Professor Joe Publishes Essay on Immigration in Los Angeles Times

Irene Oritseweyinmi Joe published an essay in the Los Angeles Times on her experience as an undocumented immigrant and how her family owes a debt to President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program that allowed them a path to citizenship.

In the essay, Joe recounts the story of how her father brought the family to the United States from Nigeria in the 1980s so that he could pursue an engineering degree at the University of Texas at Austin as well as the sacrifices her parents made, working service jobs to put their children through college. She expresses gratitude to the Republican policies of the Reagan era that made it possible for them to become U.S. citizens, but also dismay that the “story can’t be replicated today because so many Republicans refuse to even consider a path to citizenship for undocumented residents.”

“Like my family, nearly half of the nation’s suspected 11 million undocumented immigrants arrived in the United States legally with temporary, non-immigrant visas,” Joe writes. “These weren’t people who used criminal connections or secretive behavior to sneak over borders in the dead of night. Rather, these were people who ‘stood in line,’ who worked hard to achieve something in their home country that led the U.S. government to grant them a visa. Despite their legal arrival and contribution to the American economy, however, barriers impede nearly all paths to citizenship.”  

Born in Nigeria, Joe has a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She has clerked with Judge Napoleon Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California and served as the Binder Teaching Fellow at UCLA School of Law.  Her interests as a legal scholar include the development of theoretical frameworks for reshaping under-resourced criminal justice institutions.