Immigration Law Stories
Authors:
Martin, David A. / Schuck, Peter H.
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2005
18 chapters
have results for Immigration Stories
Introduction 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Given the centrality of immigration to American self-understanding, it is wholly fitting that
- Immigration stories help shape how we conceive of ourselves as a nation. At the end of his noted history of multicultural America, Ronald Takaki reflects:
- Although the American immigration narrative is sometimes rendered as a pure tale of hope, grit, and triumph, a truthful account would include its share of stories of tragedy, shame, conflict, and failure (as Takaki’s and Handlin’s works make manifest). This mixed picture of success and setback holds whether viewed from the perspective of the individuals who migrate, the society that receives them, or the government that seeks to regulate the process. And of course this complex story is still unfolding. Since September 11, 2001, we have seen a remarkable reaffirmation of inclusiveness alongside an increased fear of aliens from certain regions associated with terrorist threats.
- The other three stories in this volume are harder to classify but nevertheless reveal the operations of our immigration enforcement system, and, in some cases, the difficulty of balancing the demands of enforcement against other important societal goals. Daniel Kanstroom provides a rich and compelling account of the organized crime leader Carlos Marcello, a lawful permanent resident since infancy, whom the government tried to deport for decades, without success. One of the key markers in Marcello’s seemingly endless journey through the courts, ...with Marcello and his extraordinarily resourceful lawyers led to changes in the laws governing judicial review—but not always with the impact that the government anticipated. David Martin’s chapter addresses political asylum, an issue in an increasing percentage of modern removal cases. It is the only chapter that does not focus on Supreme Court rulings; instead, it addresses a widely noted landmark decision of the Board of Immigration...
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Chapter 9. Maria and Joseph Plasencia’s Lost Weekend: The Case of Landon v. Plasencia 60 results (showing 5 best matches)
- After the testimony of the three INS witnesses, Plasencia elaborated on the story that she had previously laid out for the immigration judge:
- The story of Maria and Joseph Plasencia shows a rather ordinary couple—one an immigrant, the other a native-born U.S. citizen—caught up in larger national and international tides. Far from a passive observer, Maria Plasencia refused to concede removal, but pressed her claim to return to her family in the United States. Legally, the Supreme Court decision in the case was a partial loss for Maria, but, released pending appeal and never pursued by the INS after the Supreme Court’s decision, she returned to normal life in the United States with her family. This at the time was not that uncommon in immigration cases, even those in which the government claimed legal victory. Uneven enforcement, and the ability of immigrants to delay removal from the United States, often worked to their advantage. Since 1982, however, the federal government has made the deportation of non-citizens subject to removal—particularly those with criminal convictions—a priority, with the result being that
- See Administration’s Proposals on Immigration and Refugee Policy: Joint Hearing Before the Subcomm. on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law of the House Comm. on the Judiciary and Subcomm. on Immigration and Refugee Policy of the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 1st Sess. 6 (1981).
- Facing the perceived threat of mass migration, many Americans favored dramatically reducing the level of immigration to the United States. The Reagan administration vigorously advocated immigration reform in the 1980s. Attorney General William French Smith told Congress in 1981, a little more than a year before oral argument in the Supreme Court in the case of Within five years, Congress would enact the Immigration Reform and Control Act two laws that together intensified immigration enforcement in hopes of reducing and controlling undocumented immigration.
- Maria Plasencia opposed the petition for writ of certiorari in a brief filed by Denis Campbell of One Stop Immigration, immigration attorney Peter A. Schey, and a group of lawyers from the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights (later renamed the National Immigration Law Center), a nationally known immigrant rights organization. The brief defended the Ninth Circuit decision.
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Chapter 13. Demore v. Kim: Judicial Deference to Congressional Folly 73 results (showing 5 best matches)
- A consultation on immigration detention hosted by the Commission on Immigration Reform on April 11, 1996 captures the moment. Congress had chartered the bipartisan Commission to make recommendations on immigration policy. Top INS officials and immigration advocates from across the country were gathered in a conference room at a Washington, D.C. hotel to brief the commissioners on detention concerns. Coincidentally, that very day decision.) It was the first newspaper story to report the now infamous statistic that the INS actually removed only one out of every ten individuals not kept in custody who were subject to final deportation orders.
