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HUMAN RIGHTS

HUMAN RIGHTS-MIGRATION-TRAFFICKING-SLAVERY-CIVIL RIGHTS

A Clear and Present Danger: Missing safeguards on migration and asylum in the EU's AI Act

By Jane Kilpatrick, Chris Jones

The EU's proposed Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act aims to address the risks of certain uses of AI and to establish a legal framework for its trustworthy deployment, thus stimulating a market for the production, sale and export of various AI tools and technologies. However, certain technologies or uses of technology are insufficiently covered by or even excluded altogether from the scope of the AI Act, placing migrants and refugees - people often in an already-vulnerable position - at even greater risk of having their rights violated

London: Statewatch, 2022. 46p.

The Vulnerability of Paid Migrant Live-in Care Workers in London to Modern Slavery

By The University of Nottingham Rights Lab

This report presents the findings and recommendations arising from an 18-month research project, conducted between February 2021 and July 2022, which used feminist, participatory, action research methods to investigate the vulnerability to modern slavery of paid, migrant, live-in care workers in London. Live-in care represents a specific segment of the adult social care sector in England. Live-in care workers stay in their client’s home and provide around-the-clock presence and personal assistance as required with activities of daily living (for example, getting around, dressing and washing) to enable people with care and support needs to live independently in the community or remain at home with intensive and often specialised support (as opposed to moving to a care home for example). Our research sought to understand better the risks and drivers of vulnerability to modern slavery and severe forms of labour exploitation. There have been long-standing concerns about severe forms of exploitation in the UK in the care sector. The Director of Labour Market Enforcement has identified adult social care as a sector where the danger of labour exploitation is high, with live-in and agency care workers believed to be at particular risk. A specialised form of domestic work, live-in carers delivering personalised care in the home are considered vulnerable. A total of 14 semi-structured peer interviews and two peer-led focus groups were conducted with live-in migrant care workers from Hungary, Poland, South Africa and Zimbabwe. An additional three practice interviews were carried out by peer researchers with each other, which informed the research but were not used in the analysis.

London: Trust for London, 2022. 43p.

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Immigration Detention in Australia; Turning Arbitrary Detention into a Global Brand

By Global Detention Project

Australia has a severe and punitive immigration detention system. It’s: policy of mandatory, indefinite detention does not distinguish between adults or children, visa violators or asylum seekers. Dozens have languished in detention for more than a decade. Private contractors, paid billions to operate centres, have been continually criticized for abusing detainees and failing to provide services. Observers have repeatedly denounced the detention regime, including its offshore operations, as violating human rights and international law. The price tag for maintaining the system is astronomical: It costs nearly $400,000 per detainee/year compared to less than $50,000 for community housing. But the physical and mental costs are even higher: Experts have documented the devastating impact of prolonged detention on the health of detainees, which has led to high levels of self-harm, long-term illnesses, and severe psychological disorders like schizophrenia.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Detention Project, 2022. 58p.

Forced Migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America: Drivers and Experiences

By Sonja Wolf

The countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America –El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras– have long struggled with social exclusion and authoritarian governments. Periodic protests were violently crushed, and the inability to achieve change by peaceful means resulted in political violence and civil wars. The Peace Accords signed in the early and mid-1990s and the transitions to electoral democracy allowed for some limited reforms, but the structural transformations that Central American societies needed remained elusive. The three countries have acquired a more urban and modern face. Citizens enjoy greater protection of human rights than in the past and can freely choose their rulers in ordinary elections, except for Honduras, which saw a democratic collapse with the 2009 coup d'état and fraudulent presidential elections in 2017. There, post-electoral violence, together with the increasing concentration of the executive power over legislative and judicial institutions, has eroded citizen confidence in public and political institutions. The progress that has occurred should not detract from the deep flaws that continue to characterize the nations of the Northern Triangle. State structures are weak and underfunded due to limited tax collection and widespread corruption. With an underdeveloped civil service, appointments and hiring decisions often based on personal and partisan connections regardless of merit, leave public institutions with little ability to build public policy. Corruption damages democratic institutions and prevents governments from allocating the maximum of available resources for the enjoyment of human rights, particularly economic and social rights. Economic power continues to be concentrated in a few hands. Deep-seated poverty, exclusion, and racism also persist and affect especially indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples as well as rural populations. Rural poverty reaches 49 percent in El Salvador, 77 percent in Guatemala, and 82 percent in Honduras. Overall poverty rates have decreased somewhat over the years, but more as a result of remittances than consistent social and economic policies. These transfers are an important contribution both to family economies and to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and in 2016 they constituted 10.4 percent of GDP in Guatemala, 17.1 percent in El Salvador, and 20.2 percent in Honduras.

