scholarly journals How the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 Has Undermined US Refugee Protection Obligations and Wasted Government Resources

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 356-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor Acer ◽  
Olga Byrne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Illegal Immigration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Screening Process ◽  
System Integrity ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status

Seeking asylum is a human right, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (“Refugee Convention”) and its 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees (“1967 Protocol”) prohibit the United States from returning refugees to persecution, and the 1980 Refugee Act set up a formal process for applying for asylum in the United States. However, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) created a barrage of new barriers to asylum. These impediments have blocked many refugees from accessing asylum in the United States and inserted additional layers of technicalities, screening, and processing, undermining the effectiveness of the US asylum system. The barriers imposed by IIRIRA are significant. They include a filing deadline on asylum applications, which prevents genuine refugees from receiving asylum if they cannot prove they have filed the application within one year of arriving in the United States. IIRIRA also established summary deportation procedures, including “expedited removal” and “reinstatement of removal,” which block asylum seekers from even applying for asylum or accessing an immigration court removal hearing, unless they first pass through a screening process. Finally, IIRIRA imposed “mandatory detention” on certain immigrants, including asylum seekers who are placed in expedited removal proceedings upon their arrival at a US port of entry. Each of these provisions imposed new processes and procedures that have contributed to an increasingly ineffective immigration system. The current backlog in the immigration courts has reached a record high, surpassing half a million cases, while the backlog of affirmative asylum cases before the Asylum Division of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has increased by a factor of six in just three years. Backlogs, which lead to long delays in adjudication, undermine system integrity as bona fide asylum seekers wait for years in legal limbo — some with families waiting abroad in dangerous and life-threatening situations — and individuals without meritorious claims may be encouraged to file applications to receive a work permit during the lengthy waiting period. Twenty years later, as the world faces the largest global refugee crisis since World War II, the asylum barriers injected into the US system under IIRIRA have proven harmful to refugees, and detrimental to the US asylum system. This paper highlights recent research, litigation, and advocacy efforts that have further brought to light the rights violations and systemic inefficiencies generated by IIRIRA. It concludes with a series of recommendations, calling on the US government to eliminate these counterproductive barriers and to take steps to assure access to asylum.

A Critical Transnational Perspective to Asian America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Vietnamese Refugees ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Rights Discourse

Much of the early scholarship in Asian American studies sought to establish that Asian Americans have been crucial to the making of the US nation and thus deserve full inclusion into its polity. This emphasis on inclusion affirms the status of the United States as the ultimate protector and provider of human welfare, and narrates the Asian American subject by modern civil rights discourse. However, the comparative cases of Filipino immigrants and Vietnamese refugees show how Asian American racial formation has been determined not only by the social, economic, and political forces in the United States but also by US colonialism, imperialism, and wars in Asia.

scholarly journals National Interests and Common Ground in the US Immigration Debate: How to Legalize the US Immigration System and Permanently Reduce Its Undocumented Population

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Kerwin ◽  
Robert Warren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
Illegal Migration ◽  
National Interests ◽  
The Us ◽  
Immigration Debate ◽  
Legal Immigration ◽  
Us Immigration

The conventional wisdom holds that the only point of consensus in the fractious US immigration debate is that the system is broken. Yet, the US public has consistently expressed a desire for a legal and orderly immigration system that serves compelling national interests. This paper describes how to create such a system. It focuses on the cornerstone of immigration reform,1 the legal immigration system,2 and addresses the widespread belief that broad reform will incentivize illegal migration and ultimately lead to another large undocumented population. The paper begins with an analysis of presidential signing statements on seminal immigration legislation over nearly a century. These statements reveal broad consensus on the interests and values that the United States seeks to advance through its immigration and refugee policies. They constitute additional common ground in the immigration debate. To serve these interests, immigration and refugee considerations must be “mainstreamed” into other policy processes. In addition, its policies will be more successful if they are seen to benefit or, at least, not to discriminate against migrant-sending states. Not surprisingly, the US immigration system does not reflect the vast, mostly unanticipated changes in the nation and the world since Congress last meaningfully reformed this system (27 years ago) and last overhauled the law (52 years ago). The paper does not detail the well-documented ways that US immigration laws fall short of serving the nation's economic, family, humanitarian, and rule of law objectives. Nor does it propose specific changes in categories and levels of admission. Rather, it describes how a legal immigration system might be broadly structured to deliver on its promises. In particular, it makes the case that Congress should create a flexible system that serves compelling national interests, allows for real time adjustments in admission based on evidence and independent analysis, and vests the executive with appropriate discretion in administering the law. The paper also argues that the United States should anticipate and accommodate the needs of persons compelled to migrate by its military, trade, development, and other commitments. In addition, the US immigration system needs to be able to distinguish between undocumented immigrants, and refugees and asylum seekers, and to treat these two populations differently. The paper assumes that there will be continued bipartisan support for immigration enforcement. However, even with a strong enforcement apparatus in place and an adaptable, coherent, evidence-based legal immigration system that closely aligns with US interests, some (reduced) level of illegal migration will persist. The paper offers a sweeping, historical analysis of how this population emerged, why it has grown and contracted, and how estimates of its size have been politically exploited. Legalization is often viewed as the third rail of immigration reform. Yet, Congress has regularly legalized discrete undocumented populations, and the combination of a well-structured legalization program, strengthened legal immigration system, and strong enforcement policies can prevent the reemergence of a large-scale undocumented population. In contrast, the immense US enforcement apparatus will work at cross-purposes to US interests and values, absent broader reform. The paper ends with a series of recommendations to reform the legal immigration system, downsize the current undocumented population, and ensure its permanent reduction. It proposes that the United States “reissue” (or reuse) the visas of persons who emigrate, as a way to promote legal immigration reform without significantly increasing annual visa numbers.

