Thursday, January 5, 2017

Individual Federal Workers Now Subject to Congressional Pay Cuts

File this under incredibly disturbing. WaPo reports that House Republicans recently reinstated the 1876 "Holman rule," enabling ANY Congressman to proposing slashing the pay of ANY individual federal worker to $1. All it requires is an amendment to an appropriations bill.

Here's the punchline from WaPo:

A majority of the House and the Senate would still have to approve any such amendment but opponents and supporters agree it puts agencies and the public on notice that their work is now vulnerable to the whims of elected officials.

Someone has called it the "Armageddon rule." Hot damn. I am seriously concerned for students, friends, and colleagues in federal service. 

-KitJ

January 5, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Immigration Article of the Day: The 'New Selma' and the Old Selma: Arizona, Alabama, and the Immigration Civil Rights Movement in the Twenty-First Century by Kristina M. Campbell

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The 'New Selma' and the Old Selma: Arizona, Alabama, and the Immigration Civil Rights Movement in the Twenty-First Century by Kristina M. Campbell University of the District of Columbia - David A. Clarke School of Law 2016 Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring 2016)

Abstract: In his unfinished manuscript, “The Politics of Expulsion: A Short History of Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law, HB 56,” the late Raymond A. Mohl, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, directly and succinctly identified the true nature of the motivations behind the passage of HB 56 in the Alabama legislature. Professor Mohl observed that “nativist fears of large numbers of ethnically different newcomers, especially over job competition and unwanted cultural change, sometimes referred to as “cultural dilution,” provided political cover for politicians who sought to control and regulate immigration within state borders, but also to push illegal immigrants out.” By recognizing that HB 56 and other anti-immigrant laws that followed nationwide in the wake of SB 1070 were driven by racist and nativist politicians, Professor Mohl cut directly to the issue when he commented that “the state’s harsh, aggressive, and discriminatory anti-immigrant policy also brought back memories from a half-century earlier, when state-sponsored racial discrimination targeted African Americans.”

KJ

January 5, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Angel Island, The AALS Field Trip

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Today, prawfs (not just immprofs!) walked across San Francisco and sailed across its waters to visit Angel Island. Our beloved Rose Cuison Villazor and Huyen Pham organized the adventure and arranged for a guided tour of the island's Immigration Station.

Angel Island served as an immigration detention facility from 1910 to 1940. People stayed an average of 2 to 3 days, though the longest resident of the facility was detained for a whopping 22 months.

We saw the small and fully enclosed outdoor recreation yard and a large room that housed men in rows of 6-bed bunks.

We also saw the walls, carved with poems from Angel Island's detainees who wrote with such emotion about their detention. One said:

Grief and bitterness entwined are heaven sent / The sad person sits alone, leaning by a window

Another:

At times I gaze at the cloud- and fog-enshrouded mountain-front. / It only deepens my sadness.

Touring the facility, it was easy to understand that overwhelming desperation and grief. For detainees may have had views of beautiful mountains and water, but it was always seen through fenced windows and barbed wire enclosures.

Angel Island was, in the words of our interpreter, "built to keep people out" and to "enforc[e] racist laws." Even the doctors on site to care for detained migrants served a dual role of not just treating the ill but looking for medical reasons to justify their deportation. 

It was a genuine treat to see a place of such historical importance. I encourage anyone traveling through San Francisco to arrange their own tour of the Immigration Station.

-KitJ

January 4, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

First Somali-American U.S. Legislator Sworn Into Office Today

This beautiful photograph comes from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. That's Ilhan Omar who was elected in November to became the first Somali-American U.S. legislator. Today she was sworn into office as a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Congratulations, Representative Omar!

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-KitJ

January 4, 2017 in Current Affairs, Photos | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kari Hong: Why Trump's Plan to Deport Criminal Noncitizens Won't Work

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Kari Hong writes in a Washington Post op-ed, "Why Trump's Plan to Deport Criminal Noncitizens Won't Work," asserting that while Trump's purported focus on noncitizens with criminal records may seem like a softening of his immigration policy, it will, instead "be inefficient, cumbersome, expensive, unnecessary and, above all, inhumane."  The op-ed identifies a number of problems with Trump's recent statements that his Administration will prioritize the removal of "criminal" noncitizens, such as the failure of the criminal justice system to effectively identify actually dangerous people and the wide reach of the criminal removal grounds; the practical impossibility of actually processing millions of persons for removal given the resources of the immigration courts; and the fact that the southern border has already become more secure. 

"If Trump truly wants to focus on drug dealers, terrorists, murderers and rapists, he should call on Congress to restore immigration law’s focus on those whom prosecutors and criminal judges determined were dangerous in the first place — people who were sentenced to five years or more in prison. That’s what the law used to be, before it was changed in 1996 to cover many more crimes."