Mexico City, Mexico: Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE), 2020. 101p,

Broken Justice in Mexico's Guerrero State

By Open Society Foundations

On September 26, 2014, dozens of student activists from a teachers’ college were detained and loaded into police vehicles by armed men in the town of Iguala, in Mexico’s Guerrero state. None of the students—43 in all—have been seen since. The disappearances of the 43, blamed on corrupt collusion between local politicians, drug gangs, and police, galvanized protests across Mexico, fueled by frustration over the lack of justice. The atrocity became a symbol of Mexico’s wider failure to protect its citizens from killings and disappearances, and to hold accountable those responsible. Broken Justice in Mexico’s Guerrero State examines the elements of that failure, and offers recommendations for change. The result of over two years of research and analysis by Mexican and international experts, and coproduced with Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña Tlachinollan and the Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, this report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the structural deficiencies of Guerrero’s justice system—flaws that have enabled perpetrators of violence to operate with almost absolute impunity.

Broken Justice in Mexico’s Guerrero State exposes the profound lack of political will to address abuses, including the failure to prosecute state actors implicated in extrajudicial killings, torture, and enforced disappearances. It also sets out an agenda for reform—the first steps needed to rebuild trust in justice and the rule of law in Guerrero.

New York: Open Society Foundations, 2015. 89p.

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Addressing Instability in Northern Central America: Restrictions on Civil Liberties, Violence, and Climate Change

By María Fernanda Bozmoski, María Eugenia Brizuela de Avila, and Domingo Sadurní

Citizens across Latin America and the Caribbean are rising up in protest. Political frustration and economic stagnation are fueling social discontent exacerbated by the continued COVID-19 pandemic and the slow health response. In Central America, restrictions on civil liberties, high rates of gender-based violence and extortion, and worsening climate change are compounding the lack of economic opportunities and pervasive corruption seen in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In the year of its bicentennial, can northern Central America chart a new path, in partnership with the United States, to tackle the sources of social instability that are forcing migrants to seek a better life?

In July 2021, the Joseph Biden administration released the US Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America report. Three of its five pillars call for the United States and northern Central American countries to work together to respect human rights and a free press, counter violence at the hands of criminal organizations, and combat sexual and gender-based violence.1 To ensure a sustained and effective implementation of this strategy, especially on these three pillars, the United States will need to find new ways to work closely with northern Central American governments, domestic and international private sectors, and organized civil-society groups. Following consultations with the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center’s Northern Triangle Advisory Group (NTAG), this brief highlights the importance of implementing a holistic, multisector approach to mitigate gender-based violence, protect civil liberties and human rights, and build climate resilience. This brief is the third in a three-part series by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center and DT Institute that provides policy recommendations for the United States and its northern Central American partners to address the root causes of migration.

Washington, DC: The Atlantic Council, 2021.

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Mexico Peace Index 2022: Identifying and Measuring the Factors that Drive Peace

By The Institute for Economics and Peace

This is the ninth edition of the Mexico Peace Index (MPI), produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP).

It provides a comprehensive measure of peacefulness in Mexico, including trends, analysis and estimates of the economic impact of violence in the country. The MPI is based on the Global Peace Index, the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness, produced by IEP every year since 2007. The MPI consists of 12 sub-indicators aggregated into five broader indicators.

Mexico’s peacefulness improved by 0.2 percent in 2021. This was the second year in a row of improvement following four consecutive years of deteriorations. Twenty-three states improved, while nine deteriorated. Although a minority of states deteriorated, the deterioration in these states was large enough to almost counter the improvements in other states. This relationship occurs globally where countries deteriorate in peacefulness much faster than they improve.

In 2021, three of the five indicators in the MPI improved. Notably, both firearms crime and homicide improved, with the rates falling by 6.2 and 4.3 percent, respectively, and both reaching around 26 per 100,000 people. This marks the second year in a row of improvement for both indicators following steep increases between 2015 and 2018....

Sydney: Institute for Economics and Peace, 2022. 102p.

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Do Refugees Cause Crime?

