Rethinking Immigration Law

 Prof. Ryo's article on immigration law featured among the best legal scholarship in the country

-By Jared Servantez

Emily Ryo’s article Less Enforcement, More Compliance: Rethinking Unauthorized Migration, published in the UCLA Law Review, was highlighted by online journal Jotwell as one of the best recent works of legal scholarship in the field of immigration law.

Juliet Stumpf, a leading scholar in the growing area of law at the intersection of criminal and immigration law colloquially known as “crimmigration,” praised Ryo’s work for doing what many others have failed to do – asking unauthorized immigrants about what they think of their presence in the U.S.

Professor Emily Ryo is a leading scholar on immigration and criminal law.

“Lives and loves and wars have been lost because of assumptions about what other people thought or did,” Stumpf wrote. “Our immigration laws and policies often rely on popular misconceptions about why people come to the United States without authorization and what will deter them or compel them to leave.”

To gain a different perspective on the controversial subject, Ryo went straight to the source and interviewed 64 current and prospective unauthorized immigrants from Latin America at day-labor sites and migrant centers about why they decided to come to the U.S., what that was like, and why they continue to live and work in the country in violation of federal immigration laws.

“The U.S. government seeks to regulate the behavior of these immigrants and millions of prospective immigrants outside our borders,” Ryo wrote in the article. “An understanding of the perspectives and motivations of those engaged in noncompliance might be important—indeed, critical—to achieving this regulatory goal, particularly if the government seeks to adopt a self-regulatory approach to governance.”

Ryo pointed out the persistent assumption by many in the U.S. that “unauthorized immigrants are lawless individuals who will break the law—any law—in search of economic gain.” But throughout her research, she found that those she interviewed generally saw themselves as “moral, law-abiding individuals who respect law and order” – not, as others might see them, as delinquents or criminals.

As Stumpf mentioned in her review of Ryo’s article, this raised a significant question: how do immigrants reconcile that view of themselves with their willing noncompliance of federal immigration law?

Ryo found that among a number of reasons, the unauthorized immigrants felt a higher loyalty to their families and children that “called for drastic action—even illegal action,” but also believed that disobeying immigration law was not morally equivalent to other criminal activity, especially that which harms others.

“Immigration law is different from other laws,” one interviewee said. “Immigrants who come to work should not be compared to those who kill or those who steal.”

Ryo also highlighted a belief among the immigrants that the U.S. immigration system is unfair and immoral – that poor immigrants from Latin America are at a significant disadvantage working within a system that they believe grants “greater opportunities for certain national-origin groups based on capricious and ever-changing international politics” rather than a clear set of rules. All of this, she wrote, supports their view that violating immigration law is their only viable option.

“[Ryo’s] prescriptions—that the U.S. craft a development strategy that promotes job opportunities, and set up an expanded temporary worker program that would permit circular migration of workers—lines up, perhaps for the first time, with empirical data about why those programs might increase compliance with immigration law,” Stumpf wrote in her review.

“We’ve all had the experience of thinking we knew what someone else was thinking,” Stumpf concluded. “Sometimes it pays just to ask.”