The United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. Sharman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Patriot Act ◽  
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ◽  
The Us ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Successful Prevention

This chapter begins by tracing the origins of the anti-kleptocracy cause in the United States, starting with the harsh Cold War environment and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. It explores the status quo ante of dictators being able to launder their funds in the US financial system with impunity immediately before and after the turn of the century. At this time, there was no law prohibiting American banks and other institutions receiving the proceeds of foreign corruption. The USA Patriot Act closed this legal loophole, yet practice lagged, and laws at first failed to have much of an impact. More recent cases indicate at least partial effectiveness, however, with instances of successful prevention and some looted wealth confiscated and returned.

Italian American Identity and Politics: World War II To the Cold War

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Danielle Battisti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Italian American ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines Italian American loyalty campaigns during World War II as well as postwar campaigns to promote the democratic reconstruction of Italy. It argues that even though Italian Americans had made great strides toward political and social inclusion in the United States, they were still deeply concerned with their group’s public identity at mid-century. This chapter also demonstrates that in the course of their increased involvement with their homeland politics in the postwar period, Italian Americans gradually came to believe that the successful democratization of Italy (and therefore their own standing in the United States) was dependent upon relieving population pressures that they believed threatened the political and economic reconstruction of Italy. That belief played an important role in stirring Italian Americans to action on issues of immigration reform.

scholarly journals Immigration and the War on Crime: Law and Order Politics and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrisia Macías-Rojas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Immigration Policy ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Illegal Immigration ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Enforcement ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
War On Crime ◽  
Policy Arena

The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) was a momentous law that recast undocumented immigration as a crime and fused immigration enforcement with crime control (García Hernández 2016; Lind 2016). Among its most controversial provisions, the law expanded the crimes, broadly defined, for which immigrants could be deported and legal permanent residency status revoked. The law instituted fast-track deportations and mandatory detention for immigrants with convictions. It restricted access to relief from deportation. It constrained the review of immigration court decisions and imposed barriers for filing class action lawsuits against the former US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). It provided for the development of biometric technologies to track “criminal aliens” and authorized the former INS to deputize state and local police and sheriff's departments to enforce immigration law (Guttentag 1997a; Migration News 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Taylor 1997). In short, it put into law many of the punitive provisions associated with the criminalization of migration today. Legal scholars have documented the critical role that IIRIRA played in fundamentally transforming immigration enforcement, laying the groundwork for an emerging field of “crimmigration” (Morris 1997; Morawetz 1998, 2000; Kanstroom 2000; Miller 2003; Welch 2003; Stumpf 2006). These studies challenged the law's deportation and mandatory detention provisions, as well as its constraints on judicial review. And they exposed the law's widespread consequences, namely the deportations that ensued and the disproportionate impact of IIRIRA's enforcement measures on immigrants with longstanding ties to the United States (ABA 2004). Less is known about what drove IIRIRA's criminal provisions or how immigration came to be viewed through a lens of criminality in the first place. Scholars have mostly looked within the immigration policy arena for answers, focusing on immigration reform and the “new nativism” that peaked in the early nineties (Perea 1997; Jacobson 2008). Some studies have focused on interest group competition, particularly immigration restrictionists’ prohibitions on welfare benefits, while others have examined constructions of immigrants as a social threat (Chavez 2001; Nevins 2002, 2010; Newton 2008; Tichenor 2009; Bosworth and Kaufman 2011; Zatz and Rodriguez 2015). Surprisingly few studies have stepped outside the immigration policy arena to examine the role of crime politics and the policies of mass incarceration. Of these, scholars suggest that IIRIRA's most punitive provisions stem from a “new penology” in the criminal justice system, characterized by discourses and practices designed to predict dangerousness and to manage risk (Feeley and Simon 1992; Miller 2003; Stumpf 2006; Welch 2012). Yet historical connections between the punitive turn in the criminal justice and immigration systems have yet to be disentangled and laid bare. Certainly, nativist fears about unauthorized migration, national security, and demographic change were important factors shaping IIRIRA's criminal provisions, but this article argues that the crime politics advanced by the Republican Party (or the “Grand Old Party,” GOP) and the Democratic Party also played an undeniable and understudied role. The first part of the analysis examines policies of mass incarceration and the crime politics of the GOP under the Reagan administration. The second half focuses on the crime politics of the Democratic Party that recast undocumented migration as a crime and culminated in passage of IIRIRA under the Clinton administration. IIRIRA's criminal provisions continue to shape debates on the relationship between immigration and crime, the crimes that should provide grounds for expulsion from the United States, and the use of detention in deportation proceedings for those with criminal convictions. This essay considers the ways in which the War on Crime — specifically the failed mass incarceration policies — reshaped the immigration debate. It sheds light on the understudied role that crime politics of the GOP and the Democratic Party played in shaping IIRIRA — specifically its criminal provisions, which linked unauthorized migration with criminality, and fundamentally restructured immigration enforcement and infused it with the resources necessary to track, detain, and deport broad categories of immigrants, not just those with convictions.

