Ming Hsu Chen is an Associate Professor of Law, Political Science, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also Faculty-Director of the Immigration and Citizenship Law Program and co-edits the ImmigrationProf blog. Dr. Chen’s book “Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era” was published by Stanford University Press in 2020.
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Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era
A Discussion With Author Ming Hsu Chen
Friday, March 05, 2021, 12pm
EST
Event Overview
The law says that everyone who is not a citizen is an alien. The social reality, however, is far more complicated.
In the fourth installment of our Reimagining Citizenship series, author Ming Hsu Chen will present her book “Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era.” In it, she provides readers with the everyday perspectives of immigrants on what it’s like to try to integrate into American society during a time when immigration policy is focused on enforcement and exclusion.
Dr. Chen argues that the citizen/alien binary should be reframed as a spectrum of citizenship, a concept that emphasizes continuity between the otherwise distinct experiences of membership and belonging for immigrants seeking to become citizens. Combining theories of citizenship with empirical data on integration and analysis of contemporary policy, Dr. Chen builds a case that formal citizenship status matters more than ever during times of enforcement and proposes constructing pathways to citizenship that enhance both the formal and substantive equality of immigrants.
The book presentation will be followed by a discussion with Shannon Gleeson, an associate professor at Cornell’s ILR School.
The series “Reimagining Citizenship” features scholars, writers, and artists whose work interrogates the limits and possibilities of legal, social, and cultural belonging. Through book talks, roundtables, and presentations, we consider how multidisciplinary, multispecies approaches to the study of migration open up new understandings of citizenship, borders, and social transformation. Organized through Cornell University’s Migrations Global Grand Challenge.
In the fourth installment of our Reimagining Citizenship series, author Ming Hsu Chen will present her book “Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era.” In it, she provides readers with the everyday perspectives of immigrants on what it’s like to try to integrate into American society during a time when immigration policy is focused on enforcement and exclusion.
Dr. Chen argues that the citizen/alien binary should be reframed as a spectrum of citizenship, a concept that emphasizes continuity between the otherwise distinct experiences of membership and belonging for immigrants seeking to become citizens. Combining theories of citizenship with empirical data on integration and analysis of contemporary policy, Dr. Chen builds a case that formal citizenship status matters more than ever during times of enforcement and proposes constructing pathways to citizenship that enhance both the formal and substantive equality of immigrants.
The book presentation will be followed by a discussion with Shannon Gleeson, an associate professor at Cornell’s ILR School.
The series “Reimagining Citizenship” features scholars, writers, and artists whose work interrogates the limits and possibilities of legal, social, and cultural belonging. Through book talks, roundtables, and presentations, we consider how multidisciplinary, multispecies approaches to the study of migration open up new understandings of citizenship, borders, and social transformation. Organized through Cornell University’s Migrations Global Grand Challenge.
What You'll Learn
- Why formal citizenship status matters more than ever during times of intense immigration enforcement
- The significance of understanding citizenship as a spectrum rather than as an alien/citizen binary
- How pathways to citizenship enhance immigrant equality
Speakers
Ming Hsu Chen
Faculty-Director of the Immigration and Citizenship Law Program and Associate Professor
University of Colorado Boulder
Faculty-Director of the Immigration and Citizenship Law Program and Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Law School
Shannon Gleeson
Edmund Ezra Day Professor | Chairperson of the Department of Global Labor and Work
Cornell ILR School
Shannon Gleeson is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the chairperson of ILR’s Department of Global Labor and Work. She also serves as a teaching faculty member in Latina/o Studies and American Studies programs in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences and is a professor in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
A sociologist who studies migrant worker rights and immigration policy, Professor Gleeson is engaged in various collaborative projects that examine immigrant workers. She is particularly interested in how worker rights policies are implemented on the ground as well as how workers, unions, worker centers and other NGOs navigate the policies that impact precarious workers, especially the 8 million U.S. workers who are undocumented.
Professor Gleeson has co-authored five books and monographs, including the book “Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Contest State Power,” which won the 2024 Best Book Award by the American Political Science Association Latino Caucus.
Professor Gleeson earned a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley.
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