- Once statutory eligibility is established, cancellation of removal for lawful permanent residents is granted as a matter of discretion. The statute provides no particular formula for making this determination. In general, the immigration judge must conclude that the positive equities in the case outweigh the negative factors, and that the applicant is deserving of a favorable exercise of discretion. In a nutshell, the record of Kim’s cancellation proceeding discloses the following story.
- The background story of Hyung Joon Kim’s convictions and rehabilitation exposes the misrepresentations and misunderstandings that clouded the Supreme Court’s judgment in In addition, the nature of Kim’s crimes and the strength of his ties to the community are precisely what an immigration judge would consider (albeit in less detail) if the statute allowed for a bond hearing. Most importantly, Kim’s story shows the steep human cost and the government waste incurred when detention is mandated for virtually all non-citizen offenders facing deportation, without an individualized assessment of whether any purpose is served by their continued incarceration.
- Mandatory detention also imposes significant costs on the government. Under INA § 236(c), virtually all the beds available for immigration detention must be used to hold non-citizens who are being deported for crimes. This impairs the Department’s ability to use detention resources for other purposes. Late in the summer of 2004, for example, a spate of newspaper stories reported that the southern border of the United States was ripe for exploitation by terrorists. The key concern was that immigration authorities along the border had no spare detention capacity, and thus were employing a “catch and release” policy that permitted individuals from countries other than Mexico who were apprehended at the border to remain at large inside the United States.
- At the close of the hearing on Hyung Joon Kim’s application for cancellation of removal, the immigration judge—expressing dismay at the government’s dogged persistence in pursuing Kim’s deportation—cautioned the DHS attorney that “you’re not going to want my decision Nevertheless, the Department did appeal the grant of cancellation to the Board of Immigration Appeals. And on January 15, 2004, the Board, in a nonprecedent decision, reversed the immigration judge’s ruling.
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Chapter 10. Adelaide Abankwah, Fauziya Kasinga, and the Dilemmas of Political Asylum 46 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Abankwah arrived three days before expedited removal took effect, a system that allows for speedy issuance, in many port of entry cases, of a removal order by an immigration officer, without the involvement of an IJ, when an arriving alien presents false or improper documents. Had she arrived later, she would have undergone preliminary screening by an asylum officer and would have gone on to immigration court only if that screening determined that she had a “credible fear of persecution.” INA § 235(b)(1), 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1). It should also be noted that in March 2003, INS was abolished and its functions were taken over by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For convenience, this chapter will generally use a reference to INS, the operative agency during most of the time relevant to these stories, even when speaking generically of immigration functions that are now handled by DHS.
- Let me make it clear that my response to your coverage is not motivated by support for the antiquated and racist immigration policies of the United States government, but from a long-term association with and love for Adelaide’s home country…. I am disgusted that your magazine has made Adelaide into a cause celebre when there is every indication that her story is contrived. Female genital mutilation is not only NOT practised in the area of Ghana from which Adelaide claims to come, but NEVER has been…. Nowhere in Ghana and, in fact, nowhere on the African continent, is [FGM] used as a punishment against those who have lost their virginity. Her claims are preposterous and any glance at any relevant literature … would have made this clear.
- of immigration law, and can lead after a few years to full lawful permanent resident status and ultimately to U.S. citizenship. Asylum cases present significant challenges of both fact and law. How can adjudicators predict what would befall an individual upon return to a distant country? What proof should applicants offer? How can adjudicators tell if the applicant is embroidering the story, or making it up out of whole cloth? What sorts of harm amount to persecution? How great must the risk be to make the fear well-founded? When does persecution have an adequate nexus to one of the five grounds listed in the statute? What is one to make of the most vague or open-ended factor in that list, membership in a particular social group? How should asylum claimants be housed and cared for while their cases are adjudicated? Under what circumstances should they be detained? Each of these questions played a role in the Kasinga and Abankwah stories.
- The story of Adelaide Abankwah reveals both real strengths and disquieting weaknesses in the institution of political asylum and in the American system for receiving and resolving asylum claims. The revelations become particularly sharp when Abankwah’s case is viewed against the backdrop of a precedent decision decided just nine months before she arrived in the United States, Both applications for asylum encountered skepticism and resistance, on factual and legal grounds. Both women endured lengthy periods in detention while awaiting resolution of their cases, and both achieved a remarkable degree of public notoriety during the wait. Not until the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) decided to grant asylum to Kasinga in 1996 did the U.S. system fully come to grips, as a matter of doctrine, with asylum claims based on this sort of ingrained cultural practice. That ruling resolved several key legal issues, but it did not make the subsequent administrative and judicial decisions in the
- Narymsky also used direct examination for another bit of anticipatory defense, by asking about Abankwah’s passport and why she did not admit under early INS questioning that her document was false. Case law makes it clear that the use of false documents as part of the immediate escape from the country of persecution should not count against the individual, but immigration judges are often wary of the credibility of such persons if they do not own up to the fraud and reveal the full story promptly after arriving in a safe country.
