Center for Social Justice Online Library

Born in 1944, Jose Angel Gutierrez grew up in a time when Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas and the Southwest attended separate schools and avoided public facilities and restaurants that were designated Whites Only. Despite the limits of segregation and rural culture in Texas, the passion to learn and to educate others, as well as to undo injustice, burned in his belly from an early age. Gutierrez offers portraits of his early influences, from his father's own pursuit of knowledge and political involvement, to his Mexican pre-school teacher's interest in bilingual-bicultural education which did not exist in public schools at that time, and to his mother's courage and persistence, taking up migrant field work to provide for her family after the death of young Gutierrez's father. In this intensely narrated memoir, Gutierrez details his rise from being beaten down by racist political and agricultural interests in South Texas to his leadership role in the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Complemented by photos from his personal archives, Gutierrez recalls his struggle for education, his early baptism in grass-roots political organizing, and his success in creating one of history's most successful third party movements, La Raza Unida Party. Along the way, Gutierrez earned college and law degrees, as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science. He was elected or appointed to school boards, commissions, judgeships and party chairmanships, all with the single-minded purpose of extending equality to Mexican Americans and other minorities in the United States. Through his tireless efforts, he crossed paths with African American and Native American civil rights leaders, Mexican presidents, and other international figures.

The Activist's Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century details the impact of specific strategies on campaigns across the country, from Occupy Wall Street to battles over sweatshops, the environment, AIDS policies, education reform, homelessness, and more: How should activists use new media tools to expose issues and mobilize grassroots support? When should activists form coalitions, and with whom? How are students―be they DREAMers seeking immigration reform or college activists battling ever-increasing tuition costs―winning major campaigns? Whether it’s by inspiring "fear and loathing" in politicians, building diverse coalitions, using ballot initiatives, or harnessing the media, the courts, and the electoral process towards social change, Shaw―a longtime activist for urban issues―shows that with a plan, positive change can be achieved.

In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quotas of the 1920s that had severly limited immigration to American from everywhere but Western Europe. The result was mass immigration from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. The wave of immigration and the restrictionism it produced led to a bitter political struggle over immigrants' rights that continues to this day. This book is a history of the post-1965 political battles between advocates of expansive admissions policies, rights, and benefits for immigrants and their anti-immigration, or restrictionist, opponents. Coleman argues that as immigration rendered what had once been seen as hard boundaries of the physical nation-state into something more porous, the rights of immigrations became crucial to immigration control. Restrictionists sought to limit immigrants' access to the American welfare state by arguing that they were a burden to the state and taking jobs from working- and middle-class Americans. However, the legacies of the civil rights movement, a growing commitment to deregulation, unusual political alliances, and institutional structures provided significant barriers to anti-immigration efforts. By the end of Reagan's presidency, restrictionists efforts to reverse the flow of immigration rights failed at the national level. In the 1990s, however, with national policy-making gridlocked, restrictionists focused their efforts on the state level. States acquired new powers in driving immigration policy and curtailed the expanded notion of alienage rights that had been forged over the previous decades. Coleman provides a new way of understanding the political history of immigration, looking not at borders and admissions policy but at the broad, internal battles over domestic policy that resulted from immigration. The author draws on a wealth of new sources from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations as well as from immigration and civil rights organizations. This book reveals that the current wave of anti-immigration sentiment seen in the electoral success of Donald Trump is not a recent phenomenon but has deep roots in the post-1965 immigration battles.

This compact, comprehensive title offers a thorough overview of the history, constitutional basis, statutory structure, regulatory provisions, administrative procedure, and ethical principles related to immigration law and practice. Updated to reflect developments including the Trump administration's impact on immigration law and the Biden Administration, it is valuable both as a teaching and a practice reference.

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.

In Disappearing Rooms Michelle Castañeda lays bare the criminalization of race enacted every day in US immigration courts and detention centers. She uses a performance studies perspective to show how the theatrical concept of mise-en-scène offers new insights about immigration law and the absurdist dynamics of carceral space. Castañeda draws upon her experiences in immigration trials as an interpreter and courtroom companion to analyze the scenography—lighting, staging, framing, gesture, speech, and choreography—of specific rooms within the immigration enforcement system. Castañeda’s ethnographies of proceedings in a “removal” office in New York City, a detention center courtroom in Texas, and an asylum office in the Northeast reveal the depersonalizing violence enacted in immigration law through its embodied, ritualistic, and affective components. She shows how the creative practices of detained and disappeared people living under acute duress imagine the abolition of detention and borders. Featuring original illustrations by artist-journalist Molly Crabapple, Disappearing Rooms shines a light into otherwise hidden spaces of law within the contemporary deportation regime.

