Immigration System Research Articles

“We Can’t Be Too Selective about This”: Immigration Advocacy in the Canadian English-Language Press, 1949–57

Immigration policy during the immediate years after the Second World War highly restricted the arrival of newcomers. Before 1947, Canada’s immigration system was a preferential one, with the highest priority given to British subjects coming to Canada from the United Kingdom, or from any of the British dominions, and the United States. Canada’s preferences then extended to Northern Europeans, then to Central and Southern Europeans. Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish immigrants were excluded. During the years of Prime Minister Louis St-Laurent (1948–57), Canadians read about the economic benefits that a robust immigration policy promised in the English-language press. The St-Laurent government was under significant pressure to increase the flow of migrants into Canada. However, the Liberal government studiously monitored recent arrivals with a conservative approach to economic growth. The Canadian business community perceived this policy as too cautious, and their preference for a more robust policy frequently surfaced in the English-language press. This article shows that newspapers coverage across the country criticized the government’s immigration policy during the 1950s and advocated for an approach that accommodated more newcomers to spur population and economic growth. Through their coverage, the editors and journalists reasoned that boosting immigration accelerated the Canadian economy. English Canadian journalists and newspapers attempted to influence Canadians about the economic benefits of increasing migration to Canada.

Becoming Queer in Canada

The ongoing global refugee crisis has been, and continues to be, one of the most pressing humanitarian issues facing the world today. The global trends of destabilization, conflict, and persecution that have been fueling this crisis show no signs of stopping. Clearly, the issues that must be considered are too numerous to cover exhaustively in a single paper. Refugee and migration studies is a vast and complex topic with many specializations and subfields. Thus, for the sake of feasibility and actually generating meaningful information, it seems necessary to focus specifically on both a category of asylum seekers and a country to which they are applying. By doing so, the goal of this paper will be to participate in a more nuanced, and therefore more personal, exploration of a specific set of issues within a specific refugee intake apparatus that may then potentially be used to explore how current immigration systems may be improved. Therefore, this paper shall focus specifically on the experience of SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) asylum seekers, perhaps more commonly known outside of legal documents as LGBTQ+, as they navigate the Canadian refugee intake apparatus.

Is there any merit to the merit‐based immigration system? What Sub‐Saharan African immigrant labor and housing market outcomes tell us about U.S. economic and immigration systems

AbstractFor decades, U.S. immigration policy debates have centered on creating a merit‐based system limiting entry to high‐skilled immigrants. Yet the emphasis on merit‐based immigration ignores the fact that high‐skilled immigrants already enter the United States in merit‐based immigration assume high‐skilled immigrants benefit the U.S. economy because they are better able than low‐skilled immigrants to translate skills into economic success. Using Sub‐Saharan (Black) African immigrants' labor and housing market outcomes, I show that meritocracy only partially explains U.S. labor and housing outcomes, leaving a merit‐based system unlikely to address America's economic needs. The majority of immigrants to the U.S. are non‐White, and racial discrimination in the labor market results in occupational and wage disadvantages in the U.S. Due to the public charge rule, high skilled immigrants may be less likely to get their visas renewed or green card applications approved because of these labor market disadvantages. Without stable visa status, high‐skilled immigrants will be less likely to make long‐term economic investments in the United States—an important way of contributing to the U.S. economy. Together, research indicates that U.S. immigration reform will not work without first enacting policy addressing racial disparities in economic systems.

Associations between memory loss and trauma in US asylum seekers: A retrospective review of medico-legal affidavits.

