Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Jennifer J Lee

Titel

Immigration disobedience

Ist Teil von

• California law review, 2023-03, Vol.111 (1), p.71-126

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Nexis Uni

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The immigration system operates through the looming threat of the arrest, detention, and removal of immigrants from the US. Indiscriminate immigrant arrests result in family separation. Immigrants languish in carceral facilities for months or even years. For most undocumented immigrants, there is no available pathway to citizenship. To protest this injustice, undocumented immigrants, lawful immigrants, and native-born citizens defy the law by engaging in direct action, deportation resistance, or hunger strikes. This article examines how this phenomenon, which I call "immigration disobedience," has fundamentally altered the legal landscape for immigration reform. It begins with a description of immigration disobedience by drawing on hundreds of accounts over the past decade and provides context for the phenomenon within the history of disobedience to the immigration system. Next, it considers the ways in which immigration disobedience consists of a new approach to resistance within the movement for immigrant rights. Immigrants develop their capacities as noncitizen political agents and take on leadership for the movement. Activists create new spaces of contestation to be publicly viewed and heard. As a result, immigration disobedience has produced a more transformative agenda that aims to redefine citizenship, end detention, and abolish US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ultimately, this article explores how everyday people in social movements, who have a personal and sophisticated understanding of the law's dysfunction, can offer more creative and radical policy possibilities for legal reform. A decade of immigration disobedience has shifted the political demands from a focus on the legalization of immigrants to an overhaul of the existing immigration system. Rather than seek procedural improvements or benefits for "deserving" immigrants, today's agenda recognizes the need to reconfigure institutions that perpetuate racial and economic inequality. More specifically, immigration disobedience teaches us, as lawyers and legal scholars, about the need to look to activism outside the law to work, think, and act in service of social change.