How the immigration courts became part of the nation's law enforcement agency-and how to reshape them. During the Trump administration, the immigration courts were decried as more politicized enforcement weapon than impartial tribunal. Yet few people are aware of a fundamental flaw in the system that has long pre-dated that administration: The immigration courts are not really "courts" at all but an office of the Department of Justice-the nation's law enforcement agency. This original and surprising diagnosis shows how paranoia sparked by World War II and the War on Terror drove the structure of the immigration courts. Focusing on previously unstudied decisions in the Roosevelt and Bush administrations, the narrative laid out in this book divulges both the human tragedy of our current immigration court system and the human crises that led to its creation. Moving the reader from understanding to action, Alison Peck offers a lens through which to evaluate contemporary bills and proposals to reform our immigration court system. Peck provides an accessible legal analysis of recent events to make the case for independent immigration courts, proposing that the courts be moved into an independent, Article I court system. As long as the immigration courts remain under the authority of the attorney general, the administration of immigration justice will remain a game of political football-with people's very lives on the line.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved through immigration court. With a national backlog surpassing one million cases, court hearings take years and most migrants will eventually be ordered deported. The Slow Violence of Immigration Court sheds light on the experiences of migrants from the “Northern Triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as they navigate legal processes, deportation proceedings, immigration court, and the immigration system writ large.

Grounded in the illuminating stories of people facing deportation, the family members who support them, and the attorneys who defend them, The Slow Violence of Immigration Court invites readers to question matters of fairness and justice and the fear of living with the threat of deportation. Although the spectacle of violence created by family separation and deportation is perceived as extreme and unprecedented, these long legal proceedings are masked in the mundane and are often overlooked, ignored, and excused. In an urgent call to action, Maya Pagni Barak deftly demonstrates that deportation and family separation are not abhorrent anomalies, but are a routine, slow form of violence at the heart of the U.S. immigration system

Although there are legal norms to secure the uniform treatment of asylum claims in the United States, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggest that strategic and economic interests also influence asylum outcomes. Previous research has demonstrated considerable variation in how immigration judges decide seemingly similar cases, which implies a host of legal concerns--not the least of which is whether judicial bias is more determinative of the decision to admit those fleeing persecution to the United States than is the merit of the claim. These disparities also raise important policy considerations about how to fix what many perceive to be a broken adjudication system. With theoretical sophistication and empirical rigor, Immigration Judges and U.S. Asylum Policy investigates more than 500,000 asylum cases that were decided by U.S. immigration judges between 1990 and 2010. The authors find that judges treat certain facts about an asylum applicant more objectively than others: facts determined to be legally relevant tend to be treated similarly by judges of different political ideologies, while facts considered extralegal are treated subjectively. Furthermore, the authors examine how local economic and political conditions as well as congressional reforms have affected outcomes in asylum cases, concluding with a series of policy recommendations aimed at improving the quality of immigration law decision making rather than trying to reduce disparities between decision makers.

