Research and Publications

• “DACA Beyond Boundaries: Employment Visa Options”: Drawing on her work building Path2Papers, Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer identifies overlooked employment-based visa options — including discretionary waivers — that could offer DACA recipients a path to lasting status. Read the paper in the University of San Francisco Law Review.
• “DACA legal services: One federal policy, different local implementation approaches”: Shannon Gleeson and Els de Graauw compare how three cities — Houston, New York, and San Francisco Bay — built different local networks of nonprofits and legal providers to deliver DACA services amid federal funding gaps. Read the full paper in Law and Policy.
• “Essentializing Cultures in U.S. Asylum Law”: Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer and Estelle McKee trace how asylum law pressures applicants — especially Central American women — to flatten their culture into a stereotyped villain, and propose ways to avoid reinforcing that narrative. Read the paper in the Brooklyn Law Review.

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• “Xenophobia Meter: Defining and Measuring Online Sentiment Toward Foreigners on Twitter”: Beth Lyon and coauthors build a seven-point scale for rating anti- to pro-immigrant sentiment online and apply it to thousands of tweets from prominent U.S. accounts to test how well humans and machine-learning models can spot xenophobic rhetoric. Read the paper in the Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
• “Migrant Rights Protections and Their Implementation in 45 Countries”: Ian Kysel and coauthors build a new database of migrant-rights indicators showing that while most major destination countries enact migrant-rights protections in law, fewer than half are both codified and actually enforced in practice. Read the paper in International Migration Review.
• “African Guiding Principles on the Rights of Migrants, Refugees and Asylum-Seekers: An Introductory Note”: Ian Kysel, Luwam Dirar, and Fatma Raach introduce the African Commission’s newly adopted guiding principles on migrant and refugee rights, tracing how the thirty-eight principles draw on African regional law alongside international and comparative human rights standards. Read the paper in International Legal Materials.

• The Climate Mobility Case Database

• “Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace”: Kati L. Griffith, Shannon Gleeson, Darlène Dubuisson, and Patricia Campos-Medina draw on interviews with more than three hundred low-wage Haitian and Central American workers and their advocates to show how U.S. labor, immigration, and civil rights law combine to produce and sustain racialized job insecurity. Read more from the Russell Sage Foundation.
• “How to Match Protections Along with Skills? Limitations of the Match-Motive Matrix for Temporary Migrant Workers”: Ashwin Kumar, Beth Lyon, and Shannon Gleeson critique the World Bank’s “match-motive” framework for migration policy, arguing that sorting migrants by skill match and motive alone overlooks whether temporary migrant workers actually have enforceable labor protections. Read the paper in International Migration.
• “Portable Justice”: Beth Lyon and Cathleen Caron propose Sustainable Development Goal indicators for tracking “portable justice” — whether migrant workers can still obtain legal remedies for exploitation after they return to their home countries. Read the chapter in The Elgar Companion to Migration and the Sustainable Development Goals.