WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., March 1, 2005 – Violations of the rights of immigrants in the 1930s that the nation may be likely to repeat in the post-9/11 world will be discussed by a nationally-respected expert on immigration law on March 10, 2005, at 5:00 p.m. in the Judicial Institute Lecture Hall at Pace Law School, 78 North Broadway in White Plains. A reception will be held immediately following. Admission to this lecture is free of charge and open to the public.

Pace Law School’s fifteenth annual Dyson Distinguished Lecture will be presented by Kevin R. Johnson, a professor of public interest law and Chicano/a studies at the law school at the University of California at Davis. Johnson’s 1999 book, How Did You Get to Be Mexican?  A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity, was nominated for the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and he has written extensively in national and international journals on immigration law and policy, racial identity and civil rights.

According to Johnson, legal scholars have paid little attention to the forced "repatriation" of an estimated one million persons of Mexican ancestry from the United States during the Great Depression. In a time of national economic crisis, the hope was to reduce the welfare rolls and to save jobs for true "Americans."  He will argue that during the repatriation campaign, federal, state, and local officials violated the constitutional and statutory rights of the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American communities. 

Johnson’s lecture, "The Forgotten 'Repatriation' of Persons of Mexican Ancestry and Lessons for the 'War on Terror,'” will also focus on the modern relevance of the repatriation campaign in evaluating the measures taken by the U.S. government in response to the events of September 11. In both cases, facing a national crisis, the government felt compelled to act and spawned racist and nativist sentiment. The lecture will draw out the historical and legal parallels between these two episodes in U.S. legal history.

Johnson is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Mabie/Apallas Public Interest Professor of Law and Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis School of Law. He also has published Race, Civil Rights, and American Law: A Multiracial Approach; Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader; and his latest, The "Huddled Masses" Myth: Immigration and Civil Rights. A graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, Johnson earned his undergraduate degree in economics from UC Berkeley. Johnson has served on the Legal Services of Northern California board of directors since 1996, was vice president of the board, and is the current president of the board. He joined the UC Davis law faculty in 1989 and was named associate dean for academic affairs in 1998. A regular participant in national and international conferences, Johnson has also held leadership positions in the Association of American Law Schools. In 2003, Johnson was elected to the American Law Institute.

Founded in 1976, Pace Law School is a New York Law School with a suburban campus in White Plains, N.Y., twenty miles north of New York City. Part of Pace University, the school offers the JD program for full-time and part-time day and evening students. Its postgraduate program includes the LLM and SJD degrees in Environmental Law and an LLM in Comparative Legal Studies. Pace has one of the nation's top-rated Environmental Law programs and its Clinical Education program also is nationally ranked, offering clinics in domestic violence prosecution, environmental law, securities arbitration, criminal justice, and disability rights. www.law.pace.edu 

Pace is a comprehensive, independent university with campuses in New York City, Pleasantville and White Plains, N.Y., and a Hudson Valley Center at Stewart International Airport in New Windsor, N.Y. More than 14,000 students are enrolled in undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs in the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, Lubin School of Business, School of Computer Science and Information Systems, School of Education, Lienhard School of Nursing and Pace Law School. www.pace.edu