Internment of Japanese and Japanese Latin Americans During World War II

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selfa A. Chew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coastal Zones ◽  
World War ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government

The lives of Latin American Japanese were disrupted during World War II, when their civil and human rights were suspended. National security and continental defense were the main reasons given by the American countries consenting to their uprooting. More than 2,000 ethnic Japanese from Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Nicaragua were transferred as “illegal aliens” to internment camps in the United States. Initially, US and Latin American agencies arrested and deported male ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. During the second stage, women and children joined their relatives in the United States. Most forced migration originated in Peru. Brazil and Mexico established similar displacement programs, ordering the population of Japanese descent to leave the coastal zones, and in the case of Mexico the border areas. In both countries, ethnic Japanese were under strict monitoring and lost property, employment, and family and friend relationships, losses that affected their health and the opportunity to support themselves in many cases. Latin American Japanese in the United States remained in camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the army for the duration of the war and were among the last internees leaving the detention facilities, in 1946. At the conclusion of World War II, the Latin American countries that had agreed to the expulsion of ethnic Japanese limited greatly their return. Some 800 internees were deported to Japan from the United States by the closure of the camps. Those who remained in North America were allowed to leave the camps to work in a fresh produce farm in Seabrook, New Jersey, without residency or citizenship rights. In 1952, immigration restrictions for former Latin American internees were lifted. Latin American governments have not apologized for the uprooting of the ethnic Japanese, while the US government has recognized it as a mistake. In 1988, the United States offered a symbolic compensation to all surviving victims of the internment camps in the amount of $20,000. In contrast, in 1991, Latin American Japanese survivors were granted only $5,000.

Korean Immigration to the United States After World War II

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Mun-hye Baik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Korean Women ◽  
World War ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Korean Immigration

Korean immigration to the United States has been shaped by multiple factors, including militarization, colonialism, and war. While Koreans migrated to the American-occupied islands of Hawai’i in the early 20th century as sugar plantation laborers, Japanese imperial rule (1910–1945) and racially exclusive immigration policy curtailed Korean migration to the United States until the end of World War II. Since then, Korean immigration has been shaped by racialized, gendered, and sexualized conditions related to the Korean War and American military occupation. Although existing social science literature dominantly frames Korean immigration through the paradigm of migration “waves,” these periodizations are arbitrary to the degree that they centralize perceived US policy changes or “breaks” within a linear historical timeline. In contrast, emphasizing the continuing role of peninsular instability and militarized division points to the accumulative effects of the Korean War that continue to impact Korean immigration. With the beginning of the American military occupation of Korea in 1945 and warfare erupting in 1950, Koreans experienced familial separations and displacements. Following the signing of the Korean armistice in 1953, which halted armed fighting without formally ending the war, the American military remained in the southern half of the Peninsula. The presence of the US military in South Korea had immediate repercussions among civilians, as American occupation engendered sexual intimacies between Korean women and US soldiers. Eventually, a multiracial population emerged as children were born to Korean women and American soldiers. Given the racial exclusivity of American immigration policy at the time, the US government established legislative “loopholes” to facilitate the migrations of Korean spouses of US soldiers and multiracial children adopted by American families. Between 1951 and 1964 over 90 percent of the 14,027 Koreans who entered the United States were Korean “war brides” and transnational adoptees. Since 1965, Korean spouses of American servicemen have played key roles in supporting the migration of family members through visa sponsorship. Legal provisions that affected the arrivals of Korean women and children to the United States provided a precedent for US immigration reform after 1950. For instance, the 1952 and 1965 Immigration and Nationality Acts integrated core elements of these emergency orders, including privileging heterosexual relationships within immigration preferences. Simultaneously, while the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act “opened” the doors of American immigration to millions of people, South Korean military dictatorial rule and the imminent threat of rekindled warfare also influenced Korean emigration. As a result, official US immigration categories do not necessarily capture the complex conditions informing Koreans’ decisions to migrate to the United States. Finally, in light of the national surge of anti-immigrant sentiments that have crystallized since the American presidential election of Donald Trump in November 2016, immigration rights advocates have highlighted the need to address the prevalence of undocumented immigrant status among Korean Americans. While definitive statistics do not exist, emergent data suggests that at least 10 percent of the Korean American population is undocumented. Given this significant number, the undocumented status of Korean Americans is a critical site of study that warrants further research.