Hong has a law review article, The Absurdity of Crime-Based Deportation, which is forthcoming in the UC Davis Law Review and explores these arguments in greater detail.

-JKoh

January 4, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Detention Nation, An Art Exhibit

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Detention Nation, like States of Incarceration (discussed yesterday), is a multi-media exhibition that sheds light on immigration detention. It showed at Houston's Station Museum of Contemporary Art in early 2015.

Detention Nation is the project of the art-activist collective Sin Huellas (Without Fingerprints or Without a Trace), a group that takes it name from the practice of removing fingerprints with acid in an effort to avoid the consequences of a prior deportation.

The Texas Observer met with collective members Orlando Lara and Deyadira Arrellano, who spoke about their own experiences with immigration detention.

It's interesting to hear how some things are universal. Lara talks about the lack of medicine in detention and how treating nurses consistently suggest that detainees "drink water." There's a strikingly similar scene in the musical Allegiance where interned Japanese are denied medicine and told to drink water.

I encourage you to check out the Facebook page, which has numerous photos of the exhibit. Any and all would be great additions to the classroom.

And for those of you at big fancy institutions who just might have an on-campus art museum, I'd consider contacting Sin Huellas to see about bringing the exhibit to your campus. It would be a powerful teaching tool.

-KitJ

January 4, 2017 in Current Affairs, Photos, Teaching Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

California Legislature enlists former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder to defend against Trump

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As the Los Angeles Times reports, the California Legislature has tapped former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder Jr. to serve as outside counsel to guide the state’s legal strategy against Trump’s administration.  “He will be our lead litigator, and he will have a legal team of expert lawyers on the issues of climate change, women and civil rights, the environment, immigration, voting rights — to name just a few,” Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said.  The leadership of the California Legislature has expressed opposition to President-elect Trump's campaign positions on immigration.

KJ

January 4, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Images of the Displaced

The ferocity of crises worldwide is forcing a record number of people to flee their homes, seeking some form of safety within their own country or across international borders. There are 65.3 million displaced people worldwide, including 21.3 million refugees. Most have lost their homes to armed conflict or natural disasters but other factors, such as extreme poverty and climate change, also drive displacement. The International Organization for Migration commissioned photojournalist Muse Mohammed to document the plight of the displaced.  Click here for more Images of the Displaced.

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A woman stands with her two children outside a square building in Bentiu Town, South Sudan. Formerly attached to a larger building, the square room, which is all that remains now, is where this young family has been living for the past six months.

KJ

January 4, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Immigration Article of the Day: From “Deportability” to “Denounce-ability:” New Forms of Labor Subordination in an Era of Governing Immigration Through Crime by Sarah B. Horton

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From “Deportability” to “Denounce-ability:” New Forms of Labor Subordination in an Era of Governing Immigration Through Crime by Sarah B. Horton

Abstract

The highly publicized 2008 Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) worksite raid in Postville, Iowa, signaled a new strategy in interior immigration enforcement. Rather than merely deport the unauthorized workers it apprehended, ICE arrested them on charges of working under stolen documents (aggravated identity theft) and invented Social Security numbers (Social Security fraud) and imprisoned them prior to their deportation. Drawing on interviews with forty-five migrant farmworkers and six labor supervisors in a migrant farmworking community in California's Central Valley, this article explores how unauthorized migrants obtain the work documents they must provide to labor supervisors in order to work. This article shows that the poverty and marginalization of migrant communities has led to the mutually beneficial exchange of work authorization documents between donors with legal status and recipients without legal status. Using ethnography to recontextualize these document loans, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the criminal charges levied in Postville. Because voluntary document exchanges may be misrepresented as involuntary theft, labor supervisors use their knowledge of identity loan to suppress identity recipients’ workers’ compensation claims. This article examines the effect of the criminalization of immigration on labor discipline, suggests that migrant “denounce-ability” has joined migrant “deportability” as a powerful new tool of labor subordination.

KJ

January 4, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Immigration Article of the Day: Understanding the Economic Impact of the H-1B Program on the U.S.

Understanding the Economic Impact of the H-1B Program on the U.S. by John Bound (University of Michigan; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)), Gaurav Khanna (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Department of Economics), Nicolas Morales (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor), October 15, 2016 Sloan Foundation Economics Research Paper No. 2883348 Abstract: Over the 1990s, the share of foreigners entering the US high-skill workforce grew rapidly. This migration potentially had a significant effect on US workers, consumers and firms. To study these effects, we construct a general equilibrium model of the US economy and calibrate it using data from 1994 to 2001. Built into the model are positive effects high skilled immigrants have on innovation. Counterfactual simulations based on our model suggest that immigration increased the overall welfare of US natives, and had significant distributional consequences. In the absence of immigration, wages for US computer scientists would have been 2.6% to 5.1% higher and employment in computer science for US workers would have been 6.1% to 10.8% higher in 2001. On the other hand, complements in production benefited substantially from immigration, and immigration also lowered prices and raised the output of IT goods by between 1.9% and 2.5%, thus benefiting consumers. Finally, firms in the IT sector also earned substantially higher profits due to immigration.