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Chapter 12. Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB: The Rules of the Workplace for Undocumented Immigrants 46 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The story of reveals the efforts of unions, employers, civil rights advocates, legislatures, executive branch agencies, and ultimately the Supreme Court to reconcile immigration and labor laws, to make sense of the sometimes contradictory legislative impulses these twin regimes manifest, and to develop a framework for the humane and effective regulation of both borders and labor markets.
- case and an emphasis on the tradition of deference to the Board’s broad remedial authority. The ACLU would analyze the case from an immigration law perspective, including an exhaustive examination of the legislative origins of IRCA, to argue that Congress did not intend IRCA to alter the outcome in , nor to limit labor law remedies. If possible, the ACLU would also argue that IRCA only confirmed Congress’ intent that undocumented workers be eligible for backpay. Several civil rights advocacy organizations would organize a “Brandeis brief,” collecting stories of exploitation , state labor, employment, workers’ compensation, tort, contract, and insurance law must be left undisturbed. Last, if possible, would be a brief on behalf of mainstream employers frustrated by unfair competition from outlaw shops that regularly violate labor and immigration laws. All five briefs, including the states’ ...employers a competitive advantage. Nor, despite the immigration issues in the case...
- To an immigration lawyer familiar with immigration law’s “plenary power doctrine” and the notion of an ascending scale of rights that privileges legal immigrants over undocumented ones, the intuitive answer might be, “of course; there are frequently different rules for immigrants and citizens, and for legal immigrants and the undocumented.” To a labor lawyer familiar with labor law’s embrace of collective action and private rights enforcement to achieve public deterrence, the instinctive response might be, “of course not; there are no statutory exceptions to labor law coverage based on immigration status, and the fate of all workers depends on the treatment of each.”
- , five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court viewed the labor and immigration laws as fundamentally at odds with one another. This majority held that an employer who unlawfully discharges a worker for union organizing activities is immune from ordinary labor law liability for backpay, if the worker lacks work authorization under immigration law and the employer learns this only after the illegal discharge. Four dissenting justices viewed the labor and immigration laws as fundamentally harmonious. They would have allowed the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enforce its backpay award, notwithstanding an immigration law that prohibits employers from knowingly hiring or employing unauthorized workers.
- Labor and immigration advocates have pursued legislative strategies to address the consequences of . California enacted a law directing that state labor and civil rights remedies, “except any reinstatement remedy prohibited by federal law, are available to all individuals regardless of immigration status.” In 2004, Sen. Ted Kennedy and others introduced major immigration reform legislation that included a “ fix was incorporated in a lengthy immigration bill providing for an expanded guestworker program and earned legalization—that is, a bill unlikely to be acted on for several years, as wider debates about comprehensive immigration reform unfold. The
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Chapter 11. INS v. St. Cyr: The Campaign to Preserve Court Review and Stop Retroactive Deportation Laws 48 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In the mid–1990s there was enormous congressional interest in immigration reform. The congressionally-established Commission on Immigration Reform recommended vast changes in the country’s immigration system. Virtually every important immigration policy was on the table, including the rules for family and employment-based immigration, asylum claims, the cap on refugee admissions, standards for relief from deportation, rules governing detention of immigrants in deportation proceedings, court review of immigration cases, and public benefits for immigrants. Comprehensive bills to alter the immigration laws were introduced in the House and Senate and all interested groups carefully followed the process of mark-up by which the bills were revised prior to the final committee votes.
- Meanwhile, the comprehensive bills reached their final stage. In a major victory for immigrant advocates, a broad coalition of business and immigration groups succeeded in a “split-the-bill” strategy that separated issues concerning legal immigration from those concerning illegal immigration. But LPRs with convictions were casualties of this approach. Senator Spencer Abraham, an architect of the split-the-bill strategy and a hero to immigration groups, was also a staunch advocate of deporting any immigrant who had been convicted of a crime, no matter how compelling the individual’s equities.
