Immigration Justice Research Articles

Everyday immigration ethics: Colombia, Venezuela and the case for vernacular response

ABSTRACT In the last decade, Venezuelans have faced a range of challenges such that by 2023, nearly 7.2 million have fled, the vast majority hosted within the region. One country particularly stands out: Colombia has accepted over 2.5 million. Colombia’s behaviour does not appear motivated by legal obligations or universal ethical principles; it is hard to make sense of in terms of international ethical and political theory. Rather, Colombian state and society make reference to mundane, localised concepts of friendship, fraternity and the reciprocity of a shared history. Such everyday ethics is generally ignored in existing debates. I argue that immigration ethics could helpfully begin from concrete, everyday ethical behaviour rather than idealisation and abstraction. Instead of initially asking what states and societies should do regarding immigration, we could ask what do they already do, why and how? This article therefore explores how Colombian politicians and civil society actors understood their welcoming actions through an awareness of entangled histories, reciprocity, friendship and solidarity: everyday, vernacular ways in which responsibility-taking is rationalised and practiced. My argument is not that Colombia’s actions are normatively right, or an enactment of immigration justice. Rather, these actions were ambivalent: the messy, pragmatic result of negotiating different, competing responsibilities, principles and emotions. The results were imperfect, heavily gendered, but also unprecedented. Those advocating greater societal responsibility for immigrants would perhaps do best to look beyond the global north, shun the universal and start from local activities founded in vernacular, everyday ethics.

An Epidemic of Virtue: A Review of Social Work's Complicity in “Prostitution” Interventions

This article engages with the field of social work's role in humanitarian and criminal legal responses to sex work in the United States over the last century. Our historical review reveals that, through interdisciplinary collaboration in the criminalization and rehabilitation of sex workers, social workers have contributed to the transformation of “prostitution” from an issue of sex workers’ rights to a psychological, criminal legal, and medical phenomenon. This has exacerbated the harm and stigma experienced by sex workers. In exploring social work interventions on sex work from the Progressive Era through the rise of neoliberalism, this article places its modern iteration, prostitution diversion programming, within the context of social work's carceral history with sex workers. We choose these periods not for their chronicity, but rather for the salient themes in these historical interventions that characterize modern diversion programming: power and control, punitive service provision, patriarchal rescue, and carceral feminism. To align with social work's mandate for social justice and client self-determination, this article offers policy and practice implications grounded in the decriminalization of sex work and divestment from the police and courts. Alternative service approaches spearheaded by sex workers are explored and placed within the context of labor, racial, gender, and immigration justice.

Obstetric violence as immigration injustice: A view from the United States and Colombia.

In September 2020, Project South, along with numerous other organizations, released a report detailing abuses in a Georgia Detention Center - including forced hysterectomies. Whatever other factors are at play, one of them is an intrinsic connection between obstetric violence against pregnant migrants and immigration injustice. It is not incidental that these acts - in US detention centers, along the US-Mexico border, in Colombian hospitals and clinics - are being perpetrated on immigrant bodies. And it is not accidental or random which immigrant bodies are vulnerable to these violations. Understanding and confronting obstetric violence directed at pregnant migrants, though, requires reconceptualizing the nature of obstetric violence itself. In particular, we must recognize that obstetric violence against pregnant Latin American migrants in the United States and Colombia is a type of immigration injustice, a means to perpetrate immigration injustice, and a product of immigration injustice. As such, bioethicists need to collaborate with immigration scholars to resist it. After providing some background on the nature of obstetric violence and some ways it is perpetuated against pregnant migrants in the United States and Colombia, I will give a brief overview of how I conceptualize immigration justice. From there, I explain how this type of obstetric violence constitutes a type of immigration injustice, a means to perpetrate immigration injustice, and a product of immigration injustice. My hope is that this analysis motivates bioethicists throughout the Americas to engage with immigration scholars and activists to confront the issue more forcefully.

Presumed guilty until proven credible: epistemic injustice toward Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia

With few exceptions, philosophers working on immigration have not taken up the topic of epistemic injustice, primarily, I imagine, because immigration justice is often too narrowly conceived of as encompassing moral and political concerns rather than epistemic ones. But the more I think about cases like the ones just highlighted, along with other injustices immigrants endure on a daily basis, the more I take this to be a mistake; epistemic injustices must be seen as a central aspect of immigration injustice too. In what follows, I will demonstrate how this is the case. More specifically, after providing an overview about the nature of epistemic injustice, I will highlight some examples of it in the lives of displaced Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia. In doing so, I hope to show why discussions about immigration injustice must include identifying and confronting epistemic wrongs.