By Aysegul Kayaoglu

The impact of immigration on crime continues to stir heated debates in public policy circles around the world whilst surveys indicate that host societies favor mitigating measures because they are concerned of what they perceive as an impingement on their security with each new wave of migration inflow. Whether there is any truth to such perceptions, however, remains a mystery for the case of developing countries since causal evidence is extremely limited. That those countries host the overwhelming majority of the global refugee population makes it paramount for researchers to supply the missing scientific link. Propelled by the magnitude of this need, this paper analyzes the impact of refugees on crime rates using the case of Turkey that hosts the world’s largest refugee population within any national borders. In doing so, it uses instrumental variables, Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Staggered DiD methods to explain if the war-fleeing Syrian refugees pushed Turkey’s crime rates higher both in the short and the long-run. Controlling for various time-varying characteristics of provinces and presenting a battery of robustness checks against various identification threats, its findings show either null or negative effects of refugees on the incidence of criminal activity in the country.

Dokki, Giza Egypt: The Economic Research Forum, 2021. 44p.

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The Crime Effect of Refugees

By Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel, Naci H. Mocan, Semih Tumen & Belgi Turan

We analyze the impact on crime of 3.7 million refugees who entered and stayed in Turkey as a result of the civil war in Syria. Using a novel administrative data source on the flow of offense records to prosecutors’ offices in 81 provinces of the country each year, and utilizing the staggered movement of refugees across provinces over time, we estimate instrumental variables models that address potential endogeneity of the number of refugees and their location, and find that an increase in the number of refugees leads to more crime. We estimate that the influx of refugees between 2012 and 2016 generated additional 75,000 to 150,000 crimes per year, although it is not possible to identify the distribution of these crimes between refugees and natives. Additional analyses reveal that low-educated native population has a separate, but smaller, effect on crime. We also highlight the pitfalls of employing incorrect empirical procedures and using poor proxies of criminal activity which produce the wrong inference about the refugee-crime relationship. Our results underline the need to quickly strengthen the social safety systems, to take actions to dampen the impact on the labor market, and to provide support to the criminal justice system in order to mitigate the repercussions of massive influx of individuals into a country, and to counter the social and political backlash that typically emerges in the wake of such large-scale population movements.

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022. 94p.

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Immigration, Crime, and Crime (Mis)Perceptions

By Nicolas Ajzenman, Patricio Dominguex, and Raimundo Undurrage

This paper studies the effects of immigration on crime and crime perceptions in Chile, where the foreign-born population more than doubled in the last decade. By using individual-level victimization data, we document null effects of immigration on crime but positive and significant effects on crime-related concerns, which in turn triggered preventive behavioral responses, such as investing in home-security. Our results are robust across a two-way fixed effects model and an IV strategy based on a shift-share instrument that exploits immigration inflows towards destination countries other than Chile. On mechanisms, we examine data on crime-related news on TV and in newspapers, and find a disproportionate coverage of immigrant-perpetrated homicides as well as a larger effect of immigration on crime perceptions in municipalities with a stronger media presence. These effects might explain the widening gap between actual crime trends and public perceptions of crime.

Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2021. 57p.

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Getting Off the Assembly Line: Overcoming Immigration Court Obstacles in Individual Cases

By Appleseed for Justice

There are few things a lawyer can do more profound than helping an immigrant avoid deportation. From saving a refugee from persecution to keeping a long-time U.S. resident from exile, the professional and personal rewards are tremendous. Yet there are a great number of challenges in immigration court, a venue unfamiliar to many litigators and other pro bono lawyers. This guide is intended to supplement the basic rules and procedures of immigration court with tips from experienced practitioners on how to deal with some of the peculiarities of these courts, including interpretation, videoconferencing, and a confounding document discovery process. The fifty-seven immigration courts are staffed by approximately 250 judges,2 sitting from New York to Honolulu. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Reform (“EOIR”) governs each of these courts, and each applies the same federal substantive and procedural law, but the practices differ formally and informally— sometimes even from judge to judge. Appleseed gathered information from practitioners in a variety of courts in diverse geographies, and the guidance in this book is the result of their willingness to share their experiences and tips.

