As the academic year is coming to an end, it is time to celebrate the closing of our master's programme in International Migration and Refugee Law. There is all the more reason to celebrate this year, as 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of the programme.
ACMRL kindly invites you to join us for the closing event, which will feature a lecture by Hiroshi Motomura and a presentation from the Migration Law Clinic. Please find more details in the programme below. We hope to see you there!
Date: 10 June 2025, 15.00 – 17.15
Venue: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NU-building, Theater3-NU-2C33
Registration: secretariaat.sb.rch@vu.nl
Programme
15.00 Opening by Martijn Stronks, head of the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law
15.05 Lecture Hiroshi Motomura, Borders and Belonging
Borders and Belonging is a pathbreaking, comprehensive, and compact analysis of responses to human migration. By answering questions that are rarely asked together, this book’s approach is unique. Borders and Belonging starts with an inquiry into how countries restrict movement, rights, and privileges based on citizenship and immigration status. The book next suggests ways to think about challenges to national borders. Sometimes, people make claims based on their humanity, objecting to national borders that inflict harm that no one human being should have to endure. At other times, people make claims of a different sort—based on belonging, or being part of communities in a given country. Borders and Belonging next applies these concepts to analyze who should be able to be enter a country, and how to think about someone entering for a temporary or indefinite stay. The book next looks at responses to people without lawful status, and at enforcement. The final three chapters delve deeper, starting with ways to respond genuinely to immigration skeptics or opponents, and then discussing what it means to address the root causes of migration. The last chapter of the book explores the injustices that national borders can enable, the best ways to make decisions about immigration, and the role of history in immigration policy. The unique contribution of Borders and Belonging is its unprecedented synthesis of many ways to think about national borders and migration.
Hiroshi Motomura is Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law, Faculty Co-Director, Center for Immigration Law and Policy. He his the author of several important books on migration and migration theory, among which his acclaimed book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford 2006) and Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014).
15.50 Discussants
- Maxime Schoots, Master student, International Migration and Refugee Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Sander de Poorter, Master student, Law and Politics of International Security, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Lieneke Slingenberg, Professor Migrants and the Rule of Law, Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law
16.15 Q&A
16.30 Tea break
16.45 Presentation Migration Law Clinic
‘From Nationality to Ethnicity: Rethinking the Civic Integration Exam Abroad according to the Prohibition of Ethnic and Racial Discrimination in EU Law’
by IMRL Master students Sterre Nederpel, Mart Bornebroek, Annie Lei, Annabella O'Sullivan, Alessia Cigna
This expert opinion from the Migration Law Clinic addresses whether the distinction between exempt and non-exempted nationalities under the Wet Inburgering Buitenland (Act on Integration Abroad) aligns with the EU’s prohibition of discrimination, particularly on the grounds of ethnicity and race. While the (proposed) preliminary questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union focus on bilateral and economic agreements as justification for the distinction, we suggest that the Court should also consider the broader implications of differential treatment. Our analysis highlights how the issue of discrimination, especially concerning ethnicity and race, has received limited attention in the Court’s reasoning to date. We believe the present case merits closer judicial scrutiny of the possible ethnic and racial discriminatory consequences associated with nationality-based distinctions.
17.05 Discussion
17.15 Closing and drinks
You can download the programme here.