Keith Aoki’s Immigration Scholarship

Brian Leiter already (click here) has noted that Keith Aoki has accepted an offer to join the UC Davis law faculty.  The Immprof blog editors are happy that keith is joining our faculty.  I wanted to point out that Keith has done some important scholarship on immigration and immigrants.  At least two influential articles in this regard are worth mentioning:  (1) Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination, 85 California Law Review 1395 (1997) (with Robert Chang); and (2) No Right to Own?:  The Early Twentieth-Century “Alien Land laws” as a Prelude to Internment, 40 Boston College Law Review 37 (1998) (published conciurrently in the Boston Third World Law Journal).

Centering the Immigrant thoughtfully analyzes the impacts of immigration on the Los Angeles suburb Monterey Park, which saw tensions in the 1980s and 1990s result from the transformation of the city from Anglo/Mexican-American working class to a majority Chinese immigrant city;  the article analyzes the successful political alliances between Latina/os and Asian Americans in Monterey Park.  Although I am far less sanguaine than Keith on the possibility of local government’s positive interventions on immigration matters, see, e.g., the City of Hazleton, the article offers important insights about the local impacts of national immigration trends and how grass roots activists can constructively address the tensions.

No Right to Own? skillfully analyzes how the laws barring pwnership of real property by aliens ineligible for citizenship (i.e., non-white immigrants) were directed at Japanese landowners and helped later facilitate the internment of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

KJ