  • Of course, the practical application of this guidance will depend greatly on the context in which the practitioner finds herself: the court, the judge, the opposing Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) attorney, and, of course, the client’s circumstances. And a pro bono lawyer taking his first case in immigration court will undoubtedly view these tips with a different perspective than a long-time immigration practitioner. But we hope that any lawyer can find here a framework for decision-making when encountering the peculiarities of litigating in immigration court—the near-absence of formal discovery, the challenges of a hearing interpreted into and from a foreign language, the minimal out-of=court contact between opposing counsel, and the obstacles presented by a videoconference system that keeps counsel miles away from the client. The guide is intended to inform your strategic choices as counsel in immigration court, but by no means to mandate a particular course of action. Above all else, a lawyer in immigration court needs to act in the client’s interest, even if that means deciding not to push aggressively against a videoconference hearing, to stop a sloppy interpretation, or to file a complaint against a misbehaving DHS attorney

Washington, DC: Appleseed Fund for Justice, 2016. 126p.

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Assembly Line Injustice: Blueprint to Reform America's Immigration Courts

By Appleseed Fund for Justice

Every year, millions of people arrive at America’s borders fortified by the hope of a better life. Some come to escape persecution or torture; others, to improve their economic situation; still others, to seek education or training. Some of these newcomers enter lawfully; others, illegally; still others enter lawfully but overstay their welcome and remain here in violation of our immigration laws. Whatever brings them here, virtually all are inspired by the American promise of opportunity in a free society and our traditions of fair play and equal justice under the law. But many, particularly those who enter or remain illegally or who are simply unable to document their right to remain, get swept up in Immigration Courts that do not faithfully carry out these ideals. It is well documented that the single best predictor of an immigrant’s success or failure in Immigration Court is the identity of the judge who hears the case. Moreover, countless immigrants are subjected to harassing or denigrating treatment in Immigration Court, cannot understand what they are being asked or told, or have no assistance in navigating the byzantine court process. Far too many immigrants are held in detention for so long, while their cases grind on at a glacial pace, that they ultimately decide to go back home, even if they are entitled to be here. Many immigrants face a courtroom experience that does not uphold America’s commitment to the fair and dispassionate administration of the laws.

  • The sharp increase in the number of cases in Immigration Courts over the past decade, without a corresponding increase in resources, lies at the root of many of these problems. Immigration Judges, their clerks and the DHS Trial Attorneys who represent the government are overwhelmed, yet the stakes to the immigrants involved could not be higher: the outcome of these cases often determines whether a person will lose his livelihood, be torn from his family or even sent back to persecution. As one Immigration Judge, commenting on the crushing burden, said to us, “These are death penalty cases being handled with the resources of traffic court.” In response to this crisis of justice, the national nonprofit organization Appleseed decided in 2008 to investigate the Immigration Court system by gathering the opinions of those who face the challenges of that system on a daily basis. Appleseed sought practical, achievable steps to bring the system closer to our American ideals and prepared this report to highlight its findings and propose workable recommendations. This report takes no position on who should be entitled under the nation’s immigration laws to stay, leave or become a U.S. citizen. Nor does it address every problem facing immigrants or the government that deals with them. (For example, we heard from many of our interviewees about— but do not address—problems in the private immigration bar.) Instead, our recommendations have been narrowly tailored to bring the reality— and the perception—of fair play and equal justice to the Immigration Court system.

Washington, DC: Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, 2009. 44p,

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Videoconferencing in Removal Hearings: A Case Study of the Chicago Immigration Court

By The Legal Assistance Foundation Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice of Metropolitan Chicago and Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice ; Julie Dona, Geoffrey Heeren, Lisa Palumbo, Diana White, Amanda J. Grant, Mollie G. Hertel, Malcolm C. Rich

In 2002, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) moved televisions into one of the Chicago immigration courtrooms and began conducting hearings for detained immigrants in removal proceedings by videoconferencing. In Chicago’s videoconference hearings, the judges are located in the downtown court, and the detainees appear from a small detention facility in a Chicago suburb. EOIR believes that videoconferencing enhances efficiency but has not to date undertaken a study of its efficacy or fairness. Since the consequences of removal from the United States are so severe for immigrants and their families, we believed that these videoconference hearings deserved further examination. During the summer and fall of 2004, we observed 110 videoconference hearings and recorded our findings. The hearings we observed were “Master Calendar” hearings, where the Immigration Judge determines whether the removal proceeding was properly commenced, examines the charges against the immigrant, schedules future hearings, and, in some cases, orders the immigrant’s removal. Findings We found that videoconferencing is a poor substitute for in-person hearings. Among other problems, we observed deficiencies related to access to counsel, presentation of evidence, and interpretation. Latino immigrants appeared to fare especially poorly in videoconference hearings.

