Hiroshi Motomura

Title: Professor
Department: Law
Email: motomura@law.ucla.edu

Current Project(s):

  • Officially, I am the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, where I teach immigration law, immigrants’ rights, and civil procedure (less frequently). I’ve been at UCLA since 2007, and before that I was a member of the law faculties at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. I’ve written widely on a variety of immigration and citizenship law topics, including the constitutional law of immigration (in many law review articles), the relationship between migration and citizenship (especially in Americans in Waiting, Oxford Univ. Press 2006), and unauthorized migration (especially in Immigration Outside the Law, Oxford Univ. Press 2014). I’ve also recently published law review articles on DACA and on “sanctuary” jurisdictions.
  • My current scholarly project has the working title, The New Migration Law. It is a book that connects four inquiries: (1) are immigrants’ rights a form of civil rights, and what are the advantages and limits of this framing?; (2) how are immigration law, human rights, and refugee protection related to each other, and what does this clustering prioritize or neglect?; (3) how is migration related to international trade and development, and how does that relationship affect the connections between migration and citizenship?; and (4) how is economic inequality in migrant-receiving countries relevant to migration policy, including the civil rights framework that is the focus of Part 1?

Available Publications/Books:

  • Immigration Outside the Law. Oxford University Press (2014).
  • Americans In Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States. Oxford University Press (2006).


Tagged: Immigration, Law