- Over the next five years the lives of these people and thousands of others would be dramatically affected by AEDPA and similar provisions enacted five months later in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of Immigrant of 1996 (IIRIRA). is the story of their ordeal and that of thousands of other LPRs. It is also the story of a remarkable litigation campaign to preserve judicial review and prevent the new laws from being applied retroactively. By 2001, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in
- , like many immigration decisions, did not rule squarely on constitutional grounds. is both a remarkable story of the potential of a well-orchestrated litigation campaign and a sober reminder of how difficult it is to protect immigrants from harsh and illegal deportation laws and legislation that curbs access to the courts.
- ruling, the IRP and immigration lawyers were no longer placed in the defensive posture of defending against motions to dismiss. Instead, they could affirmatively file petitions for review and habeas actions to challenge the Attorney General’s legal conclusions in . In one of the first affirmative habeas petitions, immigration attorneys in New York teamed up with the IRP in Lee Gelernt at the IRP handled the jurisdictional questions. Manny Vargas, a specialist on criminal immigration issues, drafted the briefs on the retroactivity issues. Alan Strauss, a private attorney, briefed the issues specific to his client, Guillermo Mojica. The division of labor reflected the IRP’s objective of being counsel on jurisdictional issues alone, leaving it to the immigration attorneys to protect the specific interests of each particular client.
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Chapter 1. Chae Chan Ping and Fong Yue Ting: The Origins of Plenary Power 30 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Anxiety over Asian immigration led the federal government to assume regulatory authority over immigration. Although the policy goal of dealing with the “Yellow Peril” no longer significantly influences the content of the Immigration and Nationality Act, this anxiety spawned a pair of late nineteenth century Supreme Court cases establishing the principle that Congress possesses plenary power to regulate immigration. More than a century later, these cases continue to shape federal constitutional authority over immigration.
- The Supreme Court dates the beginning of federal immigration regulation to 1875, with the passage of the Page Law, Act of Mar. 3, 1875, 18 Stat. 477, designed to regulate allegedly involuntary immigration of Asian men as “coolies” and women as prostitutes. INS v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289, 305 (2001). An 1862 law also addressed immigration of coolies. Act of Feb. 19, 1862, 12 Stat. 340 (repealed 1974).
- Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990, at 48 (1993); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943, at 25 (2003); Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers 8 (1995).
- See Gabriel J. Chin, The Civil Rights Revolution Comes to Immigration Law: A New Look at the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 75 N.C. L. Rev. 273 (1996).
- By the mid–1870s, however, California and other western states demanded restriction of Chinese immigration, primarily because of racial hostility fueled by economic depression in California. The Burlingame Treaty was modified in 1880 to allow restriction of the immigration of Chinese laborers, but the rights of those already in the country on November 17, 1880 were to be protected, including their right to come and go. in 1882. The Act suspended immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years, excluding from entry any who were not in the United States on November 17, 1880, or who arrived within ninety days after the Act came into force. Merchants and government officials were exempted. The Act required registration documents for laborers, to serve as “proper evidence of their right to go from and come to the United States.”
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Chapter 5. The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello 43 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Jack Wasserman was one of this country’s leading immigration lawyers for many decades. In the 1940s, he served a term as a member of the Board of Immigration Appeals before developing his private practice. In addition to his work for Carlos Marcello, he was involved in dozens of high-profile immigration cases including those of Wong Yang Sung, Ignatz Mezei, Peter Harisiades, Tom We Shung, and many others. He authored many well-regarded books and articles on immigration law from the 1940s through the 1970s (including one of the first texts in the field, entitled Immigration Law and Practice) and was a major figure in the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). Indeed, AILA confers a Jack Wasserman Memorial Award for Excellence in the Field of Immigration Law.
- The deportation story of Carlos Marcello offers a new perspective on Holmes’ famous axiom. With its many twists and turns, it is, without doubt, the story of a bad man; indeed, it involves many bad men. Dark tales of the Mafia, public corruption, murder, robbery, drug-dealing, and fraud abound. But it is also a cautionary tale about law. Around its edges lurk allegations of quasi-legal skulduggery by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and shadowy activities by all sorts of people in Dallas, Italy, Guatemala, and even Formosa. We will find hints of how one of the longest, costliest, and ultimately most futile deportation cases in U.S. history was possibly connected to the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As if all that weren’t enough, Marcello’s deportation led to a fascinating Supreme Court case involving the Administrative Procedure Act, the Ex Post Facto Clause, due process, ..., and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. His lawyers...
