The Other Side of the Water: Immigration and the Promise of Racial Justice

The series concludes with a conversation with E. Tendayi Achiume, U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance, and Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. In this episode, Achiume explores the global challenges facing immigrants of color and the “racial borders” that define our world.

In episode five, host Ellie Happel returns to explore past and current approaches in organizing, activism, and movement lawyering to vindicate the promise of equal protection for immigrants of color.  Featured guests—organizer Ninaj Raoul, Executive Director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, and attorney Sejal Zota, Co-Founder and Legal Director of Just Futures Law—discuss how social movements are essential to legal progress, sharing lessons from the 1990s movement for Haitian immigrant rights and more recent organizing to challenge increasingly oppressive immigration laws. 

In part two, host Sarah Hamilton-Jiang continues discussions on anti-Blackness in immigration law with Nana Gyamfi of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and Professor Alina Das. The episode explores the challenges Black immigrants face in the era of Trump, and how to address some of those challenges within the immigrant rights movement.

In part one, host Sarah Hamilton-Jiang meets with immigration Professor Alina Das, co-director of NYU School of Law's Immigrant Rights Clinic; Nana Gyamfi, Executive Director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration; and Historian and Associate Professor Carl Lindskoog of Raritan Valley Community College to consider the history of anti-Blackness and criminalization in immigration law. Through this recounting of history, the episode explores the role of anti-Blackness in the development of our modern-day immigration carceral system.

In Episode two of The Other Side of the Water, host Raymond Audain revisits Jean v. Nelson and Justice Marshall's dissent with some of the people closest to the litigation. The episode features Ira Kurzban, Irwin Stotzky, Muzaffar Chishti, Richard Revesz, and Steven Forester.

This series begins with a conversation between host Ellie Happel and nationally acclaimed and award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat. Danticat shares personal accounts from her childhood in Haiti, her experience emigrating to the U.S. in 1981, and her work and identity as an immigrant artist.  Danticat arrived in the U.S. at a time when thousands of Haitians sought political asylum to escape the political persecution and extreme poverty of the Duvalier regime. The year 1981 also marked the beginning of the U.S. policy to detain immigrants arriving from Haiti and other parts of the world. The detention policy was widely challenged in a series of cases that culminated in Jean, the topic of episode two. 

Introducing the Other Side of the Water: Immigration and the Promise of Racial Justice