Professor 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.

Professor Chen’s current research investigates the legal and social dynamics affecting immigrants on temporary visas, such as high-skilled workers and international students, focusing on how their social construction as racially subordinate outsiders exacerbates the liminality of their legal status in the US and Canada. Professor Chen’s interdisciplinary research explores how law and policy shape the pathways to citizenship and full membership in society for immigrants. She is the author of Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era (Stanford University Press 2020) and numerous socio-legal articles on race and migration in contemporary politics and public law in the US. Her current work investigates the legal and social dynamics affecting immigrants on temporary visas in the US and Canada.

Colorblind Nationalism and the Limits of Citizenship, 44 CARDOZO LAW Review 945 (2023)

The New Normal: Regulatory Dysfunction as Policymaking (with Daimeon Shanks) 82 MARYLAND LAW REVIEW 300 (2023)

Teaching Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Citizenship & Immigration, 67 ST. LOUIS U. L.J. 513 (2023)

The Political (Mis)Representation of Immigrants on the Census, 96 N.Y.U. L. REV. 901 (2021)

The Political (Mis)representation of Immigrants in Voting (with Hunter Knapp), 92 U. COLO. L. REV. 715 (2021)

Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era (Stanford Press 2020)

Citizenship Delayed: Civil Rights and Voting Rights Implications of the Citizenship and Naturalization Backlog, Report of Colorado Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (September 2019)

Sanctuary Networks as Integrative Enforcement, 75 WASHINGTON & LEE L. REV. 1361 (2018)

Administrator-In-Chief: The President & Executive Action in Immigration Law, 69 ADMIN. L. REV. 347 (2017)

Governing by Guidance: Civil Rights Agencies and the Emergence of Language Rights in Schools and Workplaces, 49 HARV. C.R. – C.L. L. REV. 201 (2014)

Harry & Lillian Hastings Research Chair (2022-2026)

Robertson Research Award for Empirical Studies (September 2023-2025)

Public Voices Fellow of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship and the Op-Ed Project (2023-2024)

Calhoun Public Service Award (2017)

Gamm Justice Award for Faculty Scholarship (2015)

Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans (2011-2014)