BackgroundThe U.S. immigration system mandates that persons seeking asylum prove their persecution claim is credible and their fear of returning home is well-founded. However, this population represents a highly trauma-exposed group, with neuropsychiatric symptoms consequent to prior torture or maltreatment that may interfere with cognitive function and their ability to recall their trauma. These memory lapses may be incorrectly perceived by asylum adjudicators as indicators of dishonesty and jeopardize the person’s credibility and asylum claim. Our retrospective mixed methods study seeks to present associations between trauma and memory loss in a sample of persons seeking asylum to the U.S. and describe how memory impairments manifest in this trauma-exposed population.MethodsWe randomly selected 200 medico-legal affidavits from 1346 affidavits collected in the past 30 years, as part of the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network connecting clinicians with legal providers for medical and/or psychiatric affidavits of U.S. asylum seekers and persons seeking other forms of humanitarian relief (hereafter, “asylum seekers”). Data was extracted from these affidavits using a coding manual informed by the Istanbul Protocol, the global standard for torture documentation. Seven affidavits were excluded due to missing age. We used multiple logistic regression to assess the association of memory loss with neuropsychiatric diagnoses: head trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and depression. We supplemented these findings with a qualitative content analysis of the affidavits documenting memory loss. Memory loss presented among the asylum seekers’ affidavits in several ways: memory gaps of the traumatic event; challenges with presenting a clear chronology of the trauma, avoidance of traumatic memories, and persistent short-term memory loss interfering with daily activity.ResultsA majority of the sample received a neuropsychiatric diagnosis: 69% (n = 132) of asylum-seekers received a diagnosis of PTSD and 55% (n = 106) of depression. Head trauma was reported among 30% (n = 58) of affidavits. Further, 68% (n = 131) reported being subject to physical violence and 20% (n = 39) were documented as being at risk of suicide. Memory loss was documented among 21% (n = 40) asylum-seekers. In adjusted models, both PTSD and depression, but not head trauma, were associated with memory loss (p<0.05).ConclusionStakeholders in the asylum process, spanning the medical, legal and immigration enforcement sectors, must be aware of the interplay of trauma and memory loss and how they might impact immigration proceedings for this vulnerable population.

Erasing violence: lesbian women asylum applicants in the United States

Despite growing recognition of sexual orientation- and gender identity-based violence, scholars continue to identify barriers for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals seeking asylum protection. Lesbian women asylum applicants, in particular, encounter a system that is unsure how to classify their cases and that generally questions the credibility of women’s experiences. In this way, lesbian women applicants are among the most vulnerable populations of asylum claimants, particularly in the U.S. context. In this research note, I examine U.S. appellate level Circuit Court cases initiated by lesbian women asylum applicants. I expand existing literature to include an examination of how the violence faced by lesbian women is interpreted and ultimately erased as Circuit Courts grapple with legal interpretations of persecution. Specifically, I find three mechanisms of erasure: ruling that the violence experienced was unextreme, finding that the applicants’ accounts of violence were unsubstantiated, or arguing that the violence experienced was unrelated to the applicants’ sexual orientation. When placed in historical context, these patterns are troubling. Unlike previous decades that have witnessed overt homophobia, racism, and ethnocentrism in the immigration system, these cases indicate a more subtle form of exclusion—finding technicalities in case law and formal legal definitions as grounds for denial.

Chronic health conditions, healthcare experience and life satisfaction among immigrant and native-born women in Canada

PurposeTo compare chronic health status, utilization of healthcare services and life satisfaction among immigrant women and their Canadian counterparts.Design/methodology/approachA secondary analysis of national data from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), 2015–2016 was conducted. The survey data included 109,659 cases. Given the research question, only female cases were selected, which resulted in a final sample of 52,560 cases. Data analysis was conducted using multiple methods, including logistic regression and linear regression.FindingsRecent and established immigrant women were healthier than native-born Canadian women. While the Healthy Immigrant Effect (HIE) was evident among immigrant women, some characteristics related to ethnic origin and/or unhealthy dietary habits may deteriorate immigrant women's health in the long term. Immigrant women and non-immigrant women with chronic illnesses were both more likely to increase their use of the healthcare system. Notably, the present study did not find evidence that immigrant women under-utilized Canada's healthcare system. However, the findings showed that chronic health issues were more likely to decrease women's life satisfaction.Originality/valueThis analysis contributes to the understanding of immigrant women's acculturation by comparing types of chronic illnesses, healthcare visits, and life satisfaction between immigrant women and their Canadian counterparts.

Immigration and crime in frictional labor markets

This paper studies the relationship between immigration and crime by applying the Engelhardt et al. (2008) crime model. Although the relationship between immigration and crime has been widely debated, there is no theoretical explanation that can define the impact of immigration on crime. This model constructs two channels through which immigrants affect the host country's crime rate: composition (direct) channel and labor market (indirect) channel. These two channels provide explanations for the ambiguity of immigration effects on crime rates. An extension of the model with skill bias and imperfect substitution between skilled and unskilled labor has more sophisticated numerical results based on the United States (U.S.) labor market and immigration. A more generous unemployment insurance system for immigrants increases both the unemployment and crime rates. An extended period of incarceration and a deportation policy reduce crime rates but have no significant impact on labor market outcomes.

