Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago
Critical immigration legal theory (CILT) contends with the ways in which U.S. immigration law constructs and perpetuates subclasses of people based on race, gender, class, and other historically oppressed identities. Informed and guided by critical race theory, CILT elucidates the interaction of immigration and criminal enforcement systems to reify white supremacy through carceral power. Colorblindness disguises state demarcations of immigrants, criminals, and criminal immigrants as legitimate targets of containment and subordination. The U.S. immigration legal regime creates and sustains a hierarchical social order of insiders and outsiders based on race and capital. This regime is further justified by autocratic notions of national sovereignty and national security which are antithetical to a multiracial and multicultural
democracy.
CILT’s praxis dimension embraces anti-subordination theory, intersectionality, and anti-essentialism to upend the existing immigration system. As many critical immigration legal scholars are engaged in the fight for immigrants’ rights, they have become intimately familiar with their clients’ interactions within the immigration law system. Bolstered by such experience, critical immigration legal scholarship provides space for responding to the structural determinism of the U.S. immigration system. By amplifying the work of critical immigration legal theorists, we hope to expose the existential threat of the current immigration and bordering regime and to replace it with an equitable and inclusive democracy that honors the lived experiences of all people within and beyond borders. This panel will examine and disrupt the reductive assumptions inherent in the U.S. immigration legal regime to highlight alternative paths towards freedom, equality, and justice.
• Ming H. Chen, Professor of Law, UC Law San Francisco
• Kathleen Kim, Professor of Law, LMU Loyola Law School
• Carrie Rosenbaum, Associate Professor, University of San Francisco School of Law
• Yolanda Vázquez, Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law
Critical immigration legal theory (CILT) contends with the ways in which U.S. immigration law constructs and perpetuates subclasses of people based on race, gender, class, and other historically oppressed identities. Informed and guided by critical race theory, CILT elucidates the interaction of immigration and criminal enforcement systems to reify white supremacy through carceral power. Colorblindness disguises state demarcations of immigrants, criminals, and criminal immigrants as legitimate targets of containment and subordination. The U.S. immigration legal regime creates and sustains a hierarchical social order of insiders and outsiders based on race and capital. This regime is further justified by autocratic notions of national sovereignty and national security which are antithetical to a multiracial and multicultural
democracy.
CILT’s praxis dimension embraces anti-subordination theory, intersectionality, and anti-essentialism to upend the existing immigration system. As many critical immigration legal scholars are engaged in the fight for immigrants’ rights, they have become intimately familiar with their clients’ interactions within the immigration law system. Bolstered by such experience, critical immigration legal scholarship provides space for responding to the structural determinism of the U.S. immigration system. By amplifying the work of critical immigration legal theorists, we hope to expose the existential threat of the current immigration and bordering regime and to replace it with an equitable and inclusive democracy that honors the lived experiences of all people within and beyond borders. This panel will examine and disrupt the reductive assumptions inherent in the U.S. immigration legal regime to highlight alternative paths towards freedom, equality, and justice.
• Ming H. Chen, Professor of Law, UC Law San Francisco
• Kathleen Kim, Professor of Law, LMU Loyola Law School
• Carrie Rosenbaum, Associate Professor, University of San Francisco School of Law
• Yolanda Vázquez, Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law
