Immigration and Refugee Law

Catalog description

This course explores the evolving relationship between U.S. immigration policy and our national purposes. Immigration plays a central role in contemporary American life, significantly affecting our foreign relations, human rights posture, ethnic group relations, labor market conditions, welfare programs, public services, and domestic politics. It also raises in acute form some of the most basic problems that our legal system must address, including the rights of insular minorities, the concepts of nationhood and sovereignty, fair treatment of competing claimants for scarce resources, the imperatives of mass administrative justice, and pervasive discrimination. In approaching these questions, the course draws on diverse historical, judicial, administrative, and policy materials.