News Mentions/Interviews

A new rule aims to make asylum claims ineligible if an asylum-seeker passes through another country first. Professor Johnson stated that "Guatemala's legal infrastructure is weak, to say the least. Mexico has offered very limited legal protections for Central Americans. That makes it very different from the safe third country agreement with Canada."

The deportation of U.S. citizens has always been unconstitutional, yet scholars argue the way in which “repatriation drives” deported non-citizens was unconstitutional, too. Professor Kevin R. Johnson stated that “one of the issues is the ‘repatriation’ took place without any legal protections in place or any kind of due process.”

The prospect of nationwide immigration raids starting this weekend has spread fear in the Bay Area’s immigrant communities. Professor Kevin R. Johnson noted that "people are fearful of leaving their homes, fearful of going to work, fearful of going to school, fearful of going to the doctor, fearful of going to the DMV.”

Professor Giovanni Peri's 2018 study was recently referenced to in a Breitbart article. Professor Peri's research showed that a growing population of skilled migrants in a district also tends to pull pro-Republican voters into the Democratic party.

Professor Kevin R. Johnson's commentary was recently featured in the Pacific Standard article Motel 6 will Settle a Suit Over its Cooperation with ICE. Popular budget hospitality chain Motel 6 will pay damages of $10 million to former guests with Spanish-language surnames who were targeted in the company's cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Professor Kevin R. Johnson's commentary was recently featured in the Politifact article "FACT CHECK: Did Kamala Harris really disagree with Obama’s deportation policy?". Kamala Harris’ news release said that two years earlier, in 2012, she issued another "information bulletin" to law enforcement agencies clarifying that federal immigration detainers "are not mandatory, but are merely requests enforceable at the discretion of the state and local agency." UC Davis Law School Dean Kevin R. Johnson expressed that "the bulletin on detainers was meaningful," and that "it allowed local law enforcement agencies" discretion "to not detain low level offenders."

Colleges are seeing increases in processing times for international students applying for work authorization through the Optional Practical Training, or OPT, program, leaving some students with job or internship offers unable to take up their positions on time. The times increased after January 2017 when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services removed an internal rule stipulating that it would process requests for employment authorization documents within 90 days. "The bigger issue is why for goodness sakes is it taking so long," Professor Regulska said of OPT processing times. 

Professor Kevin R. Johnson's article "By Playing Politics with DACA Trump is Toying with Immigrant Lives" was recently featured on The Globe News.

Professor Giovanni Peri's commentary was recently featured in Fortune's article titled "U.S. Immigration Policy Is Broken, But No One Can Agree on How to Fix It"

In a Dallas News article, Assistant Professor of Sociology Caitlin Patler said that DACA’s creation in June 2012 may have allowed recipients to ease up on their fears of deportation and focus on their work and futures

“As a Ph.D. student I had already worked on some immigration issues in my studies, and when this topic surfaced I began looking deeper into the issue and realized that we lacked a lot of good information to properly examine and fully explore the issue,” Rutledge told Western Farm Press in a telephone interview. “I contacted the California Farm Bureau which had conducted a survey in 2017. I felt like we needed to add additional questions to the survey to get a broader picture of the issue, and the CFB agreed to partner with us to conduct the 2019 updated survey.”

Professor J. Edward Taylor discusses the economic impact of refugees and research in poverty in Office Hour Podcast.

"Although there is evidence that some of the farmers are switching acreages, in my opinion, it doesn't seem to be happening at an alarming rate," Zachariah Rutledge, a UC Davis researcher and one of the paper's co-authors said. "But the trend is going upward."

"The farm labor supply is declining, and farmers are responding by changing their production practices,” said the study’s co-author, Zachariah Rutledge, a doctoral student in the UC Davis Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. “These results are important because they show how big of a problem this is for California farmers, and they suggest that the problem is not going to go away in the near future.”

"Part of this issue is driven by labor supply factors. The farm labor force in the U.S. is aging, and it's not really being replaced by young immigrant workers the way it once was, " Zachariah Judson Rutledge, a U.S. Davis doctoral student and the lead author on the study, told Newsweek. "One of the main factors was there's an expanding economy in Mexico for both farm work and non-farm."