This article explores the phenomenon of dog-whistle politics within the context of Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner’s rhetoric, focusing on how coded language is employed to promote ethnonationalist and far-right ideologies in contemporary European political discourse. By conducting a detailed qualitative content analysis of Sellner’s 2024 book Remigration: Ein Vorschlag (Remigration: A Proposal), the study investigates the extent to which ostensibly neutral terms can function as linguistic vehicles for exclusionary, racist, and antisemitic messages to a specific, ideologically aligned audience. While Sellner’s primary influence remains German/Austrian, his tactics reflect global far-right strategies. We thus contextualize his rhetoric through selective comparison with other far-right figures to illuminate shared communication logics. The findings reveal how coded language may shape public discourse while navigating social and legal constraints, with significant implications for political communication, media practices, and policymaking.

Lawyers instruct their clients to make performative and fleeting modifications in comportment to appease judges or officers. But how do they guide their clients to routinize everyday behaviors and lifestyles seen as desirable and respectable by the state? Expanding on theories of social control, nonstate governance, and lawyering, this paper considers the role of lawyers who guide mixed-status couples applying for marriage-based green card and naturalization petitions in the United States. Interviews with immigration attorneys, paralegals, and nonprofit advocates reveal their three-step strategy to shape intimate dimensions of mixed-status couples’ lives that connote marital legitimacy. First, lawyers translate immigration law into personalized checklists that function as the blueprint of marriage that couples must follow. Then, lawyers instruct and correct their clients’ family behaviors so that they are enacted and documented in compliance with vague immigration law as interpreted by the archetypal immigration officer. Crucially, lawyers help couples routinize and painstakingly archive these curated lifestyles for ongoing adjudication. Findings suggest that nonstate actors like immigration lawyers are more than intermediaries who broker and coach; they become domestic counselors who, as indirect agents of the state, coerce subjects toward acculturation.

Scholarly work on the politics of immigration in the U.S. has focused primarily on the influence of local demographics. Less understood are the ways in which local governments respond to demographic changes beyond the city limits. We hypothesize that local governments anticipate future influxes of immigrants from neighboring localities and adjust policies ex ante in order to constrain their movement before it can occur. We predict variation in anti-immigrant legislation as a function of proximity to nearby immigrant populations and find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of the foreign-born population in a city’s surrounding areas doubles the likelihood that a city considers a restrictive policy. The effect is more pronounced when neighboring immigrants originate from Latin America than from other regions. We also find suggestive evidence that knowledge of adjacent foreign-born populations is transmitted via commuting patterns as neighboring populations commute into cities for work. Our research highlights the importance of spatial networks in local politics and how local political units influence one another and engage in an anticipatory strategic response.

In this study, we provide a first-of-its-kind exploration of how strategic messaging by U.S. Attorneys changes during a partisan transition. We leverage original data from United States Attorney’s Office press releases that are used to inform the public about important case developments, offering a window into federal prosecutorial priorities and narratives. Using textual analysis, we examine how these political communications changed in the turnover from the Biden administration to the second Trump administration. Then, we utilize criminal case processing data to evaluate whether the content of press releases tracks with U.S. Attorney charging decisions.

The immigration debate is a major source of political conflict, yet little is known about how citizens themselves perceive it. This paper uses a survey experiment with open-ended questions to examine which arguments respondents attribute to their opponents, which they consider the strongest for the opposing side, and how both compare to the arguments opponents actually use. The study is conducted in Norway, a low-polarization, consensus-oriented context where relatively accurate and charitable interpretations of opponents’ reasoning might be expected. Still, the findings show that while many recognize legitimate arguments on the other side, they attribute considerably weaker arguments to their opponents. Text analysis reveals that their preferred counterarguments resemble opponents’ own more closely than those they attribute to them. This suggests that mutual understanding in the immigration debate is obstructed less by a failure to appreciate opponents’ arguments than a systematic misrepresentation of them.

