by Stephen Yale-Loehr ’81, Professor of Immigration Practice
The U.S. immigration system is broken. Why? Several reasons. Congress is paralyzed; it hasn’t passed major immigration reform legislation in over twenty years. Because of Congress’s failure to act, presidents try executive actions but then are immediately sued. Federal courts seem to be the final arbiters of immigration policy these days.
In the meantime, employers face labor shortages. There are over 8 million unfilled job openings across the U.S. economy. At the same time, the percentage of the U.S. population over 65 will grow by nearly 30 percent by 2040. This combination is unsustainable. An aging workforce will produce fewer workers precisely when the population’s heath care and elder care needs are skyrocketing. Since we won’t have enough domestic workers to fill the shortfall, at least part of the solution is more migrants.
Adding to the issue, more people worldwide are fleeing the breakdown of civil society, climate change, and persecution than ever before. The United Nations estimates that there were around 281 million international migrants in the world in 2020, nearly double the number in 1990. Of that total, the United States is home to one-fifth of the world’s international migrants.
Domestically, over 11 million people lack immigration status in the United States. More than half of them have been residing and working in our communities for more than fifteen years. And our immigration courts face a backlog of over 3 million deportation cases.
Against this bleak backdrop, Cornell University and Cornell Law School are working hard to improve the immigration system. Four years ago, Cornell started a global grand challenge to study how all living things—humans, animals, insects, microorganisms, and plants—migrate from place to place on our planet. As part of the Migrations grand challenge, Cornell has funded over fifty-five research projects totaling over $2 million. Much of that research is focused on human migration within the United States, including several projects at the Law School. For example, Clinical Professor of Law Beth Lyon and students are studying xenophobic hate speech on X (formerly known as Twitter). Their project aims to track anti-immigrant hate speech in real time. And I conducted a study with Dr. Gunisha Kaur, an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, about barriers immigrants face in accessing public benefits. Putting their recommendations into practice, the team has also developed Rights for Health, a website dedicated to sharing accurate and accessible information on health and legal benefits available to immigrants in the United States.
In addition to university-wide initiatives on migration, the Law School has received significant foundation support for immigration. The Immigration Law and Policy Research Program, part of the Law School’s Migration and Human Rights Program, combines Law School faculty with distinguished visiting immigration scholars comprised of experienced former government and nonprofit leaders. The program brings innovative and practical solutions to the immigration debate.
For example, in February 2023, the program sponsored a conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., entitled “Immigration Reform: Lessons Learned and a Path Forward.” Representatives of business, labor, think tanks, and advocacy groups spoke on panels moderated by visiting scholars Randel Johnson and Charles Kamasaki. Over 220 people attended, either in person or via webinar. The conference presentation and discussions, augmented by post-conference consultations, produced a rough consensus that while large, comprehensive immigration reform is unlikely to move forward in Congress, certain targeted reforms are both urgently needed and potentially achievable.
Following up on the conference, in October 2023 we issued an immigration white paper focused on three areas: (1) border management and asylum reform, led by insights from visiting scholar Theresa Cardinal Brown; (2) work visa programs, led by insights from visiting scholar Randel Johnson; and (3) help for so-called DREAMers (undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children), led by insights from visiting scholar Charles Kamasaki. The white paper has been well-received and discussed widely in congressional briefings and podcasts. An initiative, led by Associate Clinical Professor of Law Ian Kysel, also helped the human rights bodies of the African Union and Organization for American States draft principles on the rights of all migrants. Kysel has also set up a network of close to 500 litigators, advocates, and experts to coordinate refugee rights litigation around the world. That network, co-housed at Cornell, has organized meetings of U.S. and Mexican lawyers to support transnational legal strategies for addressing U.S. border policies and has filed several briefs in Mexican courts.
Other immigration projects at the Law School include:
- a novel Path2Papers project to provide recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program with access to work visas and other pathways to legal residency, including through taking advantage of a new waiver process the program helped establish, in part managed by the program’s academic fellow Dan Berger
- efforts led by visiting scholar Marielena Hincapie to allow up to 500,000 undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens to remain in the United States and receive work permits, which the program helped secure, in part through a letter to the Biden administration I coauthored that was signed by over one hundred law professors
- progress creating a model for expanding farmworker legal services across land grant universities
- leadership with the Internal Revenue Service and the American Bar Association to provide complex tax return assistance to low-income immigrants
- behind-the-scenes policy work with the Biden administration on such topics as immigrant legal representation led by visiting scholar Charles Kamasaki and efforts to help high-skilled international researchers stay in the United States led by visiting scholar Amy Nice
- solidifying the role of the Law School in the Cornell-wide Migrations initiative, such as the joint presentation on Rethinking Migration that featured visiting scholar Marielena Hincapie
- collaboration with medical and public health experts to examine the role of immigration status in the health of unaccompanied child and youth farmworkers
- creating creative access to justice models to secure legal status for immigrant children and youth in rural upstate New York who are living (and often working) in the United States without their parents
In addition to research and scholarship, the Law School has several well-regarded immigration classes and clinics. I teach an immigration law class. Clinical Professor of Law Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer conducts a unique 1L Immigration Law and Advocacy Clinic that focuses on innovative work on behalf of undocumented and DACA communities and on advocacy for detained immigrants and asylum seekers. Clinical Professor of Law Estelle McKee directs the Asylum and Convention Against Torture Appellate Clinic that represents immigrants in their appeals or habeas corpus petitions before the Board of Immigration Appeals or federal courts. The Law School’s Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic represents migrant farmworkers in immigration and employment matters. The Transnational Disputes Clinic has a federal lawsuit pending against the U.S. government challenging the denial of an immigrant visa petition and recently filed a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief addressing the right to judicial review of denial of family unity visa petitions. And the Law School’s Gender Justice Clinic engages in local, national, and global efforts to address gender-based violence and discrimination, including domestic violence-based asylum claims.
As a result of all this research and clinical work, Cornell Law School immigration scholars are frequently cited in the press and Cornell is ranked as a top law school for immigration.
I strongly believe that every law student should study immigration law, for several reasons. First, immigration law teaches students how to read a complicated statute. It makes administrative law concepts come to life, and shows students how agencies and Congress operate, or fail to operate.
Second, immigration law underscores the importance of constitutional rights, not because students see these rights being vindicated, but rather because they see a scary picture of what the world looks like when federal courts fail to enforce constitutional norms fully.
Third, immigration law restores the human face to the study of law. Students are moved by the plight of real people they read about: real people whose lives are threatened, real people impacted by an unduly harsh statute, real people who are victims of an abusive government power, of bureaucratic bungling, of inexcusable delays.
Fourth, immigration law shows people the power of a law degree for doing good. That’s what impresses me most when I talk with other immigration lawyers, including Law School alumni—the enormous amount of dedication and hard work that immigration attorneys do every day to help real people and to do good. In that way, studying immigration law fulfills Cornell Law School’s mission of training “lawyers in the best sense.”
