Human Rights and Immigration

This course explores the tense relation between immigration, nation-states, and human rights. What are the rights of documented/undocumented immigrants? What kind of human rights abuses are these people subjected to? What renders non-citizens so vulnerable to various forms of violence, discrimination, and mistreatment? To what extent can these problems be addressed and remedied by appeals to human rights? In what ways does the contemporary condition of non-citizens reveal the limits, paradoxes, and promises of human rights? In this upper level political science course, we will address these challenging, intriguing, and somewhat disconcerting questions through an interdisciplinary inquiry.