KJ

January 3, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

States of Incarceration

Sarah Lopez is a professor in the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Her work focuses on architectural history within the context of migration.

Of late, Lopez has been examining the architecture of immigrant detention facilities in Texas. It's not an easy project. As Lopez told the Texas Observer, “Studying the architecture of detention is hard... Unless you’re incarcerated or detained, or a warden or a food provider or medical assistant, basically, they don’t want you there.”

Lopez and her UT students participated in a nationwide project of the Humanities Action Lab called States of Incarceration. For their part of this project, they:

mapped the locations of detention centers throughout the state and used Google Earth to create silhouettes of each building’s footprint. The researchers even gained hard-won access to one county-run detention center and built a 3-D model from sketches. Their work marks an important step forward in understanding the physical reality of a clandestine and growing carceral system that prefers to exist just out of reach of the American imagination.

Her class contribution to the exhibition is titled Spatial Stories of Migration and Detention.

Check out this drawing of the La Salle Detention Center by Katie Slusher:

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Her drawing is accompanying by these notes:

This layout is drafted from quick sketches and notations created during a tour of La Salle detention center. From an architectural point of view, the detainee living quarters, medical ward, segregation units, and outdoor space were particularly arresting. Aside from outdoor recreation time and voluntary work shifts (for which detainees earn 1 dollar per day), the remainder of a detainee’s average day is spent in a group cell. People with gang affiliations and/or individuals with disabilities are typically placed in smaller capacity or single occupancy rooms. The group cell has exposed bathrooms. Up to 48 men witness each-others’ every move throughout the day. The medical facilities within the detention center contain quarantine cells and a suicide watch room. The suicide watch room is particularly depressing, simply because such a room is necessary. Although used to detain migrants, La Salle has segregation units otherwise known as solitary confinement. Outdoor time for detainees in solitary is restricted to one of the three roof-less rooms extending off the segregation unit cellblock. The segregation unit is equal in size and quality of construction to the suicide watch room, and it is not unlikely that a person may be moved from one to the other.

For all detainees, time spent outside is limited to the federally mandated minimum of one hour per day. Massive barbed wire walls enclose the otherwise barren space.

An excellent project, and a great teaching resource for those of us who are geographically removed from immigration detention facilities.

-KitJ

January 3, 2017 in Current Affairs, Teaching Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the Movies: Campito Kids

 

Sat tuned for "Campito Kids", a short film, is the story of a migrant family as they struggle to overcome cultural barriers and adjust to their ever-shifting lives. It is based on the filmmaker's experiences and years of observations.

Campito Kids by Antonio De Loera-Brust was shot entirely in Yolo County, California in migrant camps.

KJ

January 3, 2017 in Current Affairs, Film & Television | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hungry Venezuelans flood Brazilian towns, as threat of mass migration looms

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Marina Lopes and Nick Miroff in the Washington Post report on a migration in the Americas that has not received much attention.  They write: 

"Survival for Venezuelans . . . is becoming a matter of flight. About 10,000 Venezuelans are streaming into Brazil every month in search of food and medicine, authorities say, camping out on the streets and swamping government services in Amazon frontier towns ill-prepared to receive them.

Oil-rich Venezuela has been an immigrant destination for much of its history. Now it is a place to flee. Chronic food shortages, rampant violence and the erratic and often paranoid behavior of President Nicolás Maduro have turned the country’s border crossings and beaches into escape valves."

KJ

January 3, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Trump’s immigration policies will pick up where Obama’s left off

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In a post on The Conversation, I analyze the Trump administration's likely approach to crime-based removals:  "In 2017, the Trump administration will likely continue and expand the Obama administration’s focus on removing immigrants convicted of crimes."  Click here to read more.

KJ

January 3, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

No surprises: Trump administration looking at a border wall and expanding immigrant detention

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Photo courtesy of abcnews.go.com

Not surprisingly, the incoming Trump administration has building a wall on the US/Mexico border on the mind.  Reuters reports that in a request for documents and analysis, President-elect Donald Trump's transition team asked the Department of Homeland Security last month to assess all assets available for border wall and barrier construction.  The team also asked about the department's capacity for expanding immigrant detention and about an aerial surveillance program that was scaled back by the Obama administration but remains popular with immigration hardliners. And it asked whether federal workers have altered biographic information kept by the department about immigrants out of concern for their civil liberties.