- And what of the argument that the immigration system was outside the APA under Section 7? The Court concluded that nothing in the immigration statute “specifically provides that immigrant inspectors shall conduct deportation hearings or be designated to do so.”
- expressly stated that the APA should not control immigration proceedings. Hearings on these proposals brought strong protests from some organizations, including the ABA, against the provision making the APA inapplicable to deportation proceedings. The sponsors of the immigration measures thereupon introduced new bills that omitted the targeted words. Indeed, Senator McCarran had specifically stated: “The Administrative Procedure Act is made applicable to the bill. The Administrative Procedure Act prevails now…. The bill provides for administrative procedures and makes the Administrative Procedure Act applicable insofar as the administration of the bill is concerned.” The key for the dissenters was that no language in the 1952 Immigration Act authorized deportation cases to be heard by hearing officers “who are the dependent subordinates of the immigration agency’s prosecutorial staff.” ...aware of this is shown by the Procedure Act, and we should not construe the Immigration Act on...
- Marcello was arrested on December 30, 1952 pursuant to an immigration warrant, but was soon released on bail. The charge was a violation of Section 241(a)(11) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA), which mandated deportation for drug offenses. The proceedings were based on Marcello’s 1938 marijuana convictions. He had a full hearing before a special inquiry officer, a senior officer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), who found him to be deportable on February 20, 1953. Marcello was advised of his right to apply for the discretionary relief of suspension of deportation, then available to non-citizens with criminal records like Marcello’s if they could prove that they had been present for more than ten years since the criminal act, that they exhibited good moral character during the most recent ten years, and that deportation would cause exceptional and extremely unusual hardship. ...Immigration Appeals affirmed the order, rejecting several legal claims...
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Chapter 7. Kleindienst v. Mandel: Plenary Power v. the Professors 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- U.S. Dept. of Justice, 1998 Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service 226, Table 67 (2000); Charles Gordon, Stanley Mailman, & Stephen Yale–Loehr, Immigration Law and Procedure § 63.04 n.27 and accompanying text (“Gordon et al., Immigration Law and Procedure”).
- as a “chink in the plenary power armor” that had previously been thought to preclude any judicial scrutiny of immigration legislation. Like , which held that immigration statutes are “ deferred entirely to congressional immigration policy choices but required at least some minimal showing of rationality to sustain discretionary decisions by the Attorney General. This double standard is common enough in public law, where courts review agency actions more closely than they review congressional ones. After all, considerations of institutional competence, separation of powers, and plenary congressional power over immigration seem less compelling where ...often used statutory interpretation and review of executive decisions as ways to circumvent the constraints of the plenary power doctrine and give aliens more protection than it would otherwise allow. Professor Hiroshi Motomura shows this use of “phantom norms” to be a long-standing judicial tactic in immigration cases. This technique...
- United States Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, U.S. Immigration Policy and the National Interest, Final Report and Recommendations 282–83 (1981).
- See, e.g., Scanlan (cited in note 8); Shapiro (cited in note 24); Mitchell C. Tilner, Ideological Exclusion of Aliens: The Evolution of a Policy, 2 Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 1, 2 (1987); Burt Neuborne and Steven R. Shapiro, The Nylon Curtain: America’s National Border and the Free Flow of Ideas, 26 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 719 (1985); Peter H. Schuck, The Transformation of Immigration Law, 84 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (1984) (“Schuck, The Transformation of Immigration Law”).
- Gordon et al., Immigration Law and Procedure § 9.09 (cited in note 82); Schuck, The Transformation of Immigration Law at 65–66 (cited in note 93); Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U.S. 580, 588–89 (1952) (emphasis added) (treated in Chapter 4 of this volume). See also Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 426 U.S. 88, 101 n.21 (1976) (“the power over aliens is of a political character and therefore subject only to narrow judicial review”); Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67, 81–82 (1976) (“The reasons that preclude judicial review of political questions also dictate a narrow standard of review of decisions made by Congress or the President in the area of immigration and naturalization.”).
