FORUM-2025-Shah_FlyerSuffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum and Law School welcome:
Author Ragini Shah upon the publication of Constructed Movements: Extraction and Resistance in Mexican Migrant Communities. The evening’s moderator is Professor Shannon Gleeson, School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell University.
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
120 Tremont Street, Fifth Floor Commons, Boston, MA
6:00 p.m.
This event is free and open to everyone
In-person registration is not required.
Register here to attend via ZOOM.
Theoretically sophisticated and poignantly written, Constructed Movements centers stories from communities in Mexico profoundly affected by emigration to the United States to show how migration extracts resources along racial lines. Shah chronicles how three interrelated dynamics—the maldistribution of public resources, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the US immigration enforcement regime—entrench the necessity of migration as a strategy for survival in Mexico. She also highlights the alternative visions elaborated by migrant community organizations that seek to end the conditions that force migration. Recognizing that reform without recompense will never right an unjust migratory system, Shah concludes with a forceful call for the US and Mexican governments to make abolitionist investments and reparative compensation to directly counteract this legacy of extraction.
Ragini Shah is a Clinical Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School and director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic which she founded in 2007. In June 2024, Shah’s efforts were recognized with a Legal Solidarity Award from one of the clinic’s partner organizations, Justice at Work. Shah’s writing examines immigration law from the perspective of those most impacted.
Shannon Gleeson is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Brooks School of Public Policy. Her books include Legalized Inequalities: Immigration and Race in the Low-Wage Workplace, forthcoming; Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston; Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Contest State Power; Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States; and Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston.
