Corpus Nullius: How Europe Recast the Migrant Body

Narratives of the migrant-refugee crisis reflect the interests they serve

After a record number of refugees arrived in Europe in 2015 following the Syrian collapse, Europe’s reaction provided the conditions for an even more fundamental change. As the fences went up at each boundary within a previously borderless Schengen Europe -- almost as an act of self-reproach following Angela Merkel’s acceptance ...
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Corpus Nullius: How Europe Recast the Migrant Body

The Fire This Time

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Two

Violence against African American people creates pain and outrage, but policy makers offer us few solutions. In this episode, we ask: how can the fight for racial justice be accelerated, even as racism remains as persistent today as it was before the modern Civil Rights movement? In the spirit of ...
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Border Crisis?

How American Policies Have Produced a Generation of Refugees 

On October 18, 2018 President Donald J. Trump continued his detrimental practice of using Twitter to fuel the already hot immigration debate. He said, in part, “I am watching the Democrat Party led (because they want Open Borders and existing weak laws) assault on our country by Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, ...
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‘First thing we do, we kill all the lawyers.’

How Trump’s immigration policies have been (largely) stopped in the courts. A conversation with law professor Peter Margulies.

Lawyers -- outraged by the Trump Administration's harsh policies against immigrants -- have brought scores of cases challenging the President's actions. They have been remarkably successful in persuading judges to invalidate or put on hold many of the Administration's new policies. Law professor Peter Margulies tells us why the lawyers ...
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Border Tragedies

A Tempest Tossed Essay by Alex Aleinikoff on Trump border policies.

The death of 7 year old Jakelin Caal while in Border Patrol custody is a tragedy, and it is sadly emblematic of Trump Administration border policies that have devastated families, undermined U.S. asylum laws and betrayed traditional American values. Alex Aleinikoff, Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility ...
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Tempest Tossed Episode 10

The Trump Administration’s Assault on Gender Asylum

Two actions of the Trump Administration have sought to make it practically impossible for women who are victims of intimate partner violence to apply for and be granted asylum in the United States. The first is an action by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to overturn a decision of the Board of ...
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Tempest Tossed Episode 9

Tempest Tossed Pre-Election Edition: All Trump all the time— a conversation with Roberto Suro, professor of journalism and public policy at the University of Southern California

President Trump has dominated the pre-election news by returning to a theme that probably brought him the Presidency -- immigration. Roberto Suro discusses the politics of the Trump strategy, the failure of an effective response from the Democrats, and how older narratives of immigration may not work for the current ...
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Tempest Tossed Episode 8

Inciting Fear: Trump and the ‘Caravan’–a conversation with Doris Meissner, Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute

According to Donald Trump, a group of several thousand Hondurans fleeing violence and poverty who are on foot and 1000 miles from the US border are a threat to US national security and sovereignty. Who is part of the "caravan"? Why have they left Honduras? What are their prospects for ...
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Tempest Tossed

Is the US a ‘safe country’ for asylum-seekers?: A conversation with Professor Sean Rehaag on new challenges to the US-Canada

Under an agreement signed in 2002, Canada can return asylum-seekers to the US if they have traveled through the US or lived there prior to arriving in Canada. Recent policies north and south of the US-Canadian border pose new challenges to the agreement, as Sean Rehaag, professor at Osgoode Hall ...
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Tempest Tossed

‘Zombie ideas’ on US Immigration: A conversation with Professor Rubén Rumbaut on false ideas that will not die

Immigrants commit more crimes? Don't learn English? Hurt the U.S. economy?  These are "zombie ideas"—false claims that refuse to die.  Professor Rubén Rumbaut sets the record straight.
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Tempest Tossed

Resignation with honor: A conversation with David Martin, former member of the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council

Alex Aleinikoff speaks with David Martin on why he resigned from the Department of Homeland Security's Advisory Council, what he objects to in Trump Administration immigration policies, and what balanced and responsible immigration policy could look like.
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Tempest Tossed

‘César’s Choice’: The conditions and decisions facing reunited immigrant families–a conversation with Prof. Lauren Gilbert

Alex Aleinikoff speaks with St.Thomas University of Law, Professor Lauren Gilbert, on the detention of re-united immigrant families and the difficult choices they face:  should they return to their home countries together, should the parent return and child stay in the U.S., or should the family remain in ICE detention to pursue ...
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