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Contributors 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University School of Law, where she teaches courses in immigration law, legislation, and administrative law. Professor Taylor’s research focuses on immigration detention and the deportation of criminal offenders. She served as chair of the AALS Section on Immigration Law, was appointed to the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration, and served on the Advisory Board of the Appearance Assistance Program of the Vera Institute of Justice. She was invited to testify on detention policy before Congress and the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. Professor Taylor is a recipient of the Joseph Branch Excellence in Teaching Award from Wake Forest University School of Law and the Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association. She is a graduate of the University of Texas and Yale Law School.
- is the Director of the Boston College Law School International Human Rights Program and Clinical Professor of Law. He teaches Immigration and Refugee Law, International Human Rights Law, the BC London Program, and Administrative Law. He was the founder and is the current director of the Boston College Immigration and Asylum clinic in which students represent indigent noncitizens and asylum-seekers. Together with his students, he has won several high-profile immigration and asylum cases and has provided counsel for hundreds of clients over more than a decade. He and his students have also written amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court, organized public presentations in schools, churches, community centers, courts and prisons, and have advised many community groups. Professor Kanstroom has published widely in the fields of U.S. immigration law, criminal law, and European citizenship and asylum law in such venues as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Journal of International Law, the...
- is the Warner–Booker Distinguished Professor of International Law at the University of Virginia, where he teaches immigration and refugee law, constitutional law, and international law. He is a graduate of DePauw University and the Yale Law School. Following clerkships with Judge J. Skelly Wright and Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and a period of private practice in Washington, D.C., he served from 1978 to 1980 as special assistant in the human rights bureau of the U.S. Department of State. There he participated in drafting the Refugee Act of 1980. Since joining the Virginia faculty in 1980, he has published numerous works on immigration, refugees, international human rights, and constitutional law, including a leading casebook on U.S. immigration and citizenship law (coauthored with T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Hiroshi Motomura, Thomson West, 5th ed. 2003). He has served as Vice President of the American Society of International Law and is a member of the Board of Editors of the...
- is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Mabie–Apallas Public Interest Professor of Law and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California at Davis. He has published extensively on immigration law and policy, racial identity, and civil rights in national and international journals. Professor Johnson’s latest book,
- is a Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, where she has taught since 1987. She currently specializes in issues related to deportation and detention. Her primary areas of interest are the intersection of immigration and criminal law and issues related to changes in immigration enforcement in the wake of the attacks of 9/11. In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Morawetz is engaged in litigation and advocacy surrounding deportation and detention policy with students in NYU’s Immigrant Rights Clinic. Professor Morawetz is a graduate of New York University School of Law, where she was a Root Tilden scholar and was Editor in Chief of the New York University Law Review. After clerking for the Hon. Patricia M. Wald on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Professor Morawetz served as a staff attorney at the Civil Appeals and Law Reform Unit of Legal Aid Society in New York City. In addition to the Immigrant Rights Clinic...
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Chapter 8. Plyler v. Doe, the Education of Undocumented Children, and the Polity 28 results (showing 5 best matches)
- incontestably bold reasoning has not substantially influenced subsequent Supreme Court immigration jurisprudence in the twenty-plus years since it was decided, the educational significance of the case is still clear, even if it is limited to this small subset of schoolchildren—largely Latinos—in the United States. Given the poor overall educational achievement evident in this population, even this one success story has significance.
- The historian Mae M. Ngai, in a perceptive study concerning the history of undocumented immigration and the way in which different nationalities have been racialized by the immigration process, has concluded:
- Stephen Legomsky, Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy 1162 (3rd ed. 2002); Thomas Alexander Aleinikoff, David A. Martin, Hiroshi Motomura, Immigration and Mexico–US Binational Migration Study Report 467 (United States Commission on Immigration Reform) (1997), available at http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/uscir/binpapers/v1–5weintraub.pdf, at 468 (last visited on September 10, 2004). For a thorough analysis of these issues and other restrictive legislative efforts, see Kevin R. Johnson, Public Benefits and Immigration: The Intersection of Immigration Status, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class, 42 UCLA L. Rev. 159 (1995).
- memo, Joaquin Avila, succeeded Martinez as President and General Counsel. In 1996 he won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship after several years in private practice concentrating on voting rights; he now is a law teacher at Seattle University. Whatever became of the undocumented schoolchildren from Tyler, Texas? According to a newspaper story following up on them, nearly all of them graduated and, through various immigration provisions, obtained permission to stay in the United States and regularize their status.
