Law Librarian Blog

Immigration Scholarship

Let's start the New Year off with one of the most important issues from last year, one that will not, nor should, "disappear" this year. ImmigrationProf Blog co-editors and UC-Davis law profs Bill Ong Hing and Kevin R. Johnson recently distibuted The Immigrant Rights Marches of 2006 and the Prospects for a New Civil Rights Movement on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

In the spring of 2006, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and immigrants peacefully marched in the streets of cities across the country. Such mass demonstrations advocating for the rights of immigrants are unprecedented in American history. Energy, enthusiasm, and a deep sense of urgency filled the air. The immigrant rights movement initially spread like wildfire. A second wave followed the initial protests. By the summer of 2006, however, there were signs that the immigrant rights movement had lost steam. A series of marches on and around Labor Day attracted far fewer people than those just a few months before. After much skirmishing during the summer, Congress failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform legislation.

This Article focuses on the efficacy of a new, multiracial civil rights movement seeking social justice. We discern decidedly mixed signals about the possibility of such a movement. Despite some promising signs, there are many formidable hurdles before the emergence of a new, multiracial civil rights movement. Among the first hurdles is defining the scope of any movement. Who will participate if there is to be a new civil rights movement? Will it be a Latina/o civil rights movement or a broader one including African Americans? Will the movement address more than immigrant rights? And just who will be its leaders?

Part I of this Article outlines the context and meaning of the 2006 immigration marches and identifies the conspicuous absence of African Americans from the marches. The absence is consistent with the fact that immigration historically has been an issue dividing African Americans, Latina/os, and Asian Americans. Part II analyzes some central features of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the last relatively successful and broad-based mass social movement in America. Partly in response to broad-based political activism, the courts and political branches of government assisted in bringing forth social transformation. Part III considers the potential for a new civil rights movement. We opine that much work will need to be done before a multiracial movement for social change can be created. Specifically, African American-Latina/o conflict will need to be addressed before meaningful social change can be secured. Ultimately, it is unclear whether the immigrant marches will morph into anything more.

Bill Hing's Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy is one of several important works published last year:

• Hing's Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy
• Motomura's Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States
• Bosniak's The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership
• Zolberg's A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America
• Portes & Rumbaut's Immigrant Amercia: A Portrait, 3d ed.

[JH]

Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy
by Bill Ong Hing

List Price: $28.99
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (October 16, 2006)
ISBN: 0521864925

Book Description: In the past three decades, images of undocumented immigrants pouring across the southern border have driven the immigration debate and policies have been implemented in response to those images. The Oklahoma City bombings and the tragic events of September 11, both of questionable relevance to immigration policy have provided further impetus to implement strategies that are anti-immigration in design and effect. This book discusses the major immigration policy areas - undocumented workers, the immigration selection system, deportation of aggravated felons, national security and immigration policy, and the integration of new Americans - and the author suggests his own proposals on how to address the policy challenges from a perspective that encourages us to consider the moral consequences of our decisions. The author also reviews some of the policies that have been put forth and ignored and suggests new policies that would be good for the country economically and socially.

Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States
by Hiroshi Motomura

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 14, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 0195163451

Book Description: America is unquestionably a nation of immigrants. And yet throughout its history the practicalities of immigration have inspired more questions than consensus. Who should be admitted? What should the path to citizenship be? Despite national security concerns over enemies penetrating our borders, the number of foreign-born people living in the United States grew to 35 million in 2005, an all-time high. A coherent and rational immigrant policy is more necessary than ever. In Americans in Waiting, Hiroshi Motomura discovers in our national past a simple yet powerful approach to immigration and citizenship. Rewriting the conventional story, Motomura uncovers how for over 150 years, many immigrants were immediately put on track to U.S. citizenship. They were eligible to homestead land on the western frontier and entitled to overseas diplomatic protection. Citizens-to-be were even allowed to vote. In sum, immigration was assumed to be a transition to citizenship, and immigrants were future citizens-Americans in waiting. Once central to law and policy, this view has all but vanished. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the United States began to treat its immigrants in one of two ways: as signatories to a "contract" that sets the terms of their stay in this country, or as "affiliates" who can earn rights only as they become, over time, enmeshed in the nation's life. Immigration is now seen too often as a problem to be solved, rather than a pillar of our nation's strength. A panoramic history of the past 200 years of immigration and citizenship in the United States, Americans in Waiting offers a clear lesson: only by recovering this lost of history of immigration can we ensure that both current and future citizens share in the sense of belonging that is crucial to full participation in American life.

