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September 29, 2021

IMMIGRATION, REFUGEE & CITIZENSHIP LAW eJOURNAL Vol. 22, No. 51

Edited by Kevin R. Johnson

Table of Contents

"Ruse and Rhetoric as the Populist’s Xenophobic Ploy"

-Ediberto Roman, Florida International University (FIU) - College of Law
-Ernesto Sagás

"Re-examining the Philosophical Underpinnings of the Melting Pot vs. Multiculturalism in the Current Immigration Debate in the United States"

-Daniel Woldeab, Metropolitan State University
-Robert M. Yawson, Quinnipiac University
-Irina Woldeab, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

"The Effects of Bilateral Labor Agreements: Evidence from the Philippines"

-Adam Chilton, University of Chicago - Law School
-Bartosz Woda, University of Chicago - Law School

"Constitutional Validity of Assam Accord in Accordance with the Validity of Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019"

-Jayanta Boruah, North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU)

"The Call for the Progressive Prosecutor to End the Deportation Pipeline"

-Talia Peleg, City University of New York School of Law

"The End of Entry Fiction"

-Eunice Lee, University of Arizona - James E. Rogers College of Law

"Refouling Rohingyas: The Supreme Court of India's uneasy engagement with international law"

-Malcolm Katrak, Jindal Global Law School
-Shardool Kulkarni, Bombay High Court

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"Ruse and Rhetoric as the Populist’s Xenophobic Ploy" 
Florida International University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 21-12

EDIBERTO ROMAN, Florida International University (FIU) - College of Law
Email: romane@fiu.edu
ERNESTO SAGÁS
Email: Ernesto.Sagas@colostate.edu

Rhetoric can be a tool that builds strong communities and great empires, but it can also be weaponized in order to isolate, disenfranchise, and oppress. A thorough examination of rhetoric and its impacts in the United States introduces a unique reflection on the legacy of former President's Trump’s dialogue with a large segment of the American people and its connection to a broader fear of “the other” within the global community. The verbal onslaught indirectly and other times directly, expressed those immigrants as not of the same as the domestic-citizen “ingroup.” Consequently, we have borne witness to some of the most nonsensical attempts at immigration reform disguising the purest form of xenophobia. Unfortunately, the United States was not the lone place where rhetoric towards these outsiders fueled aggressive nationalistic response to a perceived threat. A five-country case study of the Americas highlights a critical consequence of these anti-immigrant attitudes and resulting policies. Specifically, the use of rhetoric in this fashion created an invaluable political pressure relief for conservative populist leaders: promoting a belief in the masses of a dedicated nationalist hero focused on ending the immigrant threat, but in reality only creating the figurative and not literal deportation of an indispensable labor force that are immigrants in these lands.

"Re-examining the Philosophical Underpinnings of the Melting Pot vs. Multiculturalism in the Current Immigration Debate in the United States" 
In: Harnessing Analytics for Enhancing Healthcare & Business. Proceedings of the 50th Northeast Decision Sciences Institute (NEDSI) Annual Meeting, Pgs. 264 - 285. Virtual Conference, March 26-27, 2021. DOI:10.31124/advance.14749101.v1

DANIEL WOLDEAB, Metropolitan State University
Email: daniel.woldeab@metrostate.edu
ROBERT M. YAWSON, Quinnipiac University
Email: robert.yawson@quinnipiac.edu
IRINA WOLDEAB, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources
Email: imwoldeab@gmail.com

Immigration to the United States is certainly not a new phenomenon, and it is therefore natural for immigration, culture and identity to be given due attention by the public and policy makers. However, current discussion of immigration, legal and illegal, and the philosophical underpinnings is ‘lost in translation’, not necessarily on ideological lines, but on political orientation. In this paper we reexamine the philosophical underpinnings of the melting pot versus multiculturalism as antecedents and precedents of current immigration debate and how the core issues are lost in translation. We take a brief look at immigrants and the economy to situate the current immigration debate. We then discuss the two philosophical approaches to immigration and how the understanding of the philosophical foundations can help streamline the current immigration debate.

"The Effects of Bilateral Labor Agreements: Evidence from the Philippines" 

ADAM CHILTON, University of Chicago - Law School
Email: adamchilton@uchicago.edu
BARTOSZ WODA, University of Chicago - Law School
Email: woda@uchicago.edu

Facilitating legal and safe international labor migration is arguably the most promising way to promote economic development. Due to data limitations, however, little is known about whether one of the primary legal tools that developing countries use to promote international labor migration — a kind of treaty known as a Bilateral Labor Agreement (“BLA”) — actually affect the flow of workers or the terms of those workers’ employment. We explore the effect of BLAs using administrative data from one of the world’s most prolific promoters of labor migration and signers of BLAs: the Philippines. We find no evidence that signing BLAs has increased either the international migration of Filipino workers or the return of remittances to the Philippines. This suggests that the negotiation of new BLAs may only have modest effects on promoting labor migration or improving the terms of migrant workers’ employment.

