The Transnational Labor and Migration Panel will bring together scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of labor rights and migration to examine how economic structures, legal frameworks, and political forces shape the experiences of migrant workers. Against the backdrop of an increasingly volatile administration and shifting political climate, we will explore challenges faced by migrant laborers and discuss strategies to advance support.
Speakers
Sahiba Gill
Sahiba Gill (she/her) is Deputy Legal Director at Global Labor Justice, a strategy hub supporting transnational labor organizing. At GLJ, Sahiba provides legal support for labor organizing campaigns, representing unions of low-wage workers in the global South against governments and corporations in international complaints and negotiations. Her focus is on strategies to build worker power in the global economy and challenge carceral borders and racial capitalism.
Chaumtoli Huq
Chaumtoli Huq (she/her) is a leading expert on employment and labor law, migration and human rights with a focus on social movements in the US and South Asia. She is a Professor of Law at the CUNY School of Law and the founder/Editor of an innovative law and media non-profit, Law@theMargins. Her scholarship explores interrelated issues under the broad theme of Transnational Labor Law and Social Movements which includes how law and social movements interact to create emancipatory visions of global labor and human rights laws and builds worker power. Huq has devoted her professional career focusing on issues impacting workers in the US and South Asia. Along with holding leadership roles at Legal Services of NYC and MFY Legal Services, she also served as Director of the first South Asian Workers’ Rights Project at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund as a Skadden Fellow, the first staff attorney to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
Julia Solórzano
Julia Solórzano is CDM’s Director of Litigation. Prior to joining CDM, Julia was a Senior Staff Attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, where she litigated cases regarding largescale workplace immigration raids in Tennessee and Mississippi and the unionization rights of farmworkers in North Carolina. Julia received her B.A. from Princeton University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. After law school, Julia clerked for U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison of the Southern District of Texas and completed a Skadden Fellowship project focused on the health and safety rights of poultry processing workers.
Michael K.T. Tan (moderator)
Michael K.T. Tan is a Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law, Clinical Lecturer in Law, Associate Research Scholar in Law, and Executive Director of The Movement Project at Yale Law School. The Movement Project is an initiative to reform migration laws and frameworks to manage climate and demographic change, advance the interests of working people, and honor humanitarian goals. Tan previously served as Senior Advisor to the Co-Presidents of Community Change, a nationwide organization that empowers low-income people, particularly low-income people of color, to lead movements for social change. From 2008 to 2022, Tan held a range of roles at the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he began as a recipient of Yale Law School’s Arthur Liman Fellowship and later worked as a Skadden Fellow. Most recently, he served as the Project’s Deputy Director.