Jaclyn Kelly Widmer, associate clinical professor of law, discusses the opportunities that reopening DACA presents.

“DACA recipients cannot feel safe yet, for a variety of reasons,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School. “The only true solution for DACA recipients is legislation offering them a path to legalization. Given the polarization in Congress, that seems difficult to achieve.”

“If people believe the U.S. government is becoming more liberal on immigration, we may see a new wave of people… try to enter the U.S.,” says Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law. “But if the new administration continues the hard-line approach of the Trump administration, Biden will be called ‘deporter in chief,’ just as former President Obama was.”

"It will take time to rebuild immigrants’ trust in America. But President-elect Joe Biden can and must."

In September, the White House proposed limiting international student visas to four year-periods and setting up precise new procedures for extending their stay. Biden could revoke these regulations. However, if they are finalized before Trump leaves office, a new administration would have to go through the lengthy regulatory process again, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law practice at Cornell University.

“This is the first time it’s been carefully documented that the economic institutions of the tech economy are open access,” said Victor Nee, the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor in the Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and co-author of “Immigration, Opportunity and Assimilation in a Technology Economy,” published Sept. 28 in Theory and Society.

“The barriers of entry are high with respect to human capital and social capital,” Nee said, “but once you’re in it, it is an environment that is open and inclusive.”

"As far as I know, there is no basis for President Trump's comments that Mexico will pay for the wall, period," said Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration practice at Cornell Law School. "They have not in the past, and I have not seen anything to indicate a change in the future."

Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law, says that if President Trump’s executive order is permitted to go into effect, he is not sure how it will work as state and local governments must provide aid “without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex or political opinion.”

Weekly public lectures are part of a new interdisciplinary course, Migrations: A Global, Interdisciplinary, Multispecies Examination, where migrations are approached as multispecies phenomena emerging from dynamic socioecological systems. Join us on Wednesdays at 3 p.m.

The initial impact of the pandemic was to bring human mobility to a grinding halt. The UN Secretary General has called for States to use the pandemic as an opportunity to ‘reimagine human mobility for the benefit of all’. Ian Kysel, visiting assistant clinical professor of law, describes how to limit some of the potential pitfalls of the efforts to innovate.