A History of Immigration Law: How We Got Here talk by Carlotta Wright de la Cal, PhD Candidate, UC Berkeley and Ming H. Chen, Harry & Lillian Hastings Professor of Law

Since the earliest days of the U.S., immigration and citizenship law have reflected attitudes about race and belonging as well as the economic interests of people in power. Recent events have highlighted the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and the 19th-century birthright citizenship cases. Fears of leftist agitators and foreign spies of all stripes have historically shaped immigration law, and Presidential executive orders eliminating civil rights are nothing new. Come learn about the complex history of U.S. immigration law in a lecture by Carlotta Wright de la Cal, PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley Department of History.

Carlotta Wright de la Cal is a Ph.D. student in History at UC Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of Indigenous history, labor, and migration policy. She studies how railroad corporations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands reshaped mobility, labor patterns, and border control in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ming H. Chen focuses on the intersections of citizenship, race, and equality in Constitutional and administrative law. Her current research is about temporary migrants in the US and Canada. She is the author of Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era and Faculty-Director of the Center for Race, Immigration, Citizenship, and Equality (RICE)

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Co-sponsored by Path to Belonging, a project of the City of Albany; the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Emeryville, and the Albany Reads series, bringing our community together around The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest by Satsuki Ina. Through shared reading and related events, we reflect on history, foster dialogue, and connect past injustices to present-day conversations about civil liberties and belonging.