- But this was not clear in 1977, when Peter Roos began to sniff out the full extent of the practice in Texas and other states. He looked especially at the Southwestern and Western states, where most undocumented families resided, where undocumented Mexican immigration was most pronounced (as opposed to undocumented immigration from other countries and other hemispheres), and where MALDEF concentrated ...MALDEF was in search of an appropriate federal-court vehicle to consolidate its modest victories in the many small state-court cases it had taken on in its first decade of existence. Unlike the laser-like focus of its role model the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had strategically targeted desegregation as its reason for being, MALDEF had been somewhat behind the curve, in part due to its representation of ethnic and national-origin interests for Mexican Americans and in part due to the diffuse focus that derived from representing the linguistic, immigration, and even class...
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Chapter 2. Wong Wing v. United States: The Bill of Rights Protects Illegal Aliens 15 results (showing 5 best matches)
- . Congress has power to control immigration. Congress can decide which categories of aliens should be excluded or expelled from the United States. Congress can assign the enforcement of the immigration laws to executive officers. deportation policies includes physical detention necessary to ensure successful deportation, and Congress can also impose criminal sanctions for violations of the immigration laws therefore include later cases delineating the scope of Congress’ power to detain aliens in civil immigration proceedings, such as
- did not reject the main policy concern that underlay Section 4 of the Geary Act, that the prospect of deportation might give some categories of aliens insufficient incentive for compliance with the federal immigration laws. The Court explained that the Constitution authorized Congress to supplement the administrative enforcement model with a criminal enforcement model. Today we have a wide variety of federal criminal statutes punishing aliens with fine or imprisonment for illegal entry, marriage fraud, return after prior deportation, refusal to comply with registration requirements, refusal to comply with a removal order, and other immigration offenses. also stands for the crucial proposition that the “plenary” congressional power over immigration must be exercised in compliance with constitutional limitations.
- The goal of the hard labor provision was emphasized several times in the Senate debate, for example by Senator William E. Chandler of New Hampshire, chairman of the Committee on Immigration:
- Congressional Power over Immigration
- the federal government. Coming as it did in the formative period of federal immigration law, at the height of Sinophobic racism, stands as a striking demonstration that the “plenary” immigration power must be reconciled with the constitutional framework of human liberty.
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Chapter 4. Harisiades v. Shaughnessy: A Case Study in the Vulnerability of Resident Aliens 17 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Mistrust of foreign ideas, fueled by an open-door immigration policy that encouraged large-scale immigration of cheap labor from Ireland and China, flared again between 1825 and 1860 in a series of political movements culminating in the “Know Nothings,” a national political movement aimed at suppressing foreign influence. Briefly quite powerful, Know Nothings instigated widespread mob attacks on Masons, Catholics and Mormons.
- The economic depressions of the 1880s and 1890s triggered a surge of nativism that led to restrictions on immigration and the first summary, non-judicial deportation mechanism since the Alien Act of 1798. The assassination of President McKinley in 1901 by a foreign-born anarchist cemented a volatile connection in the public’s mind between foreigners, radical ideas, and violence, ushering in intense pressure to combat alien subversion that culminated in the Immigration Act of 1903, expressly aimed at excluding subversive and undesirable aliens.
- majority likewise spent virtually no time on that crucial issue, noting merely that findings had been made by an immigration examiner that the Party taught and advocated the overthrow of the government by force and violence, and that the lower courts had ruled that those findings were supported by “some evidence.”
- The National Lawyers’ Guild Immigration Project currently bestows an annual Carol King Award for excellence in the practice of immigration law. King, a college friend of Alger Hiss, was apparently not a member of the Communist Party. Unbeknownst to King, however, the FBI apparently targeted her clients for special attention because they were thought to be unacknowledged communists. Carol King died suddenly in 1952. See Ann Fagan Ginger, Carol Weiss King: Human Rights Lawyer, 1895–1952 (1993).