The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership
by Linda Bosniak

List Price: $29.95
Hardcover: 248 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (August 21, 2006)
ISBN: 0691116229

Book Description: Citizenship presents two faces. Within a political community it stands for inclusion and universalism, but to outsiders, citizenship means exclusion. Because these aspects of citizenship appear spatially and jurisdictionally separate, they are usually regarded as complementary. In fact, the inclusionary and exclusionary dimensions of citizenship dramatically collide within the territory of the nation-state, creating multiple contradictions when it comes to the class of people the law calls aliens--transnational migrants with a status short of full citizenship. Examining alienage and alienage law in all of its complexities, The Citizen and the Alien explores the dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion inherent in the practices and institutions of citizenship in liberal democratic societies, especially the United States. In doing so, it offers an important new perspective on the changing meaning of citizenship in a world of highly porous borders and increasing transmigration.

As a particular form of noncitizenship, alienage represents a powerful lens through which to examine the meaning of citizenship itself, argues Linda Bosniak. She uses alienage to examine the promises and limits of the "equal citizenship" ideal that animates many constitutional democracies. In the process, she shows how core features of globalization serve to shape the structure of legal and social relationships at the very heart of national societies.

A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America
by Aristide R. Zolberg

List Price: $39.95
Hardcover: 672 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 30, 2006)
ISBN: 0674022181 

Book Description: According to the national mythology, the United States has long opened its doors to people from across the globe, providing a port in a storm and opportunity for any who seek it. Yet the history of immigration to the United States is far different. Even before the xenophobic reaction against European and Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth century, social and economic interest groups worked to manipulate immigration policy to serve their needs. In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building.

A Nation by Design argues that the engineering of immigration policy has been prevalent since early American history. However, it has gone largely unnoticed since it took place primarily on the local and state levels, owing to constitutional limits on federal power during the slavery era. Zolberg profiles the vacillating currents of opinion on immigration throughout American history, examining separately the roles played by business interests, labor unions, ethnic lobbies, and nativist ideologues in shaping policy. He then examines how three different types of migration--legal migration, illegal migration to fill low-wage jobs, and asylum-seeking--are shaping contemporary arguments over immigration to the United States.

A Nation by Design is a thorough, authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. With rich detail and impeccable scholarship, Zolberg's book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.

Immigrant America: A Portrait
by Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut
Third edition. Revised, Expanded, and Updated

Publisher: University of California Press (October 2006)
$55.00, 978-0-520-24283-8 hardcover
$21.95, 978-0-520-25041-3 paperback

Book Description: This third edition of the widely acclaimed classic has been thoroughly expanded and updated to reflect current demographic, economic, and political realities. Drawing on recent census data and other primary sources, Portes and Rumbaut have infused the entire text with new information and added a vivid array of new vignettes and illustrations.Recognized for its superb portrayal of immigration and immigrant lives in the United States, this book probes the dynamics of immigrant politics, examining questions of identity and loyalty among newcomers, and explores the psychological consequences of varying modes of migration and acculturation. The authors look at patterns of settlement in urban America, discuss the problems of English-language acquisition and bilingual education, explain how immigrants incorporate themselves into the American economy, and examine the trajectories of their children from adolescence to early adulthood. With a vital new chapter on religion--and fresh analyses of topics ranging from patterns of incarceration to the mobility of the second generation and the unintended consequences of public policies--this updated edition is indispensable for framing and informing issues that promise to be even more hotly and urgently contested as the subject moves to the center of national debate.

In reviewing this work for Law and Politics Book Review ImmigrationProf Blog co-editor and UC Davis Law Professor Kevin Johnson wrote: a “must read” for any serious student of immigration law and policy. .... Immigrant America offers a full and fair portrait of the population of immigrants in the contemporary United States. It deserves a wide readership and true consideration in the debate over reform of immigration laws. Put simply, Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut’s important book adds much need factual information and thoughtful analysis to one of the most pressing public policy issues of our time.

A New Year's Resolution Proposal for SSRN

A Premiere Open Source Web Destination. In an Dec. 21, 2006 email announcement to subscribers, Gregg Gordon, SSRN President, reported that the SSRN depository increased its collection in 2006 by 31% to 139,000 documents, the number of authors in SSRN grew 27% to 70,000, and the number of downloads exceeded 3 million full text papers. In the world of open source document distribution systems, SSRN has established itself as one of the premiere web destinations for the dissemination of US scholarly works. Congratulations! In the coming years I hope to see SSRN grow by greater participation from foreign authors and institutions.

