Frequently Asked Questions

Authors must be AILA members or AILA staff, folks who are actively engaged in AILA at the chapter, regional, or national level, or specially invited guest authors. Anyone who has volunteered with an AILA pro bono project, such as at a detention center or with the Military Assistance Project, may submit a piece about that experience. Don’t fit in to one of those categories? To send blog post submissions or run an idea by the editorial team, please email Belle Woods (bwoods@aila.org) and we’ll happily discuss it with you.

Non-members wanting to write for the blog may partner with an AILA member on a post, or do a question and answer piece with the AILA member interviewing the non-member. If you have an idea that doesn’t quite fit into a blog post, share it with our digital media team for consideration as a video topic.

400-800 words is the usual range; if you have more to say, you might want to consider doing a longer article elsewhere and then offering a shorter blog post on the same topic but with original content to Think Immigration.

Share! AILA will be encouraging its membership and readers to share the piece, but you have access to a network that is interested in what you have to say and what you think about immigration – share it! Use social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and feel free to repost on your firm’s blog, citing that the piece originally appeared on Think Immigration.

We don’t have any set limit on how many times an individual writer can submit and have posts published. If you have something interesting to say, please do! We’ll always let you know what our thoughts and/or concerns about a piece are before we publish or decline.

You submit your piece, making sure it follows the guidelines we’ve outlined in these FAQs. We’ll acknowledge receipt and let you know if it has been selected for publication (submission is not a guarantee of publication). If so, we start the editing process. We will always reconfirm with you before posting and we will never publish a piece without getting your approval on any substantive changes (correcting typographical errors in the text and making suggested editorial changes.)

No. Think Immigration requires that each piece be exclusive to us, that means it can’t have been posted or published elsewhere. That includes on social media, in a news outlet as an op-ed, or your firm’s website. So if you have a long post you’ve already hit “post” for on Facebook, please don’t send it to us as original content. If you want to take a 100 word post from Facebook and expand upon it, bringing in new ideas and reworking it entirely, that would be fine. When in doubt, send us an email to ask!

The contents of all material available on this Internet site, as well as any material distributed by means of social networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), are copyrighted by the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) unless otherwise indicated. All rights are reserved by AILA, and content may not be reproduced, downloaded, disseminated, published, or transferred in any form or by any means, except with the prior written permission of AILA, except as set forth in the reprint policy below. No copyright is claimed on unaltered U.S. government materials. Copyright infringement is a violation of federal law subject to criminal and civil penalties.

Any reprinting of AILA publications (including reposting of AILA website content on a private website) is by permission from AILA and the author. Authors may approve reposting/publishing of content as long as attribution to the AILA blog is clearly noted. Example: “This post was originally published on AILA’s Think Immigration blog [link]”