Tried and (Inherently) Prejudiced: Disposing of the Prejudice Requirement for Lack of Counsel in Removal Proceedings

Every year, hundreds of thousands of immigrants appear before the immigration courts in removal proceedings. Removal proceedings have long been scrutinized when it comes to ensuring immigrants who go through the immigration courts are afforded their rights—with good reason. Over the past few years, the immigration courts have been facing an existential crisis and have been dysfunctional, compromising the effectiveness of the court system. As a result, immigration judges often prioritize efficiency over ensuring noncitizens are afforded their rights and afforded a meaningful day in court. Among these rights this process has jeopardized includes the statutory right to counsel. Although noncitizens have a statutory right to counsel in immigration courts, the government has no obligation to provide an attorney to those who cannot afford one. The problem is that immigration judges are denying the statutory right to counsel in removal proceedings; therefore, the noncitizens are appearing before immigration judges without a crucial procedural safeguard. Noncitizens who have counsel are more likely to seek relief from removal and actually win their case; therefore, it is important to recognize the distinctiveness of this right. The current system is inadequate and fails to give these noncitizens a fair and meaningful hearing. As a result, the federal circuit courts are split as to whether the courts should require a noncitizen to show that they were prejudiced by lack of counsel in removal proceedings. This Comment argues that the federal circuit courts should not require prejudice when the immigrant has been denied their right to counsel because, under the Accardi Doctrine, an agency must abide by its own regulations when those regulations pertain to a party’s rights. The consequences of removal are similar in severity to those in criminal law; therefore, it needs to be ensured that immigrants have the right to counsel if they have not expressly waived it in order to effectuate a meaningful hearing. Not only are the consequences of removal severe, but immigration system is already inherently prejudicial to the immigrant such that proving prejudice would be a waste of resources. Immigration laws are complex and filled with subjective standards, the impartiality of the immigration courts has been questioned, and the immigration courts have become increasingly weaponized over the past few years. Therefore, the federal circuit courts should not require an immigrant to show that lack of counsel prejudiced their proceedings.

Skilled Labor Mobility and Firm Value: Evidence from Green Card Allocations

Abstract This paper studies how the labor market frictions of skilled workers affect corporate valuation. The analysis features immigrant workers’ mobility constraints imposed by the U.S. green card application process and exploits exogenous variations caused by imperfections in the current immigration system. The study finds that relaxing mobility constraints negatively influences firm value. This effect is stronger for firms with higher labor adjustment costs. Reductions in investments and increases in labor costs are channels through which labor mobility adversely affects firm value. The findings suggest that monopoly rent over skilled workers is an important economic determinant of corporate valuation.

Review of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century by A. Naomi Paik (University of California Press)

A. Naomi Paik’s Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary responds to a trio of executive orders on immigration policy issued in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. Those orders sought to make good on campaign promises to further restrict immigration by banning citizens from Muslim-majority countries, allocating funds to expand a border wall between the US and Mexico, and ramping up home and workplace deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Paik delineates how these legal barriers came to be by locating them in relation to the nation’s formative immigration policies, backlash to the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the global repercussions of neoliberalism. Highlighting the work of Indigenous activists, Paik eventually calls not only for the dramatic restructuring of the nation’s immigration system but also for the creation of a more just society based on relationships that reject the politics of inclusion and exclusion.

Decentering methodological nationalism to survey precarious legal status trajectories

ABSTRACT We examine how the politics of knowledge production limit research on the relationship between immigration status and social inequality. We centre the practices of methodological nationalism in Canada, a traditional country of permanent immigration in which temporary migration has become a core feature of the immigration system. In this case, state classification and counting of populations, and the careful curation of data on nominally permanent and temporary migrants limits research on immigration status. We also document the research design process and survey instrument we developed to work towards methodological autonomy from the state categorization of people on the move. The research design included community consultations, democratization of the research process, and a commitment to experiential knowledge. The resulting survey offers a parsimonious instrument to study complex and indeterminate precarious legal status trajectories and their relationship to social inequality.

Quotidian Policies: How Trump’s Unseen Immigration Rules Have Wreaked Havoc and How to Fix Them

Throughout the Trump presidency, immigration “horror stories” have riveted Americans and people across the globe. Over the past four years, splashy headlines highlighted the United States government’s dehumanization and penalization of immigrants, from travel bans to family separation to the Wall. These stories not only captured public attention, but also masked less sensational but unjust executive rules that allowed the Trump administration to overhaul the immigration landscape and maximize executive power without changing a single immigration statute. Unseen policies of expanded enforcement, partisan immigration court controls, strategic administrative precedents, and tightened regulations have all been part of the Trump administration’s complex web of practical and legal barriers for immigrants. This Article argues that President Trump and his administration have successfully exploited the power delegated to the executive branch in part by advancing policies that are out of the public view and which take delegated powers to unprecedented levels. Within the humanitarian, enforcement, and bureaucratic realms, the administration’s “unseen policies” impact the day-to-day lives of immigrants, transform the operation of our immigration system, and undermine the rule of law. The Article explores the detrimental impact of under-the-radar executive changes in these categories and offers broad solutions. Ultimately, to return to the rule of law and establish a humane immigration system, lawyers and policy makers of the Biden administration and beyond must identify and strategize around these quotidian, unseen policies as well as the well-known challenges.

