Jennifer M. Chacón

Bio: Jennifer M. Chacón is an academic researcher from University of Oxford. The author has contributed to research in topics: Immigration & Immigration law. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 30 publications receiving 552 citations. Previous affiliations of Jennifer M. Chacón include University of California, Irvine & University of California, Los Angeles.

Misery and Myopia: Understanding the Failures of U.S. Efforts to Stop Human Trafficking

Abstract: Over five years have passed since the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), more than two years have passed since its expansion and reauthorization, and millions of dollars have been spent to achieve the Act's stated goals of protecting trafficking victims, prosecuting traffickers and preventing human trafficking. In spite of apparent widespread political support and seemingly ample funding, the TVPA's success has been modest. Domestically, the number of cases prosecuted have been few and the number of trafficked workers in the U.S. who have been assisted by the program has been a small proportion of the estimated number of such workers in the U.S. In order to understand why the TVPA has fallen short of its goals, the Act must be analyzed in the context of its legal antecedents: the labor, immigration and sex trafficking laws that existed prior to the TVPA and that form the bulk of the Act's substantive provisions. This article demonstrates that long before the TVPA was enacted, legal and policy decisions were made in each of these three areas that continue to exacerbate the domestic manifestations of problem of human trafficking and the related exploitation of undocumented migrant workers. Unfortunately, Congress did not systematically revisit these laws when passing the TVPA. In fact, the TVPA incorporates many provisions of these laws with only minor changes, and fails to address many of the perverse structural incentives that the laws create. Border interdiction strategies, restrictive and punitive immigration policies and insufficient labor protection for migrants interact in ways that leave exploited workers in the United States at the mercy of traffickers and abusive employers, notwithstanding the TVPA. Furthermore, the narrow understanding of trafficking that dominates domestic TVPA enforcement efforts has created an over-emphasis on anti-prostitution efforts to the exclusion of broader issues of worker exploitation, and has also resulted in racially biased understanding and enforcement of anti-trafficking laws within the United States. Unfortunately, some of the worst impulses of U.S. anti-trafficking strategies have also been incorporated into the U.S. government's international anti-trafficking strategies. In short, as currently enforced, the TVPA exacerbates many of the negative effects of pre-existing laws, even as it alleviates some of the political pressure to address human exploitation.

Managing Migration Through Crime

Abstract: In recent years, an increasing number of scholars and commentators have turned their attention to the criminalization of migration in the United States. These scholars have focused largely on the incorporation of criminal law methodologies into the realm of civil immigration enforcement and adjudication. In contrast, this Essay centralizes the criminal prosecutions of migration-related offenses. Part I describes the ways in which the regulation of migration has increasingly become a subject of the criminal law, and discusses the explosion of migration-related criminal prosecutions over the past few years. Part II provides several examples of the use of criminal prosecutions in the migration context in order to explore an undertheorized effect of this trend, namely, that the protective features of criminal investigation and adjudication are melting away at the edges in certain criminal cases involving migration-related offenses. As these examples make clear, not only are we seeing what Stephen Legomsky has termed the asymmetric incorporation of criminal justice norms into civil removal proceedings, but we are also witnessing the importation of the relaxed procedural norms of civil immigration proceedings into the criminal realm.

Tensions and Trade-Offs: Protecting Trafficking Victims in the Era of Immigration Enforcement

Abstract: U.S. antitrafficking efforts, like the international efforts to protect trafficking victims, have been important in protecting a small (and growing) number of victims, punishing a small number of traffickers, and, perhaps most importantly, raising awareness about the nature and scope of the international trafficking problem. These advances are worthy of recognition. Nevertheless, it is equally important to acknowledge that antitrafficking efforts in the United States and elsewhere have been heavily constrained by the politics and policies of rigid immigration enforcement. In the end, there is no way to eliminate the scourge of trafficking on the international level as long as cross-border movement is subject to the high degree of regulation and criminalization that characterizes the contemporary global order.More troubling, some efforts to address the problem of trafficking within the framework of heightened border restrictions have the perhaps unintended effect of reinforcing migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation. This Article seeks to expose some of the tensions and trade-offs between immigration policy choices and antitrafficking efforts. Part I of this Article focuses on the ways in which antitrafficking advocacy and policies can actually fuel the discourse that drives restrictionist immigration policies. Discussions regarding trafficking – including media coverage of trafficking, law enforcement antitrafficking-training efforts, and official statements on trafficking – have played into and compounded stereotypes of migrant criminality.Part II of this Article explores how growing attention to the trafficking issue (in the United States and internationally) has occurred alongside, and has served as an additional justification for, the increasing reliance on the criminal justice system to manage migration. Section II.A explores the extent to which references to trafficking have been used to justify, among other things, greater law enforcement presence along the U.S.-Mexico border, greater numbers of prosecutors in border districts, and the rapid acceleration of immigration-related prosecutions. This has been the case even though very few of the resulting interdictions and prosecutions ultimately result directly in the protection of trafficking victims and even though the increased policing of the border and criminalization of migration can strengthen the hand of traffickers. Section II.B of this Article explores the development of state antitrafficking statutes and analyzes the extent to which these efforts can be understood as part of the larger trend of states and localities attempting to assert greater legal authority to participate in immigration enforcement.