- Aliens were caught up in the general effort to suppress radical political activity. The Immigration Act of 1917, as amended in 1918, broadened efforts to exclude subversive ideas. With the establishment in 1918 of a communist regime in the Soviet Union, fear swept the United States that Bolshevik agitators would strike at American institutions. The post-war depression that began in 1919 led to a series of bitter strikes, and a nationwide wave of more than thirty bombings and attempted assassinations of public figures culminating in an unsuccessful bombing attempt on the life of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. In 1920, Palmer, aided by a young FBI official named J. Edgar Hoover, invoked the 1918 immigration statute used in
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Chapter 3. Wong Kim Ark: The Contest Over Birthright Citizenship 20 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In practice, however, the revolutionary promise of Reconstruction fell flat by the 1870s, and the commitment to universal and equal citizenship flagged as well. A failure of national will, the turn in Republican interests to economic issues, the persistence of southern resistance and violence, and the refusal of the Supreme Court to read the Reconstruction Amendments and legislation broadly all played a role in Reconstruction’s demise. Booming immigration in the late nineteenth century also energized efforts to narrow the conception of citizenship. By 1900, a third of the American population was either foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent. ...Immigration was certainly not a new phenomenon for the United States, but the numbers—and the immigrants’ diverse origins and cultural backgrounds—made the post-Civil War migration distinctive, as people increasingly arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe, and also from Asia. Many “oldcomer” Americans saw the newcomers as...
- Chinese Immigration and Anti–Chinese Sentiments
- Immigration Act of 1924, ch. 190, 43 Stat. 153 (1924); Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922); United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923) (holding that Japanese and Asian Indians, respectively, were not “white” within the meaning of the naturalization laws).
- Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 265–70 (cited in note 92) Linda Bosniak, Citizenship Denationalized, 7 Ind. J. Global Leg. Stud. 447 (Spring 2000); Noah M.J. Pickus, ed., Immigration and Citizenship in the Twenty–First Century (1998).
- The focus on the Chinese man as particularly shocking in his different cultural habits was not accidental, for Chinese immigrants became the first, and most despised, targets of post-Civil War nativism. Like many other immigrants, Chinese came to the United States to improve their economic situation and escape an unstable political situation in the homeland. Drawn initially by the Gold Rush in California in 1849, Chinese immigrated primarily to the West Coast, moving from mining in the 1850s to railroad construction in the 1860s to farm labor and urban occupations by the 1880s. In comparison to European immigration, their numbers were quite small, totaling only 105,465 in 1880, or less than 2% of the total foreign-born population. ...western states and, by 1876, the object of a congressional investigation. In 1882, the United States Congress passed the first Chinese Exclusion Act, forbidding further immigration by Chinese laborers and strictly regulating the entry of other...
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Chapter 6. Afroyim: Vaunting Citizenship, Presaging Transnationality 10 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Representing the government was current INS general counsel Charles Gordon. On the one hand, Gordon was a logical choice to argue the case before the Court. Not only was he the government’s top immigration lawyer, he had recently penned a lengthy treatment of expatriation issues, including those relating to Section 401(e). case had been framed in broad constitutional terms, the government may have blundered in assigning the argument to an immigration law expert rather than one of the more seasoned constitutional litigators of the Solicitor General’s office (as had been and would be the circumstances in other major cases involving expatriation). Gordon, moreover, had not even been on the briefs in the case.
- T. Alexander Aleinikoff, David A. Martin, & Hiroshi Motomura, Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy 123 (5th ed. 2003).
- For a sketch of Gordon’s career, including 35 years at the INS and seven other cases argued before the Court, see Influential Immigration Attorney and Scholar Charles Gordon Dies, 76 Interp. Releases 760 (1999).
- eligible had acquired U.S. citizenship since immigrating to the United States. See Americans in Basin Now Fear Vote to Cost Citizenship, Wash. Post 1 (Dec. 30, 1934). U.S. officials denied rumors that voting would result in loss of citizenship. See Immigration Heads Deny Vote Perils Citizenship, Wash. Post 2 (Dec. 30, 1934).
- Among those incensed by the spectacle of Americans doing Hitler’s bidding was the chairman of the House immigration committee, Samuel Dickstein, who soon after introduced a bill under which such voting would result in loss of U.S. citizenship.
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- Publication Date: August 11th, 2005
- ISBN: 9781587788734
- Subject: Immigration Law
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: This publication includes cases that depict the Supreme Court’s broad deference to the political branches in the immigration realm, the so-called “plenary power doctrine.” Selected cases are presented in chronological order, beginning with the Supreme Court’s consideration of the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1880s and 1890s. The book then examines how the Cold War tested the constitutional limits of the government’s plenary power over immigration, and how “phantom constitutional norms” were later used to defeat the government’s broadest claims. Other cases explore the immigration enforcement system and the difficulty of balancing the demands of enforcement against other societal goals.