This volume, part of the Feminist Judgment Series, shows how feminist legal theory along with critical race theory and intersectional modes of critique might transform immigration law. Here, a diverse collection of scholars and lawyers bring critical feminist, race and intersectional insights to Supreme Court opinions that deal with the source of the power to regulate immigration, state and local regulation of immigration, citizenship law, racial discrimination, employment law, access to public education, the rights of criminal defendants, the detention of noncitizens, and more. Feminist reasoning values the perspectives of outsiders, exposes the deep-rooted bias in the legal opinions of courts, and illuminates the effects of ostensibly neutral policies that create and maintain oppression and hierarchy. One by one, the chapters in this book reimagine the norms that drive immigration policies and practices. In place of discrimination and subordination, the authors here demand welcome and equality. Where current law omits the voice and stories of noncitizens, the authors here center their lives and experiences. Collectively, they reveal how a feminist vision of immigration law could center a commitment to equality and justice and foster a country where diverse newcomers readily flourish with dignity.

This chapter breaks from standard views on the right of free movement to argue that illegal migration is a form of impure infrapolitical resistance to global poverty. The argument hinges on a comparison with fugitive slaves. If these people did nothing wrong by escaping from slavery, then illegal socioeconomic migrants cannot be said to be acting wrongly. Both cases are characterised by individuals being subjected to extreme domination that they have no reasonable chance of overturning.

It then considers objections: that this is a case of someone acting on the right of necessity, but this is not convincing because it fails to consider the relationship between poverty and unjust social institutions; this does not describe the actual thought process of migrants, but this is not an ethnography of illegal immigrants so the objection is irrelevant and, moreover, it does describe the thoughts of some illegal immigrants; finally, there is an objection that the state must have the right to exclude illegal migrants otherwise institutions that people have reason to value would be jeopardised. This privileges the desires of the perpetrators and beneficiaries of injustice over the victims.