Abstract

Excerpted From: Catherine Y. Kim, Narrative in Immigration Law, 32 Asian American Law Journal 1 (2025) (174 Footnotes) (Full Document)

In immigration law and discourse, we often talk about “immigrants” as a class and general “push and pull factors” that lead them to the United States. Contemporary debates about asylum, “economic migrants,” “chain migration,” and undocumented migration typically occur at a level of abstraction bereft of human context. Anti-immigrant rhetoric today, focused on mass deportations and sealing the border, erases the lived experience of the countless immigrants who built, and continue to build, our nation. This Article challenges the flattening and erasure of immigrants by expanding upon Critical Race Theory's rich tradition of narrative methodology to present my own father's immigration story.

Critical Race Theory has long embraced narrative methodology as a means to give voice to outsiders who are otherwise silenced in law. As Professor Mari Matsuda famously stated, “Looking to the bottom--adopting the perspective of those who have seen and felt the falsity of the liberal promise--can assist critical scholars in the task of fathoming the phenomenology of law and defining the elements of justice.” More recently, Professor Jocelyn Simonson contends, “paths of critique must include and even prioritize the voices of marginalized populations who are most directly impacted.” Personal narratives combat the law's flattening of human experience into discrete formalistic categories, and, in doing so, can dispel preconceived notions about the law's purported objectivity. As Professor Richard Delgado writes, “Stories, parables, chronicles, and narratives are powerful means for destroying mindset--the bundle of predispositions, received wisdoms, and shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place.”

Immigration law would seem a natural space for narrative methodology to thrive. By its nature, immigration law privileges the perspective of ““us,” the dominant class of those already comfortably, and legally, ensconced within our borders, while excluding the voices of the “other,” those seeking to join our nation. Immigration law also heavily relies on formalistic categories, such as refugees and asylum seekers, family unification, employment-based migration, and the like. And, discourse about immigration law is dominated by a series of myths that form an unseen backdrop for contemporary debates. Yet, personal narratives that center the voices of immigrants themselves are generally absent in immigration law scholarship.

Narratives can disrupt the dominant discourse painting immigrants in one or two dimensions, allowing us to see the dynamic, complex, and sometimes contradictory factors leading individuals to come to the United States and settle here. It can be used to telescope backward to convey an individual's full life story, departing from current legal practice, which typically looks only at a snapshot of the individual at the moment of entry or immediately prior to entry. My father's journey to the United States did not begin with his desire to study here, nor with his wife's sister's husband's admission to the United States, the formal mechanisms for his legal admission. Rather, it began far earlier, starting with his birth to a wealthy industrialist family in a Korea colonized by Japan in the northern half of the peninsula, which would then become occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II. His immigration story continues through his family's fleeing the north for the U.S.-occupied south, leading to my father's permanent separation from his father and brothers. His story accounts for the widespread poverty, displacement, and violence during the Korea War (1950-1953), waged by the United States against North Korea, China, and communism more generally. And it encompasses my father's role as a student protester during the dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee in South Korea during the 1960s, as well as the poor economic conditions in South Korea through the 1970s. Finally, it includes his eventual settlement with my family in what was quickly becoming the celebrated Koreatown in Los Angeles. Yet our immigration documents, status determinations, laws, and popular discourse do not consider these integral parts of the story.

This Article aims to show how personal narratives in immigration law scholarship can play a critical role in challenging conventional myths and understandings. My father's story adds a human dimension to the severe restrictions to humanitarian relief under international and U.S. law, particularly the failure to consider the United States's complicity in the conditions that cause migrants to leave their homelands. In doing so, his narrative builds on a growing literature examining immigration as a legacy of postcolonial and neocolonial policies of developed nations. This narrative also underscores the role that race continues to play in immigrant admission categories even after the elimination of the national origins quotas in 1965, and how contemporary immigration policy favors those who already enjoy a degree of privilege. It thus contributes to a robust body of scholarship analyzing the role of race in immigration law and the “model minority” myth. More broadly, I hope that sharing my father's story encourages others to do the same, catalyzing a new body of narrative scholarship in immigration law that provides a clearer understanding of who immigrants are and what forces led them to--or obstructed them from--the United States.

This Article proceeds as follows. Part I introduces some conventional myths and understandings in contemporary immigration law and discourse, which my father's narrative challenges. Part II recounts my father's immigration story. Part III returns to the themes identified in Part I to show how my father's narrative complicates some of the key premises of immigration law. A conclusion follows.

I make no claim that my father's story is representative of immigrants generally. Rather, his story highlights that every person who comes to the United States leaves behind, and also begins, a rich, unique, and often complex story. I also make no claim that my father's story is exceptional; indeed, many immigrant families will identify with parts of it. Nonetheless, narratives like my father's hold the potential to shift polarized debates about whether we should allow more immigrants into the country, which noncitizens should be admitted, and whether we should continue to identify as a nation of immigrants. It is only by hearing the perspectives of immigrants themselves that we begin to grasp the full import and impact of our laws and policies.

[. . .]

My father's story, from his birth in a colonized Korea, through the Korean War, and through the dictatorships of South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, sheds light on several aspects of U.S. immigration law and discourse. It shows the significant restrictions on access to asylum under U.S. and international law, including the failure to consider the United States' role in causing individuals to leave their homelands. It also underscores the role that race continues to play in the preference category system and the way that system favors those who already enjoy a degree of privilege.

As Professor Richard Delgado notes, “Storytelling emboldens the hearer, who may have had the same thoughts and experiences the storyteller describes, but hesitated to give them voice. Having heard another express them, he or she realizes, I am not alone.” It is my hope that this Article encourages others to share their own stories, so that a communion of outsider immigrant voices can be built, providing strength for us and providing others with a better sense of our nation's many peoples. This narrative is a first step toward building a body of scholarship which develops a fuller understanding of what it means to be a nation of immigrants.

Don Forchelli Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School.