Practising Immigration and Refugee Law in Hawai'i with Esther Yoo

05/25/24 • 55 min

Meet Esther Yoo, Director of the Refugee and Immigration Law Clinic at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai'i. We talk about how immigration and refugee law clients and issues are unique in Hawai'i and the kind of representation and challenges her clinic and students address. They provide services to unaccompanied children, migrant workers and asylum seekers through mobile clinics. We also talk about the tensions that migrants working in farms and tourist spots like hotels, owned by corporations in continental US, represent vis-a-vis Native Hawaiian and local claims of dispossession and imperialism.

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Home Rule and Nandita Sharma

Meet Dr. Nandita Sharma, author of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. Her provocative book interrogates the nation-state system and the anti-colonial and post-colonial aspiration to seek nationalized sovereignty through a terr=itorialized form - that sovereignty as territorial rule is the pinnacle of liberation for some communities. In this conversation, I ask Dr. Sharma some tough questions and she provides an articulate invitation to think about things differently as we discuss how we move towards a decolonized and more equitable world.

Next Episode

History of Chinese Migration to Hawai'i

Meet Douglas Chong, director of the Hawai'i Chinese History Centre. We talk about the long historical presence of Chinese in Hawai'i, how personal and community archives are essential to counter narratives produced by Western sources, and why it is important to remember the past.