Immigrant Rights as Labor Rights

This project evaluates recent experiments to rationalize the directives of immigration enforcement and labor rights enforcement through prosecutorial discretion for unauthorized immigrant workers.  In October 2021 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) took an unprecedented move and signaled that immigration relief may be granted to those who help enforce labor rights. Though previous memoranda of understanding and bureaucratic discretion allowed for elements of relief, this is the first affirmative directive from the DHS to apply this policy in a centralized and efficient process. A number of labor rights cases that engage this policy are winding their way through the process. Drawing on this timely and unique policy shift, this project seeks to examine the impacts these efforts have on workers and labor rights enforcement outcomes.  The Undergraduate Research Fellows’ activities would include constructing a comprehensive database of relevant legal documents, media coverage, interviews and secondary literature about the cases.  The project involves a collaboration between Professors Kate Griffith and Shannon Gleeson, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ILR School, the Director of the Worker Institute (Patricia Campos-Medina) and the Senior Labor & Economic Policy Attorney at the National Immigration Law Center (Jessie Hahn).