New Database Exposes and Tracks anti-Muslim Legislation Across the US

Last week we released a new searchable, public database of anti-Muslim bills designed to institutionalize the exclusion of Muslims from society, and the state legislators across the country who supported the bills. The release of our United States of Islamophobia Database comes as the Islamophobia movement receives further momentum with President Donald Trump’s recent picks of figures noted for their anti-Muslim views for high-level posts, and as the Supreme Court signalled it may rule in favor of Trump’s travel ban mostly targeting Muslim-majority countries, widely known as the “Muslim Ban.”

The database includes detailed information on 216 bills introduced in 43 state legislatures since 2010 that sought to ban “Sharia law,” or a set of guiding principles, from being considered in US courts. In many of the states where anti-Sharia bills were introduced, such as Mississippi, which alone introduced 20 bills, Muslims only account for a fraction of a percent of the population. 

Our analysis shows that the bills were put forth with the intention to exacerbate an already-hostile climate of fear of Muslims and to further institutionalize and legalize their exclusion from society. These findings were documented in the Haas Institute’s “Legalizing Othering: The United States of Islamophobia” report published last September.

"The scrutiny of US state legislation intentionally targeting Muslims—whether introduced, failed, or enacted—is vitally important to understanding a new wave of Islamophobia sweeping the country,” lead researcher and Legalizing Othering co-author Elsadig Elsheikh noted. “Our research finds that this effort is well-financed and highly organized,” added Elsheikh, who heads our Global Justice Program.

Explore the database here and read the full press release here.

Exposing racially-disparate impacts of prison drug treatment programs

Erin M. Kerrison, an affiliated faculty member from our Diversity and Health Disparities research cluster, wrote a new piece for TalkPoverty.org on how prison drug treatment programs too often fail inmates of color. The piece highlights the role of “Therapeutic Communities”  in prison drug addiction treatment, whose success, Kerrison argues, “seems to depend on the race of the participants.” While her research found that these programs seemed to have positive impacts for white inmates—including a certificate of rehabilitation that could be shown to future employers or landlords—the same was not true for Black inmates. “For white graduates, the certificate served as a badge,” Kerrison writes. “For Black graduates, the certificate lingered as a foul stain.” To underscore this point, Kerrison highlights the difference in empathy afforded to white opioid users versus that which was offered to Black users in prior decades.

Also: Watch Erin Kerrison talk as part of our Research to Impact where she discusses similar themes.

Awards and Accolades

Congratulations to two of our Fellows, one current and one former, who are recipients of the prestigious 2018 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Joel Sati, a law student at UC Berkeley, and Natalia Reyes, a current MFA candidate at the University of Iowa and former communications fellow with the Haas Institute, are just two of the 30 “New Americans”—immigrants and children of immigrants—selected for the fellowship. Read more.

Blueprint for a California Where All Belong