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Stratification of residency rights between colonizer and colonized is one of the hallmarks of citizenship in settler-colonial states. Studies of colonial ethno-national territorial projects have largely focused on the ways in which military force is used to facilitate expulsion and dispossession of colonized populations. I argue that contemporary forms of settler-colonialism have come to rely on legal techniques, and on immigration law in particular, to achieve desired demographic transformations. This paper investigates the way in which immigration and residency laws have obstructed the realization of the right to leave and to return to one's country by focusing on the case of Israel-Palestine. I first lay-out the complex regime of residency that has developed under Israeli law since 1967 and which prevents Palestinians who have established a "center of life" outside of Israel from returning to live in Israel-Palestine. I then discuss the way in which national courts, by refusing to consider the relevance of international legal norms such as the right of return, have legitimated and extended these principles. This assertive reliance on legal formalism and legal fictions occludes considerations of internationally recognized human rights, including the right of return. In this context, colonized populations are vulnerable to being legally recast as 'aliens' or 'virtual immigrants' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2011, delegates from 183 nation-states voted to adopt an international convention that brought migrant domestic workers into the fold of international law. This article explores how the interests of sovereign states were reconfigured so that they came to include protecting perhaps the most politically powerless of all international migrants. I argue that technocratic devices - charts, questionnaires, and paragraph formatting - created a space for this new category of employees to be recognized and for international consensus to be secured on appropriate standards for this group. In other words, the Domestic Workers Convention is an instance in which state interests were shaken up and reconfigured through technocratic engineering. This analysis of the progress of the Domestic Workers Convention focuses attention on international organizations and their lawmaking machinery as important but previously overlooked contributors to the international politics of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to show that liberal law continues to justify and legitimize displacements of minority populations, even in an age of universal human rights. As demonstrated by the Israeli court's 1988 decision legitimating the deportation of Mubarak Awad, citizenship and immigration laws provide juridical justifications for contemporary ethno-national settler projects. In the aftermath of a territorial conflict that defines or redefines the bounds of the state, racially-marked indigenous populations are vulnerable to being legally recast as "aliens" or "virtual immigrants." National conflict may thus be transformed by legal formalism into a question of immigration law, allowing the power relations that produce state sovereignty to slip into the background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the tactics and professional identities emblematic of law reform in France and the U.S. do not extend across national borders. Common understandings of what law reform litigation looks like in each country are nationally distinct. These divergent practices can be understood as reflecting the dynamics of the nationally-distinct fields of power relations within which law reform is conducted. In particular, the material and symbolic resources available to law reformers are linked to the relative authority of private and public juridical actors in each State. In the U.S., law reform has been a product of system that places high value on the autonomous legal profession and the independence of the judicial branch. Working within this system requires large amounts of resources and support from the powerful corporate bar. In the case of France, law reform is in multiple respects a product of experts who have been trained by the State and who exercise their profession within the State's institutions. Professionalized law reform in France alters the meaning of the term as it is used in the common law world in that it remains institutionally attached to the state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contrasts France's unique system of administrative justice with the U.S. system of separation of powers, taking litigation in the area of immigrants rights as an elucidating case study. Members of the Conseil d'Etat, France's highest administrative court, operate as part of a network of elite jurists, working in private and alternating between adjudicative and ministerial functions. By contrast, American judges are set apart from administrators and judicial proceedings are both public and publicized. While French adjudicators do rule against the administration on immigration matters, they place primacy on restoring administrative coherency and their relationship with the administration is a striking contrast to the adversarialism visible in the frequent resort to structural injunctions in U.S. immigrants rights litigation. The paper analyzes the effects of these different styles of judicial review on the development of rights for non-citizens. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France and in the U.S. the development since the 1970s of immigration-centered law reform fields has been part of both the increasing politicization of the immigration issue and the general judicialization of public policy. Applying a comparative perspective to the immigrants' rights field, this paper seeks to trace interactive patterns of influence whereby French and American lawyers work within definite (and different) institutional contexts and yet also shape these contexts in the course of their advocacy practices. The paper argues that although legal actors in both France and the U.S. identify themselves as "immigrants' rights advocates", their differing conceptualizations of the legal issues at stake are explained by the divergent political discourses around migration in these two countries. While French public discourse tends to avoid ethnic and racial categories, focusing instead on class issues, American political discourse treats ethnicity as a legitimate category within the broader framework of identity politics. Accordingly, American immigrants' rights lawyers orient their legal strategies around equal protection principles, while French immigrants' rights lawyers have placed greater emphasis on securing social and economic rights, and thus greater material equality, for migrants. The paper analyzes the way in which different lawyerly conceptions and routines not only have shaped the politics of legal mobilization on behalf of immigrants but have also played a role in shaping the development of the regulatory regimes governing immigration and immigrants. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the effects of the refugee rights movement on workings of the U.S. asylum system, focusing on the processes used in the initial adjudication of asylum claims. It offers an institutionalist explanation for the increased proceduralism in U.S. asylum adjudication, despite changes in the tenor of U.S. immigration politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]