusting for health, demographic, and socioeconomic factors. I disaggregate the analysis by ethnicity to test whether this change differs between Latinos and non-Latinos. The analysis finds that after the ACA, naturalized citizens across ethnic groups moved toward parity with native citizens in health insurance coverage while the benefits of the ACA for noncitizens were conditional on ethnicity. For non-Latinos, lacking citizenship became less disadvantageous for predicting insurance coverage while for Latinos, lacking citizenship became even more disadvantageous in predicting insurance coverage. This bifurcation among noncitizens by ethnicity implies that while the ACA has strengthened institutional boundaries between citizens and noncitizens, this distinction is primarily affecting Latinos. The conclusion offers considerations on how legal systems of stratification influence population health processes.

The importance of CEOs (chief executive officers) is not to be underestimated and this paper seeks to identify the problems in law of definition and thus liability of CEOs.

This paper draws upon the legislative and judicial experiences of China and compares them to those of the USA.

Since an owner and a manager become “the principal‐agent relationship” in the enterprise, the manager's “moral venture question” is inevitable. With the development of corporate governance structure, CEOs appear, thus people begin to take care of CEOs’ legal status and legal liability. A CEO has not only a manager's authority of office, but also some part of authorities of board of directors and president, so a CEO's legal position is higher than that of a manager. Because the questions caused by CEOs are increasing, it is necessary for us to draw lessons from American Corporate Law Reform, to revise our Corporate Law, to make definite CEOs’ legal status and to strengthen CEOs’ legal liability.

The findings will hopefully influence reform and development in this area in China.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of documentation on the educational experiences, college readiness and aspirations of undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers.

This ethnographic study was conducted in a High School Equivalency Program at a large university in the Midwest. Data was collected during two semesters across a three-year span. Participants included six Mexican migrant and seasonal farmworkers who were preparing to earn their General Educational Development (GED) diploma. Using the grounded theory, data was collected and analyzed simultaneously where initial and focused coding took place, followed by cross-case analysis.

Analysis of student interviews, participant observations and in-depth fieldnotes that include the K-12 educational experiences, experiences during and after the High School Equivalency Program reveal that undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers aspire to earn a GED diploma to access a better future inclusive of college. However, the legal liminality, the uncertainty and ambiguity of being undocumented, impacts their educational journey prior to, during and beyond the High School Equivalency Program. Furthermore, undocumented Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers are unable to change their material conditions with a GED because of their documentation status.

Although researchers have studied the education experiences of Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers, analysis and consideration of documentation status is missing. This study contributes much needed findings about the impact of documentation status on the educational experiences, college readiness, and aspirations of Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers.