Join us for the second event in our Speaker Series on Understanding Liminality and Legal Precarity, featuring Prof. Ming Chen. She will present her talk, “Exclusion By Design: Migrant Racialization and Temporary Legal Status.”
This event will be held in a hybrid format. Lunch will be served at 11:45 AM in Dodson Room. The lecture will start at 12:15 PM and wrap up at 1:45 PM.
Abstract
Migrants arrive in the United States on temporary visas ten times more often than on green cards, and more than half come from countries whose emigrants would be classified as non-White in the United States. Even so, immigration scholarship gives short shrift to temporary visas and treats them as race-neutral. This article contributes to the growing body of critical migration studies by demonstrating how immigration law assigns meaning to the race and legal status of temporary migrants. We find that temporary legal statuses are designed in ways that unnecessarily foster social exclusion through a process of racialization and hierarchical sorting by skills. Our empirical study of the distinctive experiences of three temporary worker categories deepens existing understandings of exclusion and racial subordination in the United States.
About Ming Chen
Professor Ming Chen is a legal scholar specializing in immigration, citizenship, and equality. She is Professor of Law and the founding faculty-director of the Center for Race, Immigration, Citizenship, and Equality (RICE) at UC Law San Francisco. Her teaching centers on Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Immigration Law, and Citizenship. In addition, she serves as Co-Editor for the Immigration Prof blog (@immprof) and chaired the executive committee for the AALS Immigration Section and the Law and Society Association’s Citizenship and Migration Section. She has served on the Colorado state advisory council to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Previously, she was a research associate at the Brookings Institution and worked for federal agencies and nonprofit organizations on civil rights of racial minorities and immigrants.
