Unauthorized immigrants as 'Americans in waiting:' a call for re-articulating the scope of legality and documentedness.

• Author: Gallo, Andrew
• Position: A Review of Immigration Outside the Law - Book review

A Review of Immigration Outside the Law

By Hiroshi Motomura

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 338 pages.

Recent debates on immigration, both in the United States and abroad, have become increasingly controversial and politically charged. In the wake of President Obama's November 2014 executive action to grant approximately 5 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States protection from deportation, Congress remains deadlocked on the immigration issue, as Republicans threaten to reverse the president's actions by withholding funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In Europe, anti-immigration sentiment appears to be on the rise, as evidenced by the relative success of nativist movements in last year's European parliamentary elections and recent large-scale anti-immigration demonstrations in Germany.

Given the highly personal and emotional nature of the issue, finding a balanced analysis of immigration policy can be difficult. Fortunately, Hiroshi Motomura, an award-winning author, scholar, and teacher of immigration and citizenship law, achieves this balance in his most recent book, Immigration Outside the Law. Motomura effectively explains why immigration law can be so ambiguous and contentious without overly promoting normative claims or any side's political aims. Motomura succeeds in developing a conceptual framework for understanding current immigration debates that is sensitive to the history of immigration and the political and institutional constraints that make immigration law so difficult. Through clear and concise language, Motomura delivers a pragmatic assessment of the challenges associated with unauthorized migration and provides an encouraging policy prescription.

Motomura's framework rests on three themes that he derives from the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe--a landmark case that established a child's constitutional right to attend elementary and secondary school regardless of immigration status. Plyler v. Doe is useful because a thoughtful analysis of the case illuminates the rhetoric on both sides of the U.S. immigration debate as expressed throughout the last three decades.

The first theme--the significance of unlawful presence--is the focus of the first chapter of the book, and it is the foundation upon which the remainder of Motomura's analysis sits. Here, the author clearly shows how ambiguous a determination of unlawful presence can be, particularly given the variability...