Discrimination and Multiculturalism in Canada: Exceptional or Incoherent Public Attitudes?

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that satisfaction with multiculturalism and support for discrimination in the immigration system are conceptually linked but distinct in the Canadian public’s mind. Following a large literature, I make the case that despite a normative assumption of nondiscrimination in the intellectual framework and policy rhetoric of multiculturalism, the public can support discrimination while also supporting multiculturalism. To support this, I present the results of a 2017 survey of Canadians. I show that slightly less than half of respondents are willing to explicitly support discrimination. Next, I show that, when faced with a more complex decision that offers the chance to discriminate, many do so. Finally, I compare experimental results to a nearly identical experiment in the United States, which reveals that Canadian and American respondents discriminate at similar rates.

Supporting Canada’s COVID-19 resilience and recovery through robust immigration policy and programs

Canada has been seen globally as a leader in immigration and integration policies and programs and as an attractive and welcoming country for immigrants, refugees, temporary foreign workers, and international students. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed some of the strengths of Canada’s immigration system, as well as some of the fault lines that have been developing over the last few years. In this article we provide an overview of Canada’s immigration system prior to the pandemic, discuss the system’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities revealed by the pandemic, and explore a post-COVID-19 immigration vision. Over the next three years, the Government of Canada intends to bring over 1.2 million new permanent residents to Canada. In addition, Canada will continue to accept many international students, refugee claimants, and temporary foreign workers for temporary residence here. The importance of immigration for Canada will continue to grow and be an integral component of the country’s post-COVID-19 recovery. To succeed, it is essential to take stock, to re-evaluate Canada’s immigration and integration policies and programs, and to expand Canada’s global leadership in this area. The authors offer insights and over 80 recommendations to reinvigorate and optimize Canada’s immigration program over the next decade and beyond.

A Lineage of Family Separation

Family separation is a practice rooted in U.S. history. In order to comprehensively examine the most recent execution of separating children from their parents under the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, one must follow and understand this history. That is what this Article does. Examining the separation histories of enslaved, Indigenous, and immigrant families, it offers critical context of a reoccurring practice that has had devastating effects largely on communities of color, and across generations. By contextualizing the separation of migrant families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under zero tolerance, this Article identifies narratives from colonial times to the present that consistently rely on racism, xenophobia, and paternalism to justify a practice that otherwise is extreme in its inhumanity. These justification narratives are juxtaposed with counter-stories that resist and challenge the separation of families, including by humanizing those impacted and articulating the profound harm it causes to children, parents, and communities. These stories have been told through first-hand narratives, Congressional testimonies, research studies, media reports, and facts and allegations in lawsuits. Narratives describing the harm caused by separating families are a powerful element of putting the practices to an end. The historical record suggests that these narratives have typically gained potency in specific socio-political contexts that rendered them compelling enough to overcome the justifications for specific family separation policies. Although these practices were brought to an end, systemic reform has been elusive. In the case of Indigenous family separation, legislation enacted to cease the practice failed to bring about substantial change, and has been diluted by persistent legal challenges. Historical family separation practices against enslaved and immigrant families have been replaced with systems that separate families for prolonged times or permanently. These include the present-day U.S. criminal legal and immigration systems, where the government separates children from their parents on a substantial scale as a collateral consequence of mass incarceration and widespread detention and deportation, with little to no scrutiny. The outrage that ended zero tolerance has not extended to these ongoing examples of family separation. In order to meaningfully address these practices, counter-stories urging the valuation of family integrity must be aligned with a societal will to challenge systems that, through racialized justifications, continue to separate mostly marginalized children from their parents.