“All Are Deserving”: Racialized Conditions of Immigrant Deservingness in a Catholic Worker Movement-Inspired Non-Governmental Organization

Although deservingness considerations are commonly antithetical to the aims of pro-immigrant spaces like Justicia y Paz (JyP), a volunteer-run, Catholic Worker Movement-inspired non-governmental organization in Houston, Texas, they nevertheless materialize. This study explores how and why this happens. Drawing on an inductive analysis of 11 months of ethnographic observation and 36 in-depth interviews with volunteers and migrants at JyP, I argue that in “all are deserving” contexts, pro-immigrant advocates can engage in racialization and perpetuate white supremacy. I find that not all are treated as deserving—that deservingness is conditional on migrants submitting to two racially subordinate positions: (1) workers whose labor benefits the material interests of the white suburban elite and (2) indigent subjects whose impoverishment serves as the basis of spiritual salvation for a predominately white base of volunteers aiming to “serve the poor.” This research underscores the limitations of the Catholic Worker Movement-inspired “all are deserving” framework and affords similar pro-immigrant organizations practical insight toward ways to manifest immigrant justice.

Linguistic justice for immigrants

AbstractShould speakers of immigrant languages have fewer language rights than members of long‐settled nations? In this article, I argue that the interests of immigrant and native groups are normatively equally recognition‐worthy. Any legitimate differential recognition must follow from the different interests immigrants have in language. I distinguish three categories of immigrants: strictly temporary immigrants, immigrants that have become or are to be citizens and linguistically very wealthy immigrants. The purpose of distinguishing these types is to get a better grasp on the needs and interests of immigrants, by creating sub‐profiles. I argue that the first group is entitled to minimal language recognition. The second group, I argue, should be granted equal consideration of their languageinterests, but that does not necessarily mean equallanguagerecognition. The third group—linguistically very wealthy immigrants such as English‐speaking immigrants—typically outrivals the local population in terms of the fulfilment of their language identity interests. Their language interests warrant the need of integration into the national language(s), not the need for equal language recognition.

Why Cost/Benefit Balancing Tests Don't Exist: How to Dispel A Delusion that Delays Justice for Immigrants

Why Cost/Benefit Balancing Tests Don't Exist: How to Dispel A Delusion that Delays Justice for Immigrants

The Church Is Essential: COVID-19 and the Hyperlocal Politics of Mutual Aid in Black and Latina/o Churches

This article explores the work of Latina/o and African American churches in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston as they serve their communities and, in the midst of a pandemic, are fundamentally reimaging the relationship between religion and society in hyperlocal sites. A focus on neighborhood churches provides a particularly clear view of how mutual aid is practiced and informed by a relational and horizontal orientation as much as it is rooted in a social ethic with strict expectations around charity. Churches are often criticized for their vertical and heavenly focus, but for many churches, the pandemic radically changed that orientation, prompting them to redirect their efforts toward supporting the spiritual and physical wellbeing of their Black and Brown parishioners and other community members. As churches became sites for food distribution, transformed their sanctuaries into classrooms, and joined Black Lives Matter protests, they renewed their commitment to a radical religious tradition grounded in concerns around economic, racial, and immigrant justice.

Low-Skilled Migrants and the Historical Reproduction of Immigration Injustice.

Low-skilled migrants in wealthy receiving states are routinely subordinated across a range of social contexts. There is a rich philosophical literature on the inferiorizing effects of “crimmigration”—that is, the growing criminalization of unauthorized migrants and the state’s use of uniquely harsh law enforcement methods against them. Yet there is less interest in the existing racialized division of migrant labor. Low-skilled Latino/a/x migrants disproportionately perform “dirty” and “difficult” work that citizens do not wish to perform. Theoretically, this division of labor is compatible with a more permissive immigration system that legally admitted far larger numbers of low-skilled migrants to continue “doing the dirty work.” Indeed, many have assumed the desirability of such a system. Against this, I argue that “crimmigration” and the racialized division of migrant labor cannot be conceptually disentangled. Rather, they are mutually constitutive in reproducing background conditions that constrain the social equality of low-skilled migrants, as well as others perceived to be such. “Crimmigration” has not only excluded migrants, but enabled states to include them on socially unequal terms: as an instrumental and fungible source of cheap labor. Drawing on Alasia Nuti’s (2019) valuable observation that “banal” historical mechanisms like stereotypes and social scripts can play a crucial role in maintaining present-day injustice, I show that stereotypes of migrants as workers in low-skilled occupations, as well as the expectation that they continue to take on those jobs, also profoundly undermine immigration justice.

