Immigrants, Employment, and Labor Unions: Nashville—Prospects for Coalition

immigration, employment, labor unions, Nashville

Business License Revocation: Is This What the Tennessee Economy Needs?

immigration, Tennessee, law, economy, labor

Permanent Legal Immigration to the United States: Policy Overview

Four major principles currently underlie U.S. policy on legal permanent immigration: the reunification of families, the admission of immigrants with needed skills, the protection of refugees, and the diversity of admissions by country of origin. These principles are embodied in federal law, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) first codified in 1952. The Immigration Amendments of 1965 replaced the national origins quota system (enacted after World War I) with per-country ceilings, and the statutory provisions regulating permanent immigration to the United States were last revised significantly by the Immigration Act of 1990. The critiques of the permanent legal immigration system today are extensive, but there is no consensus on the specific direction the reforms of the law should take. As the Congress considers comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), many maintain that revision of the legal immigration system should be one of the major components of a CIR proposal. This primer on legal permanent immigration law, policies, and trends provides a backdrop for the policy options and debates that may emerge as Congress considers a revision of the legal immigration system

Immigration as Commerce: A New Look at the Federal Immigration Power and the Constitution

The relationship of immigration law to the Constitution has long been incoherent. One result is that there is little clarity on the appropriate standard of review for constitutional violations when aspects of immigration law and policy are challenged in the federal courts. This Article advances the Commerce Clause as the anchor of a new understanding of the link between the government\u27s immigration power and the Constitution. Despite the extensive early history of the Foreign Commerce Clause as the presumed source of the immigration power, it plays almost no role in immigration jurisprudence today, and few scholars have seriously considered its suitability for that role. More strikingly, none have explored the Interstate Commerce Clause as an appropriate source of the immigration power, one that could open the door to a normalization of constitutional analysis in the immigration context. The Article argues that both the Foreign and the Interstate Commerce Clauses should be understood to undergird the contemporary immigration power, and suggests that acknowledging immigration’s relationship to the Commerce Clause clears a path to more routine constitutional review of immigration law and policy

Immigrants, Education, and Labor Market: A Perspective from Four States

immigration, education, labor market, workforce, population, Tennessee

'Descended from immigrants and revolutionists': how family immigration history shapes representation in Congress

Does recent immigrant lineage influence the legislative behavior of members of Congress on immigration policy? We examine the relationship between the immigrant background of legislators (i.e., their generational distance from immigration) and legislative behavior, focusing on roll-call votes for landmark immigration legislation and congressional speech on the floor. Legislators more proximate to the immigrant experience tend to support more permissive immigration legislation. Legislators with recent immigration backgrounds also speak more often about immigration in Congress, though the size of immigrant constituencies in their districts accounts for a larger share of this effect. A regression discontinuity design on close elections, which addresses selection bias concerns and holds district composition constant, confirms that legislators with recent immigrant backgrounds tend to support pro-immigration legislation. Finally, we demonstrate how a common immigrant identity can break down along narrower ethnic lines in cases where restrictive legislation targets specific places of origin. Our findings illustrate the important role of immigrant identity in legislative behavior and help illuminate the legislative dynamics of present-day immigration policy.Accepted manuscrip

Immigration: An Opinion

immigration, U.S., opinion

The Summary Affirmance Proposal of the Board of Immigration Appeals

The Board of Immigration Appeals is on the verge of making a tragic mistake, trading away a key element of fair adjudication--the written opinion--for the sake of what it hopes will be greater administrative efficiency. The cost of eliminating written adjudication is too great, and the Board has given no indication that it has sufficiently canvassed less drastic alternatives. The Board of Immigration Appeals (the Board ) is the primary appellate body for immigration law. The staple of its work is to decide appeals from decisions of Immigration Judges in removal proceedings, though it also hears appeals in several other categories, such as decisions of Immigration Judges on petitions for approval of preferred immigration status by virtue of close relationship to a United States citizen or permanent alien

Justifying Resistance to Immigration Law: The Case of Mere Noncompliance

Constitutional democracies unilaterally enact the laws that regulate immigration to their territories. When are would-be migrants to a constitutional democracy morally justified in breaching such laws? Receiving states also typically enact laws that require their existing citizens to participate in the implementation of immigration restrictions. When are the individual citizens of a constitutional democracy morally justified in breaching such laws? In this article, I take up these questions concerning the justifiability of noncompliance with immigration law, focusing on the case of nonviolent – or mere – noncompliance. Dissenting from Javier Hidalgo’s view, I argue that the injustice of an immigration law is insufficient to make mere noncompliance justified. Instead, I contend that only if an immigration law lacks legitimate authority are individuals justified in breaching it, since the subjects of an institution with legitimate authority are under a content-independent moral duty to comply with its rules. I further argue that a constitutional democracy’s regimes of law regulating immigration and requiring its citizens’ participation in implementing these regulations have legitimate authority. Nevertheless, when a particular immigration law is egregiously unjust, its legitimacy is defeated

Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Enforcement: Legal Issues

This report begins by discussing the sources of federal power to regulate immigration and, particularly, the allocation of power between Congress and the President in this area. It next addresses the constitutional and other foundations for the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion, as well as the potential ways in which prosecutorial discretion may be exercised in the immigration context. It concludes by addressing potential constitutional, statutory, and administrative constraints upon the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The report does not address other aspects of discretion in immigration law, such as the discretion exercised by immigration officers in granting benefits (e.g., asylum), or by immigration judges in non-enforcement contexts (e.g., cancellation of removal)