The Call for the Progressive Prosecutor to End the Deportation Pipeline

“Progressive prosecutors” seek to redefine the role of the prosecutor and question the purpose of the criminal legal system, ushering in the need to reexamine the scope and substance of their duties toward all, but particularly immigrant defendants, seeing as they suffer outsized punishment for most criminal offenses. Ten years ago, Padilla v. Kentucky broke ground in finally recognizing that defense counsel is constitutionally obligated to advise immigrants of the clear risks of deportation associated with a plea. Nevertheless, immigrants ensnared in the criminal legal system have since faced deportation at ever-increasing rates. Given the entwinement of immigration and criminal law, organizers and scholars have recognized that local prosecutors serve as gatekeepers to the federal criminal removal system. Yet, prosecutors around the country wildly differ in their treatment of immigrant defendants, at times ignoring or misusing this gatekeeping role. In the last decade, new prosecutorial goals — ensuring fairness and equity, promoting community integrity, tackling disproportionate treatment of Black and brown communities in policing and incarceration, addressing root causes of crime — have gained increasing popularity, by some. Decriminalization and decarceration have been tools utilized to meet these goals. The specific goals strived for by self-described progressive prosecutors require an examination of their treatment of non-citizens given the prosecutor’s outsized role in determining immigration consequences and application of an immigrant’s rights lens to current practices. Their policies toward immigrant defendants to date have been tepid and at times, harmful. Yet, careful study reveals “progressive prosecutors” have expansive obligations to immigrant defendants — rooted in the progressive prosecution movement’s own rhetoric about the appropriate role of the prosecutor and the underlying purposes of the criminal legal system, prosecutorial ethical and professional standards, and Supreme Court jurisprudence. The progressive prosecutor’s duty is simple — to utilize their powers to avoid the double punishment of criminal sentence and deportation. This means ensuring that policy choices that purport to support communities of color and poor communities do not neglect immigrant defendants, thereby creating disproportionate consequences for this population. Due to the immigration consequences that might flow from any contact with the criminal legal system, progressive prosecutors need not only look at their role in plea negotiations, but beyond. A progressive prosecutor’s work then is to first, understand her role as gatekeeper to the federal deportation machine and second, act to stop feeding it. This Article proposes a series of guidelines and policy recommendations prosecutors can institute toward these ends, including institutional changes as well as the adoption of specific practices that consider immigration consequences at all stages of criminal proceedings – arrest, conviction, sentencing and beyond. This might include the creation of an immigrant integrity unit to audit and revamp all areas of practice to establish policies like the expanded use of declination, the encouragement of pre-arrest diversion and a prohibition on information sharing with ICE. “Progressive federalism” suggests that by taking these kinds of actions, progressive prosecutors will move closer to securing proportionate outcomes for immigrants in the criminal legal system. While federal immigration reform remains stymied, adoption of a robust immigration agenda by the local prosecutor will simultaneously begin to disentangle the criminal and immigration systems and influence immigration enforcement policy on a national level.

Racial surveillance and the mental health impacts of electronic monitoring on migrants

Since the late 1990s, the government has used outsourced electronic monitoring (also known as tagging) in England and Wales for criminal sentencing and punishment. Under the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants) Act 2004, s36, the use of this technology extended to immigration controls, and individuals deemed as ‘high risk’ of harm, reoffending or absconding can be fitted with an ankle device and subjected to curfew. The tagging of migrants is not authorised by the criminal court and therefore not considered a punitive sanction. It is managed by the immigration system and treated as an administrative matter. Nevertheless, people who are tagged experience it as imprisonment and punishment. Drawing on data from an eighteen-month ethnographic research project, this article examines the impact of electronic monitoring on people seeking asylum, who completed their sentences for immigration offences. It uncovers the psychological effects and mental health impacts of such technologies of control. The article sheds light on how tagging is experienced by racialised minorities, and adds to the literature on migration, surveillance studies, state racism and violence.

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.

Menstrual Justice in Immigration Detention

The menstrual injustices experienced by noncitizens detained in immigration facilities–a particularly vulnerable subset of menstruators in carceral spaces–are largely ignored. Menstruating detainees are forced to rely on the immigration system to provide adequate access to menstrual products, and on detention facilities to engage in safe menstrual management and corresponding dignity. Unfortunately, the immigration system fails many detainees, and the defining characteristics of immigration detention—lack of access to counsel and the significant geographic and social isolation that people in custody face—exacerbate the problem. Despite these isolating factors, detainees are finding ways to share their struggles with menstrual injustices. This essay aims to categorize, amplify, and contextualize these experiences, and the need for thoughtful reform.

Pharmacists added to government's list of occupations facing national shortage

Pharmacists have been added to the Home Office’s shortage occupation list, following a recommendation from the department’s Migration Advisory Committee. The inclusion of pharmacists in the shortage occupation list from 4 March 2021 makes it easier for staff from abroad to successfully apply for a skilled worker visa through the UK’s immigration system. This comes […]