Immigration @ AALS: Racism in Immigration Regulation

Immigration @ AALS started off this morning bright and early at 8AM. Heroically many immprofs showed up to engage in this absolutely critical and fascinating topic.

We had four amazing panelists:

• Kevin Johnson (Davis) talked about the relationship between critical race scholarship and immigration scholarship, and his long-standing desire to have these two scholarly threads enter into conversation. His talk was informed by his essay Systemic Racism in the U.S. Immigration Laws.
• David Cook-Martín (University of Colorado, Boulder, Sociology) spoke about Racial Selection in Immigration and Nationality Laws of the Americas. His empirical work reveals interesting and perhaps counterintuitive conclusions, such as "Democracy often has promoted racist immigration policies" and the "Demise of racist immigration law began in the Global South, against political gravity." Check out his co-authored book Culling the Masses.
• Emily Ryo (USC -- law and sociology) spoke about her latest quantitative work-in-progress--Compounded Disadvantage: Race, Criminal Justice, and Access to Justice in Immigration Courts. She introduced her research questions, data, preliminary conclusions, and next steps. The focus is crime-based removals and whether racial disparities in criminal prosecution follow into crime-based removal.
• Claire Thomas (New York Law School) spoke about her forthcoming article The So-Called Stateless: Firm Resettlement, African Migrants, and Human Rights Violations in Mexico. This article brings forth insights from Thomas' Fulbright research in Mexico focusing on the non-white, non-Latino asylum-seekers who became stranded in Mexico due to changes in U.S. and Mexican migration policies.

An eye-opening and engaging way to begin the day!

-KitJ