We Learn from Our Mistakes. Gordon writes that "[w]e have learned that SSRN is an important part in many people's lives and when we make a mistake, they let us know about it." From a librarian's perspective, one SSRN mistake is failing to include a completion date for submitted works. There is nothing wrong is allowing authors to upload works to the depository that are 2-3-5-10-20-25 years old but one unintended consequence of not providing this fundamental bibliographic data has been the bloated claims some law schools choose to make about their "scholarly productivity." Pointing out the difference between when works were actually produced from "productivity" claims based on when works were uploaded led to some rather spacious arguments in 2006 including, in playing the unfair rankings game, such claims were OK. They are not.

Productivity & Porn. Back in the day when I performed a fair amount of labor relations/labor economics analysis, I wrote "productivity is like porn, one knows it when one see it." One also knows "law porn" when one sees it. One would hope that law schools would moderate their marketing conduct by avoiding the appearance of impropriety but they are not required to do so. At times, I think I should contribute to the literature by performing a unit cost analysis of law school "scholarly productivity!"

Tomorrow's Research Today. Gordon writes that "[SSRN's] focus on providing Tomorrow's Research Today allows research to be read much sooner than ever before." [Emphasis added] Let's hope SSRN provides users with a readily available means of identifying recent scholarship by improving bibliographic control of its online depository. A cottage industry using upload and download statistics generated by SSRN became widespread in 2006; hopefully in 2007, SSRN-generated statistics will be more accurate. [JH]

Congratulations to Our Canadian Colleagues at Slaw!

Bob Ambrogi's unintended law blogs ranking based on reader suggestions was published on November 30th. Sorry Bob, my RSS feed reader also is flooded with law blogs so I just read the post! Congratulations to Slaw, the top voted site. When it comes to covering Canadian legal research and IT developments there is no blog better than this one.

Tied in fourth place were two Law Professor Blogs Network publications, our own Law Librarian Blog and OSU Law Prof Douglas Berman's Sentencing Law & Policy plus Law.com's Legal Blogs. [JH]

Google's Most Popular Search Queries and Trends of 2006

From the press release:

"Google today announced its annual Zeitgeist, featuring lists and charts of the most popular and fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com. If you're interested in revisiting this year's top scandals, or learning who wins in a Suri vs. Shiloh face-off, or which sport is most popular – visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2006.html to read all about what spurred people's collective curiosity in 2006."

Top Searches in 2006

  1. bebo
  2. myspace
  3. world cup
  4. metacafe
  5. radioblog
  6. wikipedia
  7. video
  8. rebelde
  9. mininova
  10. wiki 
[RJ]

Internet Archive Claims Progress Against Google Library Initiative

Interesting article from InformationWeek: "The Internet Archive, which objects to Google's plans to scan public-domain books in a proprietary format, scored a $1 million grant to fund scanning books in several of the U.S.'s best-known libraries."  [RJ]

Law Librarian Blog is Two Years Old!

Today is the second anniversary of the first post published on Law Librarian Blog. See Putting Law Librarian Blog in Perspective. Since its inception, the editors of the Law Librarian Blog have posted 3,884 stories and the blog has been visited 329,744 times with an amazing 455,749 page views. Thanks Ron, Neal, Mark, and Lee, bloggers who have served so well since 2005, and Stina, Jean, and Carol, bloggers who joined the Board this year. And thank you blog readers for visiting our blog!

Law Professor Blogs Network. May I also call attention to the editors and contributing editors of the Law Professor Blogs Network. What a great job! Being a co-founder of the Network (with Cincinnati Law Prof Paul Caron) I can say I never imagined the growth and popularity of the Network back in July 2004 when we started this venture. We now have 57 editors and 25 contributing editors writing for 36 law blogs with several more blogs expected to go into production soon. Together our editors have posted 57,971 stories. Cumulative Network blog traffic closed the 2006 calendar year at 12.4 million page views (click on chart for 2006 Network growth). I believe I'm justified in claiming that the Law Professor Blogs Network is the largest and one of the best law blog networks of its kind.

Thank you Network readers for making our collective effort so worthwhile. Check out our new Network blogroll which lists the five most recent posts from each of our blogs.