Muslims in America from the European Colonial Period to the Present

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Identity ◽  
World War I ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Muslims ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Muslim Majority

The history of Muslims in America dates back to the transatlantic mercantile interactions between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Upon its arrival, Islam became entrenched in American discourses on race and civilization because literate and noble African Muslims, brought to America as slaves, had problematized popular stereotypes of Muslims and black Africans. Furthermore, these enslaved Muslims had to re-evaluate and reconfigure their beliefs and practices to form new communal relations and to make sense of their lives in America. At the turn of the 20th century, as Muslim immigrants began arriving in the United States from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Asia, they had to establish themselves in an America in which the white race, Protestantism, and progress were conflated to define a triumphalist American national identity, one that allowed varying levels of inclusion for Muslims based on their ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds. The enormous bloodshed and destruction experienced during World War I ushered in a crisis of confidence in the ideals of the European Enlightenment, as well as in white, Protestant nationalism. It opened up avenues for alternative expressions of progress, which allowed Muslims, along with other nonwhite, non-Christian communities, to engage in political and social organization. Among these organizations were a number of black religious movements that used Islamic beliefs, rites, and symbols to define a black Muslim national identity. World War II further shifted America, away from the religious competition that had earlier defined the nation’s identity and toward a “civil religion” of American democratic values and political institutions. Although this inclusive rhetoric was received differently along racial and ethnic lines, there was an overall appeal for greater visibility for Muslims in America. After World War II, increased commercial and diplomatic relations between the United States and Muslim-majority countries put American Muslims in a position, not only to relate Islam and America in their own lives but also to mediate between the varying interests of Muslim-majority countries and the United States. Following the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, Muslim activists, many of whom had been politicized by anticolonial movements abroad, established new Islamic institutions. Eventually, a window was opened between the US government and American Muslim activists, who found a common enemy in communism following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Since the late 1960s, the number of Muslims in the United States has grown significantly. Today, Muslims are estimated to constitute a little more than 1 percent of the US population. However, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the United States as the sole superpower in the world, the United States has come into military conflict with Muslim-majority countries and has been the target of attacks by militant Muslim organizations. This has led to the cultivation of the binaries of “Islam and the West” and of “good” Islam and “bad” Islam, which have contributed to the racialization of American Muslims. It has also interpolated them into a reality external to their history and lived experiences as Muslims and Americans.

scholarly journals What we talk about when we talk about Jerusalem: The duty of non-recognition and the prospects for peace after the US embassy’s relocation to the Holy City

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 621-647
Author(s):  
Marco Pertile ◽  
Sondra Faccio
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Solution ◽  
Negative Reaction ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
Bilateral Agreement ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Holy City

AbstractThe article addresses the legality of the relocation of the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in light of the duty of non-recognition and the international consensus on the two-state solution. Analysing the massive reaction of states to the United States administration’s decision, the article takes stock of the practice on the status of Jerusalem and on the Israeli-Palestinian issue more broadly. The authors conclude that the almost unanimous negative reaction of states and their commitment to the two-state solution will remain a dead letter if the solution to the crisis is left to a future bilateral agreement.

Contemporary Fascism’s de-Judified Homo Sacer

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Hong Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that representations in popular culture of the Holocaust of World War II are being used to reframe issues of racism in the United States. It critically examines three major discourse formations: contemporary Western thought on fascism, critical scholarship on the US collective memory of the Holocaust, and popular culture’s use of the Holocaust for racial instruction. The Americanization and de-Judification of the Holocaust shows how fascist racism is constructed through institutional discourses and practices and functions as an archetype for understanding race and racism in the United States. Exploring the emergence of Holocaust references in US public culture following Barack Obama’s election, this article proposes that the analogy gains its efficacy because the Americanization of the Holocaust articulates the relationship between institutional practices and race for racist whites.

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