“I’ve never cried with a stranger before”: a pedagogy of discomfort, emotion and hope for immigrant justice

While anti-immigrant policy and practices have a long history in the United States, many students are unfamiliar with the historical or current immigration crises. This study explores the challenges of teaching a graduate seminar about immigration and education at a predominantly white university. Five graduate students and their instructor share their reflections from a post-course survey and field notes related to the course’s ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ and experiential learning. The class was moved emotionally, interrupting previous beliefs and shifting attitudes. However, the course fell short of exploring one’s own positionality fully, resulting in unfinished learning about how Whiteness upholds the status quo. The authors argue for a neo-abolitionist pedagogy, one that creates a ‘third space’ to process emotional responses and discuss social positionalities to prevent unproductive feelings of guilt or pity that function to further otherize immigrants.

Why are Muslim Bans Wrong? Diagnosing Discriminatory Immigration Policies with Brock’s Human Rights Framework

In the course of presenting a compelling and comprehensive framework for immigration justice, Brock (2020) addresses discriminatory immigration policies, focusing on recent attempts by the Trump administration to exclude Muslims from the U.S. (the ‘Muslim ban’). This essay critically assesses Brock’s treatment of the issue, and in particular the question of what made the Muslim ban and similar policies unjust. Through examining these issues, further questions regarding the immigration justice framework on offer arise.

Immigration status and policing in Canada: current problems, activist strategies and abolitionist visions

ABSTRACT Bridging prison and immigration justice is of utmost importance, and an obvious and strategic point of encounter for dialogue among activists and scholars working on these issues is immigration detention. But as penal and carceral abolitionists have taught us, we cannot tackle prison injustice without addressing broader issues in policing, criminal law and other means of coercive social control. Taking my cues from this work, I suggest that we move upstream and look at the role of immigration policing in detention and deportation. The article draws from records obtained mostly through Access to Information (ATI) and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to map out collaboration between the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and municipal police forces in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. In looking for ways to limit police involvement in internal border control, the article discusses strategies to promote a culture of non-collaboration with immigration enforcement and build alternative means of ensuring community safety and well-being in the spirit of police and border abolitionism.

Love in Precarious Times: A Queer Politics of Immigration

Increased media coverage of the human costs of border enforcement, especially the detention of children and the separation of families, has called attention to structural violence and inhumanity in the US immigration system. An estimated eleven million undocumented people and millions more members of mixed-status families have lived for years with the trauma caused by legal exclusion, economic precarity, and separation from loved ones. Yet years of legislative reform efforts and rights claims based on heteronormative notions of immigrant respectability, family unity, and economic contributions have failed to yield better policies. This article describes a turn within the immigrant rights movement in the 2010s toward a more transformative politics of radical inclusion across, not in spite of, differences in sexuality, gender, race, citizenship, and immigration status. Citing examples from immigrant public testimonies, movement publications, LISTSERVs, and social media, we argue that they offer evidence of new, durable bonds of political interdependence being forged between unusual allies in the struggle against racist and homo/transphobic state violence that we describe as a queer politics. The gains of the marriage equality movement, especially shifting cultural acceptance of same-sex love, support immigrant organizing across and beyond the constraints of strategic alliances, coalitions, and hierarchies of deservingness. Practices of loving politics, particularly in the current context, offer resources for hope for a stronger and more durable political consensus about what constitutes immigrant justice in the future.

Community-Engaged Learning for Immigration Justice: Building Solidarity through Praxis

This article argues for the use of community-engaged learning to teach about migration in anthropology. Using community-engaged learning centers justice-based praxis and builds solidarity by working to dismantle the unjust structures creating migration crises and inhumane conditions for migrants. We analyze our partnership between an anthropologist, a leader of a non-profit organization providing affordable legal services to local migrants, and a collaborating student as a case study. The design of our partnership, the construction of the migration seminars Bennett teaches, and an emphasis on justice-oriented outcomes for both the students and the community center our anti-racist, anti-classist approach to building solidary. We argue that community-engaged learning address anthropology’s (re)current crises around our colonial legacies not only epistemologically and methodologically but also pedagogically.

