A Critical History of Deportation Reliefs: Competing Notions of Membership and Illegality

• In Event: 097 - Section on Human Rights Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Rights and Migration

Abstract

The overarching question motivating this research concerns the ways in which immigration law works to construct the very subjects and practices it seeks to regulate and define. The project explores how consecutive legal and administrative changes introduced since the Refugee Act of 1980 – in particular the incorporation of a new provision expanding the right of asylum to undocumented migrants facing deportation - fueled a significant shift in how classes of persons eligible for relief came to be defined in U.S. law and political discourse.
This research has important implications for how we understand contemporary deportation and immigration policies. A critical analysis of the changes asylum relief effected in the nature of who gets to stay and who is ultimately deported is relevant for how we employ categories of illegals, undocumented migrants and refugees constitutive of current day debates over immigration reform. The contribution of this study is, however, not limited to analyses of deportation and immigration policies. It calls our attention to the fact that law is an important player that stands on its own merit; in the case of deportation reliefs, administrative and legal developments worked to engender new choices (a new route for legalizing status) and to create a category of people as asylum seekers, generating new understandings of illegality and membership. A study of shifts in the grounds for deportation reliefs is thus ideal for examining the ways in which law may work to shape the social reality it seeks to regulate.

Author

• Talia Shiff, Northwestern University