Welcome Message and 2010 Updates from the Organizers

Dear Citizenship and Immigration CRN Members:

It was nice to see many of the members of our Law and Society Association Citizenship and Immigration CRN at the 2010 conference in Chicago. We especially offer a warm welcome to the new members!

We want to especially thank those who organized CRN02 panels on immigration and citizenship topics. We also had a very well-attended and productive business meeting in Chicago, which allowed CRN members to inter-mingle and gave a clearer idea of the work members are doing.

One of the key follow-ups of this meeting was the drafting of a proposal for an International Research Collaborative (IRC), which was co-ordinated by Marie and Leila and received contributions from several members. An overview of the IRC submission is available here.

There were many panels at LSA 2010 that dealt with immigration or citizenship issues. The CRN sponsored seven of these sessions, including a Roundtable on Immigration and Communities: Reception, Advocacy, and Law in the "Model City", chaired by Jamie G Longazel and Rashmee Singh. If you have ideas for further roundtables or CRN02 related panels, or would like to help with planning, please do let us know.

This year our CRN benefitted from close proximity to the biennial Immigration Law Teachers Workshop, organized by Hiroshi Motomura, which took place in Chicago at DePaul University Law School on the Tuesday and Wednesday prior to the LSA conference. Although the two events were not formally connected, some CRN members attended both the Workshop and LSA. Hiroshi and other members shared many positive reflections from this workshop at the CRN Business Meeting.

We were happy to note that the LSA Board of Trustees was receptive to the polling of our CRN that expressed support for a boycott of Arizona until it withdraws its repugnant legislation requiring local police to enforce federal immigration law. The use of police to target immigrants increases the potential for racially discriminatory law enforcement, and creates a variety of other problems. The Board decided to boycott Arizona as a site for future meetings so long as it pursued these measures. The Board's resolution can be accessed here.

We ask that you please update (or create) your bio on the website. Erasmus University's International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Netherlands will continue to host our website and email listserv. As you can see from the website, we now have quite a list of CRN member bios, and we are always happy to have more. The CRN website also contains a section where immigration and citizenship course syllabi are posted. If you teach in this area, please do send your syllabus so that it can be posted. Please send all website enquiries to Jeff.

The 2011 Law & Society Association Annual Meeting will take place in San Francisco from May 27-31. A Call for Papers will be issued in the autumn of 2010 and we will send out a reminder in due course through the CRN List-Serve. If you are not a member of the CRN List-Serve already, please do join. You will not be over-burdened with emails, but you will have a good site for coordinating and creating immigration-related panels. Whether you use this site or not, please do identify appropriate panels with the CRN 02 designation to make scheduling work better and to help identify relevant panels in the program. By adding [CRN02] at the end of the proposed title of your panel as you are submitting it through the LSA electronic submission process, you will signal the organizers not to put two immigration panels in the same time slot.

We would also like to encourage everyone to send immigration-related conference announcements and job/fellowship postings to the listserv.

Best wishes for the 2010-2011 academic year, and we look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

Marie, Leila and Jeff.

Citizenship and Immigration CRN02 Organizers