Four Upcoming Events: Please Join Me! 🎤
In the next month, I'll be at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon; Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Red Emmas Bookstore in Baltimore, and Barnard College in NYC. Come say 'hello'!
If you like my newsletters, come see me live✨ at one of the following events happening in March. I’m not the headlining attraction for most of them, so don’t worry—you’ll get to see actual superstars like author John Washington whose new book just dropped (it’s excellent), professor Juliet Stumpf of ‘crimmigration’ fame, and legendary attorney Cecilia Wang of the ACLU.
Here’s a preview of the list:
March 1-2 » Crimmigration Conference 🚨
March 5 » Immigration and Free Speech Panel 🗯
March 19 » John Washington’s Book Tour 📚
March 20 » Tracking the State 🔢
Welcome back. My name is Austin Kocher, and I’m a professor who writes about the fascinating world of immigration. If you’re new, welcome! 🙏🏼 You can learn more about this newsletter on the “about” page—and please consider subscribing.
1. March 1-2 » Crimmigration Conference 🚨
Event Essentials
Full title: Crimmigration through Time, Space, and Culture
🌎 Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland Oregon.
🚀 Academic conference.
📆 Friday & Saturday, March 1-2, 2024
🕥 all day
📕 Program here.
Event Overview
One of the conferences I’m most excited to present at this spring is the upcoming crimmigration conference. The "Crimmigration through Time, Space, and Culture" conference aims to take the concept of “crimmigration” coined by Juliet Stumpf in her 2006 article “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power” and expand it theoretically, geographically, and historically beyond its current application to the U.S. context.
See my previous post on the conference here:
2. March 5 » Immigration and Free Speech Panel 🗯
Event Essentials
Full Title: Who Has the Right to Free Speech? Immigration, Civil Liberty, and Freedom of Expression
🌎 Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
🚀 Panel event.
📆 Tuesday, March 5, 2024
🕥 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm
✅ N/A
Event Overview
The U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to free expression, but not all those who reside within the country’s borders have equal protection. Some migrants to the U.S. are leaving situations where their rights were threatened, and they embrace the principle of free expression. Those same migrants may find their rights circumscribed when they arrive in the United States.
What can be done to counter threats to free expression for immigrants? How can we protect civil liberties and the law while also protecting human rights and building a diverse, inclusive, and safe society? When is it appropriate to deny visa applications because of a person’s political views?
Panelists
Cecillia Wang, Deputy Legal Director, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Austin Kocher, Research Assistant Professor, Syracuse University
Beth Lyon, Associate Dean for Experiential Education, Clinical Professor of Law, and Clinical Program Director, Cornell Law School
Gautam Hans, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
3. March 19 » John Washington’s Book Tour 📚
Event Essentials
Full Title: John Washington presents "The Case for Open Borders" in conversation w/ Austin Kocher and José Luis Sanz
🌎 Red Emma’s Bookstore in Baltimore, Maryland.
🚀 Book event.
📆 Tuesday, March 19, 2024
🕥 7:00 pm
✅ RSVP here.
Book Overview
Because of restrictive borders, human beings suffer and die. Closed borders force migrants seeking safety and dignity to journey across seas, trudge through deserts, and clamber over barbed wire. In the last five years alone, at least 60,000 people have died or gone missing while attempting to cross a border. As we deny, cast out, and crack down, we have stripped borders of their creative potential — as lines of contact, catalyst, and blend — turning our thresholds into barricades.
Brilliant and provocative, The Case for Open Borders deflates the mythology of national security through border lockdowns by revisiting their historical origins; it counters the conspiracies of immigration’s economic consequences; it urgently considers the challenges of climate change beyond the boundaries of narrow national identities.
4. March 20 » Tracking the State 🔢
Event Essentials
Full Title: Tracking the Deportation State: Public Records Requests, Data Analysis, and Research on Immigration Enforcement
🌎 Barnard College in New York City, New York.
🚀 Scholarly talk.
📆 Wednesday, March 20, 2024
🕥 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Event Overview
One of the most significant barriers to scholarly research on U.S. border enforcement and immigration control is institutional closure. Closed institutions—such as immigrant detention centers, immigration courts, and ports of entry along the border—create added barriers to researcher access and limit the production of knowledge that might critique, reform, or transform these systems.
To challenge institutional closure, TRAC (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse) at Syracuse University has spent the last 30 years using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and litigation to make large government datasets on immigration enforcement available to researchers and to the wider public. TRAC’s data provides one-of-a-kind insight into who gets asylum, how many immigrants are detained, and where immigrants facing deportation live—all at a scale that enables multi-disciplinary mixed-methods research.
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Have a great tour!