This year marks the 135th Anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Join APILSA for a presentation on the legal history of immigration exclusion, and a discussion of the parallels between Chinese Exclusion and the Trump executive orders that exclude nationals from six predominantly Muslim countries.

This panel will place Professor Lucas Guttentag, a national expert on immigration law, in conversation with Katherine Toy, the President of the Board of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. Professor Guttentag will explain the legal history of immigration exclusion and other discriminatory legislation that specifically targeted ethnic Chinese and other Asians. Katherine Toy will describe her family’s US immigration history, which dates back to the 1800s, and the work of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Chinese food will be provided. RSVP here.

Speakers:

Lucas Guttentag

Lucas Guttentag is a national expert on immigration law and immigrants’ rights litigation. He is the founder and former national director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, which he led from 1985 to 2011. He has litigated complex civil rights, class action, and constitutional cases in courts throughout the United States, including successfully arguing in the Supreme Court. In 2017, he will return from serving in the Obama administration, most recently as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson.

Katherine Toy

An educator by training, Katherine Toy’s passion for the Angel Island Immigration Station project comes from years of work with her students to discover their own immigrant and migrant stories, and from her own firm belief that “everyday people make history every day.” A fifth-generation Chinese American, Ms. Toy’s own ancestors traveled frequently between the United States and China in the early twentieth century, subjecting them to the interrogation faced by all Chinese during the era of exclusion. Ms. Toy has been involved with the work of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation for more than a decade, serving as the organization’s first Executive Director and now as a member of the Board of Directors. Ms. Toy holds a bachelor and a master’s degree from Stanford University where she now works to engage alumni in positions of volunteer leadership.

Moderator: Titi Liu

Titi Liu is the Director of International Public Interest Initiatives at the Levin Center. She develops and implements programs that support students who are pursuing a career path in international public interest lawyering and serves as a resource for leading practitioners in the field, with a focus on transitional societies.

Titi has a long career advancing social justice issues both domestically and internationally. She was the law and rights program officer for the Ford Foundation in Beijing, China and a State Department and USAID consultant. She has been extensively published in the US and in China on the relationship between litigation and social change.

She was most recently the Executive Director of the Asian Law Caucus, the first organization in the country to promote, advance and represent the legal and civil rights of Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Prior to joining the Caucus, she was the Garvey Schubert Barer visiting professor in Asian Law at the University of Washington.