Joe Hodnicki
Co-founder & Chief of Operations
Law Professor Blogs Network

Editor, Law Librarian Blog
Member, Board of Advisors, and Contributor, Law School Innovation
Editor, Law Blog Metrics (coming soon)

Associate Director for Library Operations
Robert S. Marx Law Library
University of Cincinnati College of Law
Editor, Securities Lawyer's Deskbook

Law Librarian Blog's IMHO Awards

Best Law Book of 2006

• St. John's Law Prof Brian Tamanaha's Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law (Cambridge UP, 2006)

Best Law Prof Blog Exemplifying "Scholarship in Action"

• OSU Law Prof Doug Berman's Sentencing Law & Policy (a member of the Law Professor Blogs Network). Berman coined the phrase in the context of blogging and practices it daily.

Most Significant but Underreported Future Development in Legal Research

• NCBE's plans for adding of a legal research component to bar exams. Let's not lose this opportunity to improve the dismal state of legal research instruction.

Most Hoped-for Future Development in Legal Publishing

• Substantially improved access to online and print materials for law students, practitioners, judges and professors with disabilities We can do better, much better.

Best New Current Awareness Service for Law Library Literature

• AALL Publishing Initiatives Caucus Published Articles Database. Subscribe to it!

Best Law Prof Blog Law Librarians Should Be Reading (But Probably Aren't)

• Info/Law by Cincinnati Law Prof Timothy Armstrong, Wayne State Law Pro Derek Bambauer and Minnesota Law Prof William McGeveran. Check it out!

Worst Internet Development

• China passing on its cyber-spying skills to some of the world's most repressive regimes who have acquired the means to do so thanks in large part to technology sold by Western, mostly US, firms.

Most Notorious Law School Marketing Effort

• Chapman's SSRN Claims

Most Disturbing Situation in Academic Law Library Management

• Tulane: hijacking law library directorship by University Library Director, Post-Katrina workforce reductions after reopening the law library, filling open positions before hiring a law library director Will a law library director be hired before, during, or after the AALL 2007 Meeting in New Orleans? Will a law library director be hired period.

Quickest Retraction of "It's (Almost) All Electronic" in the Context of Academic Law Libraries

• Drexel, Drexel... With Chris Simoni now running the store, the accrediation of Drexel Law offers the prospect for real format neutrality in library collection evaluation. May the force be with you, Chris.

Most Tortured Law School Search for a Library Director

• John Marshall (Chicago)

Most Sensible Law Library Stacks Management Suggestion

• From Stina McClintock's boyfriend who suggested that law libraries rearrange collections by color

Best Law Librarian Blog Editorial Board (none of whom are responsible for any of the above awards)

• This blog's editors! Thanks Ron Jones, Neal Axton, Mark Giangrande, Stina McClintock, Jean M. Pajereck, Carol A. Parker & Lee F. Peoples.

Happy New Year to all. --- Joe Hodnicki

New Laws Ring in the New Year

Interesting report from the National Conference of State Legislatures:

"Residents in at least 32 states will wake up New Year’s Day to a host of new state laws, according to a compilation of legislation from the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

The new state laws run the gamut of issues, as lawmakers have responded to the needs of their constituents."  [RJ]

A New Year's Reminder from the Law Professor Blogs Network

Click over to the Law Professor Blogs Network from Westlaw

To view our catalog of blogs, search the Network, and view recent posts from our blogs.

3,000th American Soldier Dies of Iraqi War Wounds

According to CNN, the death of 23-year-old Sgt. Edward Shaffer, of Mont Alto, Pennsylvania, was the 3,000th American military fatality reported since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. He died Wednesday of wounds received on November 13, 2006 by a roadside bomb in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi.

Try to imagine one death three thousand times. [JH]

Uncut Video of Saddam Hussein's Execution

Here it is. For commentary, see Sentency Law & Policy. Hat tip to OSU Law Prof Douglas Berman. [JH]

New Year's Eve: How's Traffic in Manhattan Today?

There are 45 cameras installed in key traffic points around Manhattan. This website lets you watch real-time streaming videos and still images whenever you want. File under "to do when you are too brain dead to do anything else." [JH]

Remembering Former President Gerald R. Ford

FirstGov.gov has added a page in remembrance of Former President Ford. This page includes links to information about Former President Ford, as well as links to information about funeral services and tributes to him.  [RJ]

U.S. to Declassify Secrets at Age 25

From the N.Y. Times: "At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many F.B.I. cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers."  [RJ]

NY Times Publishes Op-Ed article Redacted by C.I.A.

By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann:

"HERE is the redacted version of a draft Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, as blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House."  [RJ]