Daniel I. Morales (University of Houston Law Center) has posted The (Im)materiality of Immigration Law (forthcoming, 58 Columbia Human Rights Law Review __ (2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Immigration law killed Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and many other noble souls last year, just as it has killed innumerable people on the move over the centuries. It has killed, maimed or stymied all these human beings by nurturing a lie: that migration is inherently harmful. By sorting, excluding, and expelling human beings, immigration law has constructed a false reality that sustains the commonsense that migration is dangerous and that violence in response to it is necessary and justified. Law here is not, primarily, responding to reality—it is staging it.
This Article exposes the prevailing belief that migration is inherently harmful as untrue and theorizes why it is nonetheless so entrenched. This conviction is deeply rooted because the work immigration law does for our society has little to do with the practical logistics of managing people on the move. Immigration law serves instead a more mystical purpose: legitimating and sustaining the status quo of the American social structure. While migration law imposes extraordinary, material violence on migrants—the jails, the expulsions, the deaths, the torn ties of family, friends and community—migration law’s actual purposes are immaterial—ineffable, emotional, and metaphysical. Migration law ultimately aims to produce the immaterial abstractions of “nation,” the superiority of “citizens” and “heritage Americans,” and to carry water for capitalism.
If this is the real work of immigration law—to deploy legal violence on “others” to produce the superiority of citizens and capital—is it legitimately law at all? Does it deserve the honor? Or is it rather the rawest kind of power cannibalizing the rule of law’s legitimacy? The ICE occupation of Minneapolis has made the answer plain for all to see. What should follow from this fact? I argue that in a world that took the rule of law and constitutional provisions—like birthright citizenship—more seriously, immigration law wouldn’t be law at all since its immaterial purposes violate too many precepts of law’s rule.
Recommended.
Lawrence Solum