  • Compounding these errors, the immigrants whom we observed had little chance to speak or ask questions, were unable to communicate easily with their attorneys (if they were represented), and typically were informed of what had happened only at the conclusion of the hearing. There was little interpretation given for the benefit of non-English speakers. We were impeded from conducting our study by a general lack of transparency in the removal process for detained immigrants. There was no public access to the remote courtroom, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) refused to allow us to interview immigrants who had gone through videoconference hearings. There is virtually no regulation or written policy, moreover, governing videoconferencing in the immigration court

Washington, DC: Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, 2005. 106p.

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Every Move You Make: The Human Cost of GPS Tagging in the Immigration System

By Bail for Immigration Detainees (‘BID); Medical Justice ; Public Law Project

Human rights groups the Public Law Project, Bail for Immigration Detainees and Medical Justice Monday released a joint report calling upon the UK government to immediately end GPS electronic monitoring of immigration bailees. GPS monitors currently track approximately 2000 people for 24 hours a day. The tracking devices do not have an expiry date and can only be removed by court decision. The report “focused on the anticipated impact of electronic monitoring on physical or psychological well-being.” The groups found that the use of the tracking devices has serious impacts on the physical and mental health of bailees. According to the report, “clinicians raised concerns about the potential for electronic monitoring to exacerbate mental illness by triggering reminders of their trauma, for example where clients had a history of being restrained, or where they feared return to a situation where they may be at risk of further harm, or had experiences of powerlessness.” There is also serious concern that the trackers are restrictive socially and physically due to charging requirements. Physical impacts include skin conditions and musculoskeletal issues. Although the report calls for the immediate end of GPS electronic monitoring, the groups also provide recommendations for better regulation of the tracking devices if they are to continue. Recommendations include a strict limit on the time a tracking device shall be worn and call for GPS monitoring to be removed as a mandatory term of immigrant bail.

London: Public Law Project, 2022. 49p.

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Struggling to Survive: the Situation of Asylum Seekers in Tapachula, Mexico

By Stephanie Brewer, Lesly Tejada, and Maureen Meyer

Seeking asylum is never an easy process. Families, children, and adults forced to flee their homes experience the trauma of violence or other life-threatening circumstances at their place of origin, the rupture of leaving their past lives behind, and the uncertainty of where and how to find refuge. But in recent years, this already difficult path has become increasingly fraught with obstacles for the rising population of protection-seeking people arriving at Mexico’s southern border, the majority of whom make their asylum claims in the city of Tapachula, Chiapas.

The new WOLA report, Struggling to Survive: the Situation of Asylum Seekers in Tapachula, Mexico, follows the route of asylum seekers arriving in Tapachula. It draws on a March 2022 visit during which we conducted field documentation and interviews with asylum seekers, government officials, UN agencies, and civil society organizations providing services to migrants. The report highlights abuses, arbitrary treatment, and steep obstacles faced by asylum seekers at each step of their process.

Washington, DC; Washington Office on Latin America, 2022. 39p.

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Safeguarding the Integrity of Our Courts: The Impact of ICE Courthouse Operations in New York State

By The Immigrant Defense Project

The ICE Out of Courts Coalition (the Coalition) is comprised of over 100 organizations and entities across New York State. As community-based organizations, unions, civil legal services providers, public defenders, family defenders, anti-violence advocates, law schools, and civil rights and liberties groups serving New Yorkers of all ages, races, and immigration statuses, we have been alarmed and appalled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) increasing dependence on our State’s court system as its preferred venue for surveilling and detaining immigrant New Yorkers. For over two years, the Coalition has gathered qualitative and quantitative data from affected stakeholders across issue areas and roles within the justice system. Following meetings with the Chief Judge and the Chief Administrative Judge, the Coalition has spent significant energy compiling the data collected in this report. The data collected in this report demonstrates the full breadth of the negative impact ICE courthouse operations have had on the administration of justice, as well as equal access to justice, in New York State. This report demonstrates just how widespread this problem is — affecting not just New York City but the whole state, affecting not just criminal but problem-solving and civil courts as well. Information presented here attests to how systemic this issue has become in the fair and efficient administration of justice, and how ICE courthouse operations have had an outsized effect on the most vulnerable New York State residents, including victims and survivors of domestic and gender-based violence, single mothers, those eligible for problem=solving courts and youth.

New York: Immigrant Defense Project, 2019. 88p.