Stephen Castles provides a deeper understanding of recent 'migration crises' in this fascinating and highly topical work. The book links theory and methodology to real-world migration experiences, with a truly global perspective and in-depth analysis of the links between economics, migration and asylum and refugee issues. Key features surrounding this complex and often controversial field are examined through five thematic sections: · the sociological theories and methodologies most appropriate for understanding the migratory process, including the changing nature of international migration in an era of globalization · analysis of contemporary types of migration and the cruciality of understanding migration as a dynamic social process - inability to do so may lead to policy failure and unintended consequences · the relationship between migration and development · asylum and refugees · the effects of international migration on citizenship and identity, providing a critical perspective on the emergence of transnationalism. Migration, Citizenship and Identity will appeal to graduate students, senior undergraduates and lecturers in international migration, globalization, sociology, political science, demography and geography. Government officials, civil society activists, social workers, medical personnel, lawyers and other professional groups whose work is concerned with migrants and refugees will also find much to engage them.Stephen Castles provides a deeper understanding of recent 'migration crises' in this fascinating and highly topical work. The book links theory and methodology to real-world migration experiences, with a truly global perspective and in-depth analysis of the links between economics, migration and asylum and refugee issues. Key features surrounding this complex and often controversial field are examined through five thematic sections: · the sociological theories and methodologies most appropriate for understanding the migratory process, including the changing nature of international migration in an era of globalization · analysis of contemporary types of migration and the cruciality of understanding migration as a dynamic social process - inability to do so may lead to policy failure and unintended consequences · the relationship between migration and development · asylum and refugees · the effects of international migration on citizenship and identity, providing a critical perspective on the emergence of transnationalism. Migration, Citizenship and Identity will appeal to graduate students, senior undergraduates and lecturers in international migration, globalization, sociology, political science, demography and geography. Government officials, civil society activists, social workers, medical personnel, lawyers and other professional groups whose work is concerned with migrants and refugees will also find much to engage them.

Governments increasingly rely upon detention to control the movement of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. The deprivation of liberty of non-citizens due to their undocumented or irregular status is often fraught with gross injustices. This book stresses the need for global policy-makers to address these practices in order to ensure compliance with fundamental human rights and prevent detention abuses. Approaching detention from an interdisciplinary perspective, this volume brings together leading writers and thinkers to provide a greater understanding of why it is such an important social phenomenon and suggest ways to confront it locally and globally. Challenging Immigration Detention thematically examines a broad range of situations across the globe, with contributors providing overviews of key issues, case studies and experiences in their fields, while highlighting potential strategies for curbing detention abuses. Demonstrating the value of varied analytical frameworks and investigative angles, the contributors provide urgently needed insight into a growing human rights issue. With cross-disciplinary investigation into an issue with immediate global importance, Challenging Immigration Detention is vital for undergraduates, postgraduates, activists, lawyers and policy-makers interested in international human rights. National and international humanitarian organizations and advocacy groups working in migrant and asylum rights will find this a compelling and diverse overview of migrant detention.

The national debate over American immigration policy has obsessed politicians and disrupted the lives of millions of people for decades. The Battle to Stay in America focuses on Las Vegas, Nevada–a city where more than one in five residents was born in a foreign country, and where the community is struggling to defend itself against the federal government’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Told through the eyes of an immigration lawyer on the front lines of that battle, this book offers an accessible, intensely personal introduction to a broken legal system. It is also a raw, honest story of exhaustion, perseverance, and solidarity. Michael Kagan describes how current immigration law affects real people’s lives and introduces us to some remarkable individuals—immigrants and activists—who grapple with its complications every day. He explains how American immigration law often gives good people no recourse. He shows how under President Trump the complex bureaucracies that administer immigration law have been re-engineered to carry out a relentless but often invisible attack against people and families who are integral to American communities.

Kagan tells the stories of people desperate to escape unspeakable violence in their homeland, children separated from their families and trapped in a tangle of administrative regulations, and hardworking long-time residents suddenly ripped from their productive lives when they fall unwittingly into the clutches of the immigration enforcement system. He considers how the crackdown on immigrants negatively impacts the national economy and offers a deeply considered assessment of the future of immigration policy in the United States. Kagan also captures the psychological costs exacted by fear of deportation and by increasingly overt expressions of hatred against immigrants.

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Fragomen on Immigration Fundamentals provides in-depth coverage of the rules, policies, and procedures related to key facets of immigration law in the United States, including:
Employment-based and family-based immigration
Other avenues for permanent residence
Temporary (“nonimmigrant”) admissions for business, study, work, and other purposes
Naturalization of foreign-born persons and acquisition of citizenship at birth
Refugee and asylum law and other humanitarian protections under U.S. law
The denial of admission and removal of foreign nationals on security- and criminal-related grounds (and other statutory grounds)
The administrative and judicial review of unfavorable immigration determinations
Throughout, the authors supplement analysis of recent cases, policies and rules with practical guidance for both general practitioners and experienced immigration attorneys.