Category: Comprehensive Immigration Reform Symposium: Problems Possibilities and Pragmatic Solutions

This symposium, titled “Immigration Reform: Problems,Possibilities, and Pragmatic Solutions,” is perfectly timed. The nation for at least a decade has from time to time fiddled with immigration reform. Some might critically contend that the United States has fiddled as Rome burned.
Change may well be in the winds. In December 2009, an immigration reform bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. The Obama administration at one time had promised to pursue comprehensive immigration reform in 2010. We shall see whether Congress will—and can—address the all-important, yet deeply contentious, issue of immigration reform in an election year. Read More …

Since 1893, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Fong Yue Ting v. United States, deportation has been considered something other than punishment. It has been considered a civil tool for border control and, thus, a remedial measure rather than a punitive measure. As a civil remedial measure, the U.S. Supreme Court has concluded that constitutional criminal protections are not applicable to deportation. Additionally, the Court has yet to acknowledge other substantive constitutional restraints on the state’s power to deport noncitizens. Read More …

We have just listened to two talks very close up to the data at the micro-level of the immigration experience, and those are important objects of study for us as scholars and engaged intellectuals. That said, I am going to back away a little bit and speak more abstractly and about a dilemma we have to confront, however difficult it may be for us. And that is the dilemma of failing social solidarity and the place of immigration in the neo-liberal order that dominates us now and will continue to dominate us for the foreseeable future. Read More …

More than twenty years ago, the city of San Francisco declared itself a “City of Refuge” for immigrants, particularly those who do not have authorized status. To bolster the city’s symbolic declaration, San Francisco subsequently passed an ordinance that restricted city employees from obtaining information about a person’s immigration status or revealing a person’s known unauthorized immigration status to the federal government. In so doing, San Francisco took the bold step of aiming to assure undocumented immigrants that the city would serve as a safe haven by not cooperating with federal immigration authorities, whose responsibilities include removing unauthorized immigrants from the United States. Read More …

Many developments have kept the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act and the issue of undocumented college students in the news and on federal and state legislative agendas.
Who would have thought that presidential candidates would be debating the issue, as they did in the Republican primaries of 2007 and 2008? Especially coming on the heels of a near-miss months earlier, when the bill almost passed in the Senate, the topic is one that has all the earmarks of an agenda-building subject, situated in the complex and treacherous context of twenty-first century U.S.domestic politics, especially those of comprehensive immigration reform. Inasmuch as this subset of much larger immigration, higher education, and tuition policies commands recurrent attention, DREAM Act politics are a useful bellwether for observers of these domains. Read More …

Recent events have unearthed a firestorm around the issue of border enforcement in the United States. The state of Arizona passed S.B.1070, a law that directs state and local law enforcement to ascertain the immigration status of anyone officers have a “reasonable suspicion” of being “an alien unlawfully in the United States.” The response included protests and an announcement by the Democratic Party of its“framework” for immigration reform. The framework follows the model of bills for immigration reform in recent years, pairing the legalization of undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States with increased enforcement personnel and spending at the border and in the interior of the United States. The latter, which is the focus of this Article,is the reform being stressed in the wake of Arizona’s bold initiative as federal lawmakers rush to concede that Arizonans acted due to a failed federal border policy. Read More …

What do Google, Intel, Yahoo,
e-Bay, Sun Microsystems, and Facebook have in common? Besides being household names and innovative, highly profitable industry leaders, these companies all had immigrant founders or co-founders. Duke and Harvard University’s researcher Vivek Wadhwa revealed that half of Silicon Valley’s engineering and technology companies, and a quarter of those startednationwide between 1995 and 2006, had immigrant founders. In addition, one in every four patents in the World Intellectual PropertyOrganization listed a foreign national residing in the United States as the inventor. These figures are less surprising if we focus on statistics fromthe National Science Foundation, reporting that foreign studentsreceived nearly sixty percent of all engineering doctorates awarded in the United States, over fifty percent of all doctorates in engineering,mathematics, computer sciences, physics and economics, and 40 percentof all doctorates in agricultural sciences. The Bureau of Citizenship andImmigration Services reports that foreign students in the science,technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are disproportionately represented. Read More …