The requests were made in a Dec. 5 meeting between Trump's transition team and Department of Homeland Security officials. The document offers a glimpse into the president-elect's strategy for securing the U.S. borders and reversing polices put in place by the Obama administration. 

KJ

January 3, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, January 2, 2017

Mali Returns Deportees To France

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This week, Mali returned two deportees to France for failure to establish that they were, in fact, Malian.

The deportees, flown to the capitol city of Bamako, did not travel on Malian passports but European travel permits (fancily called "laissez-passer").

Mali has an agreement with the EU under which Mali is supposed to assist in "identifying irregular Malian migrants in Europe and providing them with the documents needed to return to their country of origin." In return, Mali has received significant financial benefits in the neighborhood of $150 million.

Mali has warned airlines not to let people using traveling under European travel permits to fly to Mali.

-KitJ

January 2, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

My father came here illegally. But in many ways he was a red-blooded American

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Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Hector Becerra of the Los Angeles Times tells about his father, who came to the United States from Mexico without authorization "but in many ways . . . was a red-blooded American."

Becerra writes:

"My father was like so many immigrants of his generation from Mexico: Coming north, without proper papers, looking for work and a better life for their families. Over the years, my father and people like him were demonized by those who felt they were ruining California and praised by others who believed their work ethic and labor were a boon to the state."

KJ

January 2, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (1)

Immigration at the AALS

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Huyen Pham, chair of Immigration Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and the entire section leadership has put together many immigration-related events at AALS annual meeting in San Francisco this week
 
The Immigration Section program is on Thursday, January 5, 1:30-3:15 p.m.  It is  entitled, Asylum from Persecution by Non-State Actors:  Upholding and Updating Refugee Protection.  Moderated by Jennifer Moore, the panel features presentations by Susan Akram, Shalini Ray, and Shana Tabak.  The Immigration section business meeting will be held immediately after the panel discussion.
 
Other immigration-themed programs include:  
 
Wednesday, January 4
 
8:30 - 10:15 a.m. AALS Discussion Group
The Central American Refugee Crisis: A Discussion of the Current Response and Evaluation of U.S. Legal Obligations under Domestic and International Law
 
10:30 am - 12:15 pm Admiralty and Maritime Law, Co-Sponsored by Immigration Law, Insurance Law, International Human Rights, International Law and National Security Law 
For Those in Peril on the Sea: Maritime Law, Criminal Law, and Human Rights in the Migrant and Refugee Crisis
 
1:00 pm - 5:00 pm Immigration Law Field Trip to Angel Island Museum
Angel Island Museum, Angel Island, San Francisco
 
Thursday, January 5:
 
8:30 am - 10:15 am AALS Hot Topic Program
Federal Power Over Immigration
 
8:30 am - 10:15 am Labor Relations and Employment Law, Co-Sponsored by Immigration Law, Business Associations, and Contracts
Classifying Workers in the "Sharing" and "Gig” Economy
 
6:30 pm – 9 pm AALS Law and Film Series – The Feature Film Selection: La Jaula de Oro/ The Golden Dream (Sponsored by William S. Hein, Co., Inc.) 
 
Friday, January 6:
 
1:30 pm - 3:15 pm AALS Academy Program
Does Anyone’s Law Matter at the Border? Shootings, Searches, Walls, and the U.S. Constitution
 
1:30 pm - 3:15 pm Law and Mental Disability, Co-Sponsored by Criminal Justice, Immigration Law, Disability Law, Law and the Social Sciences, and Law, Medicine and Health Care
Competence Revisited: The Changing Role of Mental Capacity in Criminal and Immigration Proceedings

KJ

January 2, 2017 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday, January 1, 2017

90 Day Fiancé

Last night, Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper talked about their favorite shows to binge watch on New Years Day, when they're inevitably recovering from their evening amusing us masses with their uniquely wonderful New Year's Eve countdown show on CNN.

Here's Kathy's description of TLC's 90 Day Fiancé:

"So what it is it's where you have 90 days to bring someone from another country... and then you have 90 days to marry them or else they don't get their citizenship. ... It's called a K1 visa. And there's a lot of couples that, I'm going to be honest, you're not even pulling for, at all. Like the whole time you're like go back to your country no matter how horrible it seemed."

Okay, so her law isn't quite right. But it could be interesting. Here's the official promo:

Hm. I think I'll take a hard pass. But maybe it's just the thing for your NYE recovery efforts.

-KitJ

January 1, 2017 in Current Affairs, Film & Television | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday, December 31, 2016

Happy New Year!