Deborah M. Weissman

Family Matters: Claiming Rights across the US-Mexico Migratory System

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA) created an immigration system favoring the immigration of spouses, children, and parents of US citizens, thereby establishing family unity as the cornerstone of US immigration policy. Despite this historical emphasis on family unity, backlogs and limited visas for non-immediate relatives of US citizens and legal permanent residents, the militarization of the US-Mexico border, punitive measures for those who enter without inspection, such as the forced separation of children from their parents at the US border, and an aggressive policy of deportation have made it more difficult for members of Mexican binational families to unify. How do members of Mexican binational families manage the hardships that result from US immigration policies that prolong and force family separation? Immigrants and return migrants alike may not be aware of their rights and the legal remedies that exist to enforce them. Structural barriers such as poverty, legal status, fear of deportation, lack of proficiency in English, and lack of familiarity with government bureaucracies no doubt prevent many migrants in the United States and return migrants in Mexico from coming forward to request legal assistance and relief in the courts. Despite these barriers, when it comes to family matters, members of some Mexican binational families can and do assert their rights. In this article, we analyze an administrative database of the Department of Legal Protection of the Mexican consular network that documents migrant legal claims resulting from family separation, along with findings from 21 interviews with consular staff and community organizations in three consular jurisdictions — El Paso, Raleigh, and San Francisco — to investigate the sociolegal processes of claims. Our investigation centers on the mediating role the Mexican state — via its consular network — has developed to assist binational families as they attempt to assert their rights and resolve child support and child custody problems resulting from prolonged and forced family separation. We find that the resolution of binational family claims in part depends on the institutional infrastructure that has developed at local, state, and federal levels, along with the commitment and capacity of the receiving and sending states and the binational structures they establish. These binational structures transcend the limitations of national legal systems to achieve and implement family rights and obligations across borders.

The Federalization of Racism and Nativist Hostility: Local Immigration Enforcement in North Carolina

In recent years, immigrants from Latin America in record numbers have chosen the South—and North Carolina, in particular—as a new and favored destination. Because race has been a decisive historical organizing category in the South, the legacy of racism remains an ongoing source of concern as Latina/os take their place in the state. Although some state institutions and entities adapted to accommodate the changing population, this chapter argues that nativist sentiment has been expressed through a number of practices, including a program known as 287(g) that authorizes the enforcement of immigration laws at the local level. The program has provided new-found authority upon which localities can disguise a local politics of resentments and racial hostilities toward immigrants through the use of the instrumentalities of immigration enforcement powers. However, one conceptualizes the larger framework of immigration issues, what remains clear is that the enforcement of immigration laws at the local level will inevitably involve historical legacies of race and tolerance.

Gender and Human Rights: Between Morals and Politics

The phenomenon of globalization, with its attending imaginary representations of one-world, shrinking-world, global village, and global integration, among others, raises issues that are as vast as they are complex. Globalization has forced us to change our way of thinking about gender and justice. Gender equality had hardly begun at the national level when developments called attention to the need to think about the condition of women on a global scale. The issue of womens equality has assumed a place of prominence in the debates on globalization and international law, and in the context of globalization paradigms, has motivated efforts to develop universal norms to guide the conduct of public life as well as private realms.The project to improve the condition of women has assumed multiple forms, spanning from local grassroots organizing to national and international movements. Womens organizations and human rights groups have frequently relied upon legal approaches and rights-based claims. Constitutional citizenship, social citizenship including economic and development rights, and human rights are key concerns that recently have been identified as essential norms of womens global citizenship to be advanced within an international framework. In fact, the realization of the gendered dimensions of global citizenship has served to provide the standard by which to take measure of the progress made toward equality for women. Progress has been made in the development of international legal standards for the benefit of women. Violence against women is now considered a proper subject for international human rights law. International tribunals have established that genocide and crimes against humanity may include sexual violence. Indeed, the issue of human rights for women has moved to center stage of the United Nations in terms of programmatic, administrative, and methodological approaches to international relations. So too has the International Criminal Court included both substantive protections, procedural safeguards, and administrative structures that are gender-sensitive and designed to fully incorporate the needs of victims of and witnesses to gender-based crimes. Feminist legal scholars have developed a body of scholarship for the purpose of demonstrating the emergence of a body of customary international law that requires governments to expand protection for women, particularly as against all forms of gender-based violence. But it is more complicated, for this process is itself a microcosm of the larger debate about globalization, specifically the degree to which old paradigms of colonialism are being recreated in the guise of global integration. The call for womens equality, a summons to which people of good will cannot but be sympathetic, must, nevertheless be received warily, indeed perhaps even skeptically, to be examined for hidden agendas and ulterior motives. Transnational feminism cannot yet be unhinged from nation, where one nation, the United States, so dominates global dynamics. Caution is warranted if the pursuit of objectives that envision womens equality is not as an end unto itself but a means by which to enhance U.S. global interests.