"Constitutional Validity of Assam Accord in Accordance with the Validity of Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019" 
Forthcoming, International Journal of Legal Science and Innovation, Volume 3 Issue 3, 117-127, ISSN: 2581-9453

JAYANTA BORUAH, North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU)
Email: jayanta.boruah94@gmail.com

Assam has always been facing the issue of illegal immigration since time immemorial. And this issue has always created huge tensions in establishing the law and order situation in the State. There are several examples of brutal incidents that are related to this issue like- the Nellie massacre in 1985, the Bodo-Muslim Conflict in 2012, and recently the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 (CAA) where again five Assamese people had to sacrifice their lives. In such a situation analysis of the existing Citizenship laws and their relevancy with the Assam Accord, which was signed after the brutal Nellie Massacre, becomes important for understanding the extent of conformity between the objectives of these laws and the demands of the local people from such laws. This Article has therefore focused on the Constitutional validity of the Assam Accord and the CAA of 2019 along with the conflict between the two and the impact of such laws on the issue of the Assamese people where the conclusion highlights the lacunas in both the legal documents along with the question that we as citizens of a democratic country must think for.

"The Call for the Progressive Prosecutor to End the Deportation Pipeline" 
Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Forthcoming

TALIA PELEG, City University of New York School of Law
Email: talia.peleg@law.cuny.edu

“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.

"The End of Entry Fiction" 
North Carolina Law Review, Vol. 99, pp. 565-642, 2021

EUNICE LEE, University of Arizona - James E. Rogers College of Law
Email: eunicelee@arizona.edu

Although “entry fiction” emerged in immigration and constitutional law over a century ago, the doctrine has yet to account for present-day carceral and technological realities. Under entry fiction, “arriving” immigrants stopped at the border are deemed “unentered” and “not here” for constitutional due process purposes, even in detention centers deep within the United States. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) uses its sole discretion to detain tens of thousands of arriving asylum seekers in its facilities without a bond hearing. Despite significant modern changes in immigration statutes and due process jurisprudence, the Supreme Court recently suggested, but did not decide, that individuals subject to entry fiction may continue to lack constitutional due process protections against detention. Both courts and the government have invoked sovereign power as the doctrine’s justification, asserting that detention is necessary to effect exclusion (removal) of individuals and that entry fiction appropriately protects the government’s power to detain.

While many scholars over the decades have offered trenchant critiques of the doctrine, no recent treatment evaluates entry fiction as legal fiction. This Article fills that gap, tracing entry fiction’s origins in law and jurisprudence to consider its operation in the present-day context. I engage in a close rereading of Chinese Exclusion- and McCarthy-era cases to uncover functionalist and humanitarian underpinnings of entry fiction, including an intention to minimize hardship to immigrants. I then reevaluate entry fiction in the present day. In particular, this Article explores DHS’s indiscriminate use of immigration detention and its breathtaking expansion of surveillance technology. Today, DHS both operates a mass detention regime and engages in ever-increasing surveillance, including real-time tracking of immigrants that allows deportation without physical detention. These current realities decouple entry fiction from sovereign purpose—rendering detention unnecessary for the sovereign power of exclusion—and engender decidedly antihumanitarian practices. I conclude that courts must put entry fiction to rest as a vestige of the past and recognize the constitutional due process rights of all persons who are present and here in U.S. immigration detention centers.

"Refouling Rohingyas: The Supreme Court of India's uneasy engagement with international law" 
Journal of Liberty and International Affairs | Vol. 7, No. 2, 2021

MALCOLM KATRAK, Jindal Global Law School
Email: mkatrak@jgu.edu.in
SHARDOOL KULKARNI, Bombay High Court
Email: kulkarnishardool@yahoo.co.in

The complex relationship between international and municipal law has been the bone of significant scholarly contention. In the Indian context, despite a formal commitment to dualism, courts have effected an interpretive shift towards monism by espousing incorporation of international law. The case of Mohammad Salimullah v. Union of India, which involves the issue of deportation of Rohingya refugees from India, represents a challenge in this regard owing to the lack of clarity as to India’s obligations under the principle of non-refoulment. The paper uses the Supreme Court’s recent interim order in the said case as a case study to examine India’s engagement with international law. It argues that the order inadequately examines the role of international law in constitutional interpretation and has the unfortunate effect of ‘refouling’ Rohingyas by sending them back to a state where they face imminent persecution.