Immigration Article of the Day: Legal Borderlands and Imperial Legacies by Jennifer M. Chacón

Immprof Jennifer M. Chacón (Stanford) is the author of Legal Borderlands and Imperial Legacies: A Response to Maggie Blackhawk’s The Constitution of American Colonialism, 137 Harvard L. Rev. Online 1 (2023).

Chacón’s Response to Blackhawk’s article “embark[s] on a brief journey in search of the borderlands…. highlight[ing] some tensions among the principles of borderlands constitutionalism, and suggest[ing] some additional challenges that inhere in any effort to invigorate these principles in the framework of the United States’s colonial constitutional law.”

In the first Part of this Response, I summarize key elements of Blackhawk’s Foreword and explain the role that the borderlands, and borderlands constitutionalism, play in her argument. In the second Part, I expand upon this idea of the borderlands, and offer some reflections on how an engagement with other borderland spaces and realities might advance distinct aspects of the constitutional project that Blackhawk sets out. In the third Part, I offer an analysis of immigration law that both bolsters Blackhawk’s central claim concerning the colonial legacy that animates and structures U.S. constitutional law and illustrates some of the difficulties of constitutional redemption through borderlands constitutionalism. The final Part offers some brief reflections about how we know what we know about U.S. colonialism and its continuing practical and legal legacies.

-KitJ