Territorial Presence As A Ground For Claims: Some Reflections

"Territorial Presence As A Ground For Claims: Some Reflections" returns to political theory to assess the moral and legal position of those individuals who are inside the territory of liberal democratic states, but whose very presence has been unauthorised by the state. The author asks the question as to what their bodily presence means and does from a political perspective. The paper is part of a broader political phenomenology of territoriality in liberal national thought and puts emphasis on the idea that it is migrants’ bodily presence within the state’s territory that lies at the analytical heart of the conversation about irregular immigrants. What is paradoxical about territorial presence of unauthorised migrants is that such presence is simultaneously (1) the source of the offence states invoke as a justification for making them ‘illegal’; (2) the basis for protections the migrants may claim against the state for basic fair treatment while present; and (3) the ground for claims they make (or are made on their behalf) to remain present – i.e., to stay in the territory. Territorial presence is thus a fertile ground for the analysis of arbitrary law-making in migration. The author sets out to analyse some recent legal developments pertaining to the governance of irregular non-citizen immigrants in the United States. These developments bear on the project of theorising "immigrant justice" as resistance to the growing illiberalization of migration policy. In her view, the very existence of a class of people designated as irregular migrants within state polities presupposes that such polities maintain formal exclusionary border regimes and that in such regimes, some persons are predesignated as ineligible for entry. And even though those exclusion rules do not function to fully preclude entry and presence of such persons, states do not treat their arrival as an automatic basis for full membership either. Hence, irregular immigrants are territorially present in a state that purports to eschew that presence. The author then explores how the idea of “sanctuary” relates to the kinds of claims that both liberal humanitarians and immigrant justice advocates have been making over the last few years. These are claims which ground protection in what exponents cite as the overriding ethical significance of immigrants’ territorial presence – their already-hereness – as the basis for recognition and rights. In particular, the author makes the case that even though "sanctuary" provides a logic of safe harbour, it fails to end the predicament of constitutive based in border exclusionism. For her, the political, social, but also philosophical, struggle for the idea of border abolitionism requires a figurative sword that must go beyond sanctuary so that borders are not just mitigated, but radically deconstructed and even destroyed. The author takes this to be the vital imperative that confronts all legal and political theorists who must engage the normative challenge of rethinking arbitrary law-making in view of the new inequalities that a global political order grounded on sovereign borders produces.

Faith in Action, Adult Learning, and Immigrant Justice

This article emerges from a collaborative research project between a religious studies professor at DePaul University and the executive director of the Chicago-based non-profit Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants (ICDI). In 2016, we forged a community partnership to explore and enhance the relationship between pedagogy, faith, and social justice. In this article, we share the results of our research on how exposure to and involvement with the work of ICDI impacts students, staff, and volunteers. Our research reveals the powerful effect that a community-engaged partnership can have not only on adult learning but also on spiritual development. Our findings suggest that faith in action may take several forms, including encounter, accompaniment, advocacy, and social justice, and that those who engage the work of ICDI may engage them in different ways. These insights will be useful for institutions, both universities and community organizations alike, in enhancing adult learning and spiritual growth.

Back to the Root? Immigrant Farmers, Ethnographic Romanticism, and Untangling Food Sovereignty in Western Oregon

AbstractImmigrants—especially those from farmworker or campesino backgrounds—have gained attention as promising recruits for a new generation of sustainable farmers. Nonprofits promoting this aspirational vision of food justice link sustainability to empowered workers and communities of color, and to the preservation or revival of (agri)cultural traditions. I present findings from ongoing research showing that Oregon nonprofit food sovereignty initiatives training Mexican immigrant farmers have achieved successes as cultural, community building, and educational programs, but have struggled to produce viable farm businesses. I contrast these farmers with the less ecologically oriented and less self‐consciously “cultural” immigrant farmers who work without organizational support in the same region, and who find an aspirational agrarian good life in more conventional agricultural practices. I argue that activist and academic formulations of food sovereignty linking peasant heritage, sustainability, labor rights, and immigration justice may lead scholars to overstate immigrant farmers' actual propensity for "alternative" agriculture and ignore those immigrant farmers who fail to conform to this ideal.

Psychological and Structural Barriers to Immigrant Community Participation: The Experience of Peruvians in Santiago de Chile.

Community participation can be considered a pillar for the promotion of social justice and well-being for immigrants in new countries. Participation may be influenced by different forms of oppression which decrease opportunities for immigrants to be engaged. The present study explores the difficulties that Peruvian immigrants encountered and still encountering to participate in Santiago de Chile through in-depth qualitative interviews. Eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with Peruvian leaders of Ethnic Community Based Organizations (ECBOs) in Santiago de Chile. Interviews focused on the community engagement of Peruvians highlighting the difficulties they encountered when deciding whether to engage and throughout the process of carrying out their commitment, along with their perceptions when trying to engage their compatriots. The present study contributes to the literature in three aspects. First, it focused on the phenomenon of South-South migration. Secondly, it delved into the psychological and structural barriers that immigrants' experience, considering their disadvantaged conditions. Thirdly, it used Situational Analysis, along with the constructionist drift of Grounded Theory, which is widely used in critical, qualitative research, and is sensitive to producing situated knowledge. Coding and mapping analysis identified experiences related to historical trauma, transnational bonds, and dominant master narratives in both countries as well as challenges due to balancing time and priorities, surviving institutional deterrents, and inter-organizations competitiveness. Finally, transnational commitments, mechanisms of social disconnection, and under valuated rights that Peruvians may live in Chile were pointed out. These results intend to have practical implications for immigrants and for community psychologists.

Refugees’ Dreams of the Past, Projected into the Future

Refugees’ Dreams of the Past, Projected into the Future

Author Biographies

Author Biographies