Christianity and the Law of Migration. Edited by Silas W. Allard, Kristin E. Heyer, and Raj Nadella. London: Routledge, 2022. Pp.392. $180.00 (cloth); $54.99 (paper); $49.49 (digital). ISBN: 9781032049526.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been an explosion of scholarly works on migration studies written by researchers in both legal studies and religious studies.Despite the welcome scholarly engagement and outcomes, there has been seldom interdisciplinary work between legal scholars and religious thinkers on this important issue in our world.Edited by Silas W. Allard, Kristin E. Heyer, and Raj Nadella, Christianity and the Law of Migration now fills the gap.Contributions from fourteen law and religion scholars cover such legal topics as exclusion, deportation, chain migration, refugees, asylees, borders, integration, and citizenship, along with key theological concepts such as hospitality, theoxenia, sanctuary, theopolitics, and social responsibility.Allard, Heyer, and Nadella organized the book into three parts.In the first, legal scholars engage the contours of both domestic and international migration and migration policy, investigating key themes in the law and migration.In the first chapter, Daniel Kanstroom points out the conceptual and practical limitations of the traditional categories of migration control-exclusion, admission, and deportation-by arguing that they have become "both descriptively inaccurate and normatively inadequate" (11).According to Kanstroom, the highly problematic structural components of the global migration system have intrinsically to do with these traditional categories in that the stories of exclusion, admission, and deportation involve "harsh, punitive, arbitrary, anomalous, discriminatory, and disproportionate" practices (20).Enid Trucios-Haynes focuses on how migration workers are exposed to "discrimination on multiple grounds, such as race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality" (29).Laying out multiple visas categories (including both temporary and long-term work visas), Trucios-Haynes highlights how "lower-skilled workers" face numerous, often insurmountable, roadblocks in seeking employment-based permanent residence (34).It is refreshing and encouraging to see that a legal scholar discovers the ideological source to protect immigrant workers' human rights in Christian ethical values.In a legal argument against former president Trump's 2019 immigration reform plan, which attempted to upend the so-called chain migration immigration system, Bill Ong Hing argues that "family reunification is certainly at the heart of the U.S. immigration system today" (51).On this ground, Hing counterattacks the Trump administration's anti-immigration
Source: Journal of Law and Religion
DOI: 10.1017/jlr.2024.26
Author: Ilsup Ahn
Institution: North Park University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4407259506