iroshi Motomura, professor of law at UCLA, has written the most thoughtfully and honestly argued brief for a liberal immigration regime in the United States that one is likely to find. Exploring the implications of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, which afforded undocumented minors unfettered access to public schools, Professor Motomura develops subtle legal, historical, and ethical arguments for opening up America’s borders so as to normalize the movement of hundreds of thousands of migrants who are otherwise “outside the law.”
One virtue of Motomura’s project is that he takes seriously Americans who object to high levels of immigration or who seek to impose severe penalties on the undocumented. Though concerned to advance equality and contain the racial bias that he argues inevitably taints efforts by states and localities to expand their immigration enforcement responsibilities (leading him to support federal preemption of state policies struck down by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States), Motomura refuses to dismiss as “racist” the anxieties motivating such policies.
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