President Trump and his administration have repeatedly threatened to invoke insurrection powers and unleash US military and National Guard members in American cities in response to civil uprisings and alleged interferences with immigration officials’ actions. In so doing, they raise a specter of significant constitutional clashes over the use of these antiquated emergency authorities. To the extent Congress is unwilling to constrain presidential discretion, the US Supreme Court may be called on to clarify the scope and limits of Insurrection Act powers.

The last 10 years of scientific research analyzing asylum-seekers’ mental health has established high rates of trauma exposure throughout the migratory trajectory. However, limited studies have identified gender-based violence among Central American asylum-seeking women. The purpose of this study was to identify the frequencies of gendered-base violence among asylum-seeking women from Central and South America at a humanitarian respite center (USA) and a tent encampment (Mexico) on both sides of the United States–Mexico Border using data from three independent studies in 2016, 2019, and 2023, respectively. Visual trend analysis identified a peak in domestic violence in 2019, a stable frequency of sexual assault across the three studies, and a downward trend in Study 3 compared to Study 1 for all types of gender-based violence except for domestic violence. Age stratification revealed diverse patterns in trauma rates. Trends in domestic violence differed between the 18–25 (56%) and 26+ years age groups (70%), in one study, substantially higher than the prevalence of the 29% rate among US female community samples. The data highlights the need for immigration reform addressing women’s human rights and provides insights for mental health service providers to promote trauma-informed care for this vulnerable immigrant group.

Providing pro bono legal services is an important professional obligation that ensures that people who cannot afford representation still realize their rights. Unlike impact litigation, which seeks to overturn unjust laws or create new rights, pro bono direct legal services are not typically seen as oriented toward creating social change. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with thirty-six lawyers and non-lawyer legal volunteers, this article explores how bearing witness became a mechanism that blended pro bono services with social movement-like collective action to transform direct legal services within two liminal legal environments, the U.S.–Mexico border and immigration detention. These activities included (1) asserting and publicizing truth in the face of misconceptions and misinformation so the American public understood what was occurring and demanded policy change, (2) recruiting more volunteers to assist asylum seekers and in turn speak out, and (3) documenting the human impact of immigration laws and policies to ensure future harms would not occur. Because interviewees took part in up to three waves of interviews between 2019 and 2023, I also address the perceived outcomes of these efforts, including that interviewees felt that they increased knowledge and shifted some individuals’ perspectives.

Recent research documents that many research designs in the social sciences are underpowered: they can detect only extremely large – often implausible – effects. I show that this problem is structural in the workhorse approach to studying the immigration-crime link: regressing changes in aggregate crime rates on exogenous shifts in local immigrant shares. While this design may identify changes in native criminal behavior, I demonstrate that it is largely uninformative regarding the difference in crime propensities between immigrants and natives. Because immigrants typically comprise a small fraction of the population, even large group-level differences are mechanically diluted. I formalize the minimum detectable gap - the smallest immigrant-native crime difference these regressions can reliably distinguish from zero given standard design parameters. Using Monte Carlo simulations calibrated to real-world immigration and crime data, I demonstrate that conventional designs only achieve adequate statistical power with implausibly large crime differentials and extreme immigration shocks.

In the Progressive Era, the standard of living became a social scientific and policy-relevant bureaucratic measurement. As historians have shown, the ostensibly objective statistical metric of consumption challenged a “market-driven conception of wages or income” and rested on normative assumptions about the ideal standard, family roles, and labor relations.1 It was also embedded in a discourse on who could attain it and how. A migrant-knowledge approach to the development of standard of living measurements explores how American social scientists drew these normative contours in relation to their experience and understanding of what they termed the immigration problem, the influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who sought to live and work in the United States between the 1880s and 1920s. Migrant knowledge encompasses knowledge both by and about immigrants, drawing attention to immigrant actors who cross state borders, bring cultural baggage along with material belongings, and often maintain ties to their places of origin. This concept assumes that immigrants do not have particular knowledge by virtue of being immigrants; rather, it asks how immigration-related experiences, discourses, and institutions shape modes of knowing and communicating that knowledge. It takes knowledge as embodied practice, influenced by material conditions as well as its own materiality.2 This approach frames the debate on immigration and the standard of living as a mutual engagement of both immigrants and native-born Americans, made tangible through their knowledge practices.