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Denied, Disappeared, and Deported: The Toll of ICE Operations at New York’s Courts in 2019

By The Immigrant Defense Project

In 2019, ICE continued its expansive courthouse operations: IDP received reports of 203 operations, a 1700% increase from 2016 (11 operations). Nearly half of these operations occurred after the New York State Unified Court System (UCS) issued a Directive to limit ICE courthouse arrest practices on April 17, 2019—in part, requiring ICE to provide a judicial warrant to make an arrest inside a courthouse. ICE made clear to its agents through internal communications that “We can enter the courthouses to observe...we are good to make the arrest outside the courthouse with or without a judicial warrant.”1 From April 2019 onward, ICE used tactics that skirted the Directive by moving their arrests to court entrances and exits, while still surveilling people inside courthouses. In some cases, ICE violated the Directive outright—refusing to identify themselves as required, failing to wait for a supervising judge to review a warrant, and escorting an individual out of the courthouse to handcuff them outside. ICE’s use of force has resulted in injuries, broken glass doors, and crippling fear of attending court. As New York ICE Field Office Director Thomas Decker told reporters in September, “if we don’t have the information about where they are at in the community, and then we can pick them up around the court, then that’s what we are going to do.”2

New York: Immigrant Defense Project, 2020. 22p.

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Immigration Consequences of Criminal Activity. Updated May 28, 2021

By Hillel R. Smith

Congress’s power to create rules governing the admission of non-U.S. nationals (aliens) has long been viewed as plenary. In the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as amended, Congress has specified grounds for the exclusion or removal of aliens, including because of criminal activity. Some criminal offenses, when committed by an alien present in the United States, may render that alien subject to removal from the country. And certain criminal offenses may preclude an alien outside the United States from being either admitted into the country or permitted to reenter following an initial departure. Criminal conduct also may disqualify an alien from certain forms of relief from removal (e.g., asylum) or prevent the alien from becoming a U.S. citizen. In some cases, the INA directly identifies particular offenses that carry immigration consequences; in other cases, federal immigration law provides that a general category of crimes, such as “crimes involving moral turpitude” or an offense defined by the INA as an “aggravated felony,” may render an alien ineligible for certain benefits and privileges under immigration law.

  • The INA distinguishes between the treatment of lawfully admitted aliens and those who are either seeking initial admission into the country or who are present in the United States without having been lawfully admitted by immigration authorities. Lawfully admitted aliens may be removed if they engage in conduct that renders them deportable, whereas aliens who have not been admitted into the United States may be barred from admission or removed from the country if they have engaged in conduct rendering them inadmissible. Although the INA designates certain criminal activities and categories of criminal activities as grounds for inadmissibility or deportability, the respective grounds are not identical. Moreover, a conviction for a designated crime is not always required for an alien to be disqualified on criminal grounds from admission into the United States. But for nearly all criminal grounds for deportation, a “conviction” (as defined by the INA) for the underlying offense is necessary. Additionally, although certain criminal conduct may disqualify an alien from various immigrationrelated benefits or forms of relief, the scope of disqualifying conduct varies depending on the particular benefit or form of relief at issue.

Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2021. 37p.

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Immigration and Crime: The Role of Self-Selection and Institutions

By Fabio Mariani and Marion Mercier

Contrary to popular perception, empirical evidence suggests that immigrants do not necessarily commit more crimes than natives, in spite of having lower legitimate earning opportunities. To make sense of this, we propose a novel theoretical framework based on a predator/prey model of crime, where endogenous migration decisions and career choices (between licit and illicit activities) are jointly determined. In this setting, we show that the involvement of migrants in crime crucially depends on self-selection into migration, as well as on productivity and institutional quality in the host economy. In particular, immigrants may display a lower crime rate than natives even if they are less productive on the honest labor market - and this result can still hold if career choices are revised after migration. We also find that stricter immigration policies could induce an adverse selection of migrants, and eventually attract more foreign-born criminals. Finally, a dynamic extension of our model can account for the higher crime rates of second-generation immigrants, and highlights the critical role of immigration and assimilation for the long-run evolution of crime and institutions in host countries.

Bonn: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. 2021. 51p.

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Navigating the European Migration Regime: Male Migrants, Interrupted Journeys and Precarious Lives

By Anna Weiss

Anna Wyss’ survey of the heavily politicised group of male migrants in Europe provides insightful analysis of both masculinity and the European migration crisis. The book tracks men’s repeated attempts to achieve permanent residence status and the successive detentions and deportations they endure. It measures the effects of precarity on their lives and explores the hope and vulnerability they experience.

Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2022. 214p.

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