Managing Migration through Crime

Abstract: In recent years, an increasing number of scholars and commentators have turned their attention to the criminalization of migration in the United States. These scholars have focused largely on the incorporation of criminal law methodologies into the realm of civil immigration enforcement and adjudication. In contrast, this Essay centralizes the criminal prosecutions of migration-related offenses. Part I describes the ways in which the regulation of migration has increasingly become a subject of the criminal law, and discusses the explosion of migration-related criminal prosecutions over the past few years. Part II provides several examples of the use of criminal prosecutions in the migration context in order to explore an undertheorized effect of this trend, namely, that the protective features of criminal investigation and adjudication are melting away at the edges in certain criminal cases involving migration-related offenses. As these examples make clear, not only are we seeing what Stephen Legomsky has termed the asymmetric incorporation of criminal justice norms into civil removal proceedings, but we are also witnessing the importation of the relaxed procedural norms of civil immigration proceedings into the criminal realm.

Unsecured Borders: Immigration Restrictions, Crime Control and National Security

Abstract: In this Article, I explore the origins and consequences of the blurred boundaries between immigration control, crime control and national security, specifically as related to the removal of non-citizens. Part II of this Article focuses on the question of how immigration control and crime control issues have come to be subsumed by national security rhetoric. Discussions about the removal of non-citizens have been treated as national security issues, when in fact the driving motivation is basic criminal law enforcement. Part III of this Article disentangles the use of removal for criminal and immigration law enforcement ends from national security removals. Non-citizens are seldom removed on national security grounds. At the same time, the government has relied upon national security justifications to explain the removals of thousands of non-citizens who pose no demonstrated security risk. This strategy does little to enhance national security, and undermines the important national security objective of protecting civil liberties. Part IV of this Article explains that although the vast majority of removals effectuated each year are carried out on the basis of a non-citizen's violation of the immigration law or criminal law, there is little reason to believe that the recent expansion in the removal of non-citizens will serve as an effective or efficient means of decreasing domestic crime or preventing undocumented migration. The insistence on formulating immigration policy while gazing through a distorted lens of national security perversely ensures that the law is ill-suited to achieve either national security or other immigration policy goals.

Militarized humanitarianism meets carceral feminism: the politics of sex, rights, and freedom in contemporary antitrafficking campaigns.

Abstract: Over the past decade, abolitionist feminist and evangelical Christian activists have directed increasing attention toward the “traffic in women” as a dangerous manifestation of global gender inequalities. Despite renowned disagreements around the politics of sex and gender, these groups have come together to advocate for harsher penalties against traffickers, prostitutes’ customers, and nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem the flow of trafficked women. In this essay, I argue that what has served to unite this coalition of “strange bedfellows” is not simply an underlying commitment to conservative ideals of sexuality, as previous commentators have offered, but an equally significant commitment to carceral paradigms of justice and to militarized humanitarianism as the preeminent mode of engagement by the state. I draw upon my ongoing ethnographic research with feminist and evangelical antitrafficking movement leaders to argue that the alliance that has been so efficacious in frami...

Legacies The Story Of The Immigrant Second Generation

Abstract: legacies the story of the immigrant second generation is available in our digital library an online access to it is set as public so you can download it instantly. Our book servers saves in multiple countries, allowing you to get the most less latency time to download any of our books like this one. Merely said, the legacies the story of the immigrant second generation is universally compatible with any devices to read.

The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens and the Nation

Abstract: knowledge of local languages and political structures, their willingness to renounce their homeland citizenship despite the Swiss recognition of dual citizenship, and their lack of a record of unemployment and dependence on welfare benefits. While this appears to contradict his initial rejection of economic factors as explanatory variables, Helbling concludes that authorities’ emphasis on applicants’ records in this regard cannot be explained by local politicians’ unwillingness to support these residents financially. Rather, it is due to the symbolic importance assigned to being a ‘good’ Swiss citizen who is not dependent on the state. This level of analytical depth was made possible by the study’s qualitative component, focusing on individual actors whose recommendations affect the outcome of naturalisation processes. Though the qualitative component of the study appears to be modelled closely on the quantitative sections of the work, overall the methodological rigour undertaken and the theoretical and analytical sophistication achieved are impressive. The quantitative analyses pursued are very thorough, with multiple models controlling for variables presented as important in the citizenship and integration literature. Although there is room for debate on the way in which indicators have been calculated, ultimately the study represents a valuable effort to quantify contextual and vague processes, allowing, then, for comparisons across otherwise incomparable locales. The study also goes beyond the more usual approach of focusing either on the applicant (the immigrant) or on national policy. In so doing, it presents a missing link: the people who receive and process applications, conduct interviews, and present cases to the final decision-makers. The book is a ‘must read’ for any student of citizenship. Zeynep Kilic University of Alaska Anchorage # 2011 Zeynep Kilic

Does Immigration Enforcement Reduce Crime? Evidence from Secure Communities

Abstract: Prior research investigates whether immigrants commit more crimes than native-born people. Yet the central policy used to regulate immigration—detention and deportation—has received little empirical evaluation. This article studies a recent policy innovation called Secure Communities. This program permits the federal government to check the immigration status of every person arrested by local police and to take the arrestee into federal custody promptly for deportation proceedings. Since its launch, the program has led to a quarter of a million detentions. We utilize the staggered rollout of the program across the country to obtain differences-in-differences estimates of its impact on crime rates. We also use unique counts of the detainees from each county and month to estimate the elasticity of crime with respect to confined immigrants. The results show that the Secure Communities program has had no observable effect on the overall crime rate.