New Immigration Articles From SSRN

Here are some new immigration articles on the Social Science Research Network (www.ssrn.com):

“Immigrant Labor and the Occupational Safety & Health Regime; Part I: A New Vision for Workplace Regulation” New York University Review of Law & Social Change, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2009 JAYESH RATHOD, American University – Washington College of Law.

ABSTRACT:  This article is the first in a series of three articles that together form a scholarly project that unearths the causes of recent trends in immigrant worker fatalities and injuries in the U.S., and presents recommendations for reversing it. The article examines how the history, structure, and operations of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have, at times, obscured the workplace safety concerns of immigrant workers and have left these workers with no meaningful voice in the regulatory process. The article presents a set of regulatory imperatives to guide OSHA’s future work with respect to immigrant workers. These imperatives provide a framework for other agencies that have failed to adequately protect or otherwise address the concerns of a historically disadvantaged constituency.

“Allowing Judicial Review of Motions to Reopen: Kucana v. Holder” American Bar Association, Section of International Law, Immigration & Naturalization Committee, Fall 2009 Newsletter, Volume XI, Issue 2, pp. 1-4 JOHANNA K. P. DENNIS, Vermont Law School.

ABSTRACT: This casenote discusses Kucana v. Holder, in which the U.S. Supreme Court is called to determine whether motions to reopen are not judicially reviewable outside the immigration agency context based on 8 U.S.C. § 1252.

“The Hidden Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Immigration Law” Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 62, No. 5, pp. 1353-1418, October 2009 KERRY ABRAMS, University of Virginia School of Law.  BLOGGER’S NOTE:  PROFESSOR ABRANMS IS DOING SOME GREAT IMMIGRATION SCHOLARSHIP.

ABSTRACT:   This Article challenges the conventional wisdom that the law had little to say about immigration before 1875. Instead, it offers a reframing of immigration law history as including what scholars have previously thought of as “settlement history”: The immigration of whites to the western territories. The Article focuses on a particular group of immigrants-the so-called Mercer Girls-to explore both how the failure to invoke exclusionary immigration law and the presence of other kinds of laws (including homestead acts and anti-miscegenation statutes) functioned to shape the population of the nascent western territories. A close look at this type of immigration and this group of immigrants in particular facilitates a reconceptualization not only of narratives of American westward immigration, but also of the way immigration law actually works, both on its own and in tandem with other doctrinal schemes. The story of the Mercer immigrants can help us put exclusionary immigration law in context as part of a broad set of legal strategies used to produce, shape, and maintain populations. More importantly, it shows us that the study of restriction only tells part of the story of our country. To understand whether immigration policy is meeting its goals, we must look to see how the law fosters immigration as well as how the law restricts it.

KJ