Hiroshi Motomura

Born in Japan, Hiroshi Motomura came to the United States at age three with his family. Due to nationality laws at the time, Motomura was technically stateless at birth. Motomura’s father had been born in the U.S. to Japanese parents, however, which ultimately helped Motomura become a citizen later in his life.

“In my own family, my father’s a U.S. citizen but really felt Japanese, my mother was a Japanese citizen who felt Japanese, I grew up in this country feeling very American but finding out as a young teenager that I had no citizenship at all,” he told NPR. “It shows that in one family, we often have a people separated into different legal statuses by the accident of their birth.”

Informed by this upbringing, Motomura is now a leading scholar of U.S. immigration and citizenship law, serving as the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and faculty codirector of the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. His work has been influential across academic disciplines and in federal, state, and local policymaking. He has testified before the U.S. Congress and served as cocounsel or a volunteer consultant in many litigated cases and policy matters. Motomura also cofounded the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network and received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Motomura has authored several books, including Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States and Immigration Outside the Law, both of which won the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Awards in the law and legal studies category. In 2025, he released Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy.

Discussing his work, he told UCLA, “Immigration law isn’t just about the wall. It’s about what happens inside communities and whose voices are heard in shaping those communities.”

Published June 2026