Perceived structural vulnerabilities among detained noncitizen immigrants in Minnesota

Across several decades there has been an unprecedented increase in immigration enforcement including detention and deportation. Immigration detention profoundly impacts those experiencing detention and their family members. An emerging area of research has found that immigrants experience a number of challenges which constrain and limit their decisions, choices, and options for security and integration in the United States due to social, political and structural determinants. These determinants lead to greater structural vulnerabilities among immigrants. The purpose of the current study was to illuminate the perceived vulnerabilities of detained noncitizen immigrants as they are raised and described while attending case hearings at the Bloomington, Minnesota immigration court. Through conducting a thematic analysis of notes derived from third party immigration court observers, three areas of perceived vulnerability were identified. These perceived vulnerabilities include 1) migration and motivations to migrate, 2) structural vulnerabilities (e.g., discrimination, financial insecurity, social ties and family support, stable or fixed residence, English language proficiency, health and mental health) in the US, and 3) challenges in navigating immigration detention. These findings demonstrate that noncitizen immigrants who are undergoing immigration detention are experiencing multiple intersecting vulnerabilities which profoundly impact their lives. Collaborative efforts across sectors are needed to work towards comprehensive immigration reforms including both short-term and long-term solutions to address pressing issues for noncitizens undergoing immigration detention.

Rival Visions of Nationhood

This chapter studies how immigration policy can be deployed as a key instrument of grand strategy, a site where state actors might use the levers of immigrant and refugee admissions to advance both a comprehensive and integrated set of social, economic, and security goals at home. Indeed, a diverse array of US presidents, lawmakers, and activists have had grand strategies in mind as they pursued major immigration reform. The chapter focuses on a particularly significant effort to remake the US immigration system—the 1960s struggle to dismantle national origins quotas and reopen US gates to immigrants and refugees—in order to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of grand strategizing in this policy realm. One can discern these dynamics in immigration reforms and executive actions from the 1920s to the present, but the successful battle for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 provides an especially illuminating example. Before turning to this case, however, the chapter first considers immigration control and grand strategy in the early American republic and the rise of rival interests and ideals that make significant policy innovation contingent on incongruous coalitions and uneasy compromises.

Canada’s Immigration System Increasingly Draws Talent from the United States

Official data shows a 75 percent increase in the number of U.S. residents advancing through Express Entry, Canada's flagship skilled immigration program. These findings call for immigration reforms and greater investment in STEM research and workforce development.

Immigration Policy

Although the United States is a nation shaped by vast waves of immigration over time, Americans have been fighting over policies governing immigrant admissions and rights since the earliest days of the republic. Rival nativist and pro-immigration movements and traditions have yielded marked shifts across U.S. history among national policies designed to stimulate or discourage immigration. The federal government only gradually took control of regulating immigrant flows over the course of the nineteenth century. Since then, national policy has assumed both restrictive and expansive forms. Whereas the creation of an “Asiatic Barred Zone” and national origins quotas in the 1920s imposed draconian barriers to immigration, immigration reforms after 1965 helped fuel the nation’s fourth major wave of immigration dominated by unprecedented numbers of Latin American and Asian newcomers. As underscored by recent battles over family separation and efforts to build a southern border wall, the politics of immigration reform today, as in the past, remain deeply polarizing, as border hawks on the Right and immigrant rights advocates on the Left clash over unauthorized immigration and the future of millions of undocumented immigrants living in the country. The United States’ immigration policy will continue to reflect these competing interests and ideals.

Whom We Shall Welcome

This book looks at Italian American campaigns to reform American immigration laws from 1945 to 1965. It argues that even while Italian Americans were members of a coalition that pushed for liberal immigration reforms, their campaigns reflected a mix of liberalism and conservatism. Italian American immigration reformers invoked both secular principles of democratic liberalism and arguments based on Catholic social thought to call for a more humane and equal system of regulating immigration than the one in place based on a system of National Origins quotas. Yet in practice, Italian American campaign rhetoric and legislative strategies often reflected a socially and racially conservative vision of Americanism. Through displays of anti-communism, household mass consumption, assimilation, and advancing narratives of immigrant contributions to the nation, Italian Americans largely asserted their group’s fitness for immigration and citizenship rights in the United States. Each of those displays was highly racialized and hardly contested accepted political and social boundaries, but rather reaffirmed them. Those actions demonstrated that Italian Americans were just as concerned with their group’s political and social equality with older-stock whites as they were with liberalizing American immigration laws.

Discrimination and Policies of Immigrant Selection in Liberal States

How should liberal societies select prospective members? A conventional reading of immigration history posits that whereas ascriptive characteristics drove immigration policy in the past, contemporary policy is based on the principle of nondiscrimination. Yet a closer look at the characteristics of those admitted reveals systematic group biases that run counter to liberalism’s core moral commitments. This article first discusses liberal states’ basic moral obligation to treat their citizens with equal respect. It then identifies ways in which the group biases produced by immigration policy violate that principle, when states either deprive their citizens of fundamental rights or stigmatize them through hierarchical constructions of citizenship. Three mechanisms are presented—structural bias, profiling, and positive selection—by which seemingly liberal admissions policies produce illiberal outcomes. The empirical analysis explores the resulting discriminatory group biases in the context of language and income conditionalities on family migration, excessive demand restrictions against economic migrants, and visa waivers for international travelers. We conclude that immigration reforms that mitigate, if not erase, these morally problematic patterns are within the reach of liberal states.