33. Discussing Professor Hing’s Book, Humanizing Immigration: How to Transform Our Racist and Unjust System

Bill Ong Hing, Professor, University of San Francisco

On the 33rd episode of Immigration Today! Angeline Chen interviews Professor Bill Ong Hing. Bill Ong Hing is Professor of Law and Migration Studies at the University of San Francisco, and Professor of Law and Asian American Studies Emeritus, at UC Davis. Previously on the law faculties at Stanford University and Golden Gate University, he founded the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco and directs their Immigration & Deportation Defense Clinic. Professor Hing teaches Immigration Law & Policy, Migration Studies, Rebellious Lawyering, and Evidence. He is the author of 6 books and was co-counsel in the US Supreme Court asylum precedent-setting case INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca (1987). Throughout his career, Professor Bill Ong Hing pursued social justice through a combination of community work, litigation, and scholarship. Most recently, he has published his book Humanizing Immigration which argues that immigrant and refugee rights are part of the fight for racial justice and offers a humanitarian approach to reform and abolition.

Professor Hing was passionate about teaching from the moment he stepped foot into law school. He spent his first five years as an attorney representing Spanish speaking and Chinese clients in their deportation needs and visa work. He would also offer evening teaching classes at University of San Francisco and eventually began teaching full time at different campuses. In all if his teaching positions, he remains heavily involved with legal clinic work. Professor Bill Hing has over 50 years of experience in the immigration world and is a strong believer that the conversation around immigration needs to be revisited through a more humanitarian lens. In his most recent book, he offers criticism about the immigration court system and the judges that make decisions in cases, cites to examples of racial injustices in immigration law and ultimately advocates for major reform to the broken immigration system in this country.

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One of the experiences that I write about in the book is interviewing several dozen children that were detained and separated from their families at a border patrol station in Texas right before the pandemic. This was during the Trump administration. It still haunts me. I think about them all the time because many were sick, many had the flu, and they were lonely. They were sad, they were traumatized, and they were malnourished… the youngest person that we interviewed was 2 years old. And this kind of separation continues even during the Biden administration.
— Bill Ong Hing

Humanizing Immigration was just released on October 24th! You can purchase a copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Walmart and many other outlets.  You can connect with Professor Bill Hing via the University of San Francisco website here.

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