Yale Law Students Receive 2018 Soros Fellowships
Four Yale Law students have received the 2018 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a graduate school fellowship for outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States.
The students were selected from 1,766 applicants. Each of the recipients was chosen for their potential to make significant contributions to U.S. society, culture, or their academic field and will receive up to $90,000 in funding for the graduate program of their choice.
The students selected from Yale Law School include HaoYang (Carl) Jiang ’20, Aseem Mehta ’20, Wazhma Sadat ’19, and incoming student Joel Sati.
“Whether it is through scientific discovery, business, literature, medicine, or law, immigrants enrich our everyday lives in the United States in profound ways. As a country, we need to refocus our attention on immigrant contributions,” said Craig Harwood, who directs the Fellowship program, which is celebrating its 20-year anniversary.
Hungarian immigrants Daisy M. Soros and Paul Soros (1926-2013) founded the program in 1997.
Yale Law School 2018 Soros Fellow Bios:
Award to support work toward a JD at Yale Law School
Wazhma Sadat was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in a setting where her educational opportunities were severely limited by the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education. When the Taliban’s stringent policies threatened the lives of Afghan civilians, Sadat’s family joined the millions of displaced Afghans who crossed multiple borders in search of peace and education. As a refugee in Pakistan, Sadat attended a school for displaced Afghans during the day and wove carpets with her six siblings at night.
After the fall of the Taliban, Sadat’s family returned to Kabul permanently where she finished high school and travelled to the United States for the first time as a high school exchange student. Upon her return to Afghanistan, Sadat worked on various initiatives across the country that improved women’s access to education and furthered the economic empowerment of Afghan women.
Sadat would subsequently be the first Afghan woman to graduate from Yale College. Soon after college, she cofounded Firoz Academy, an ed-tech startup that aims to provide educational and e-employment opportunities for the less privileged in war-stricken countries such as Afghanistan.
Currently, Sadat attends Yale Law School by day and teaches students in Afghanistan by night. She believes her life’s work will be to advocate for and provide educational opportunities for the less privileged in the Muslim world.
Award to support work toward a JD at Yale Law School and a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy at UC Berkeley
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Joel Sati immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. Early on, Sati's mother worked night and double shifts at a Kennesaw, Georgia gas station to make ends meet. In 2010, after moving to Maryland and as he was applying to colleges, Sati found out that he was undocumented. This meant that though he was accepted to four-year colleges, he had almost no financial aid options.
In January 2012, Sati's mother put money together and recommended that he attend Montgomery College. That summer, President Barack Obama issued Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which provided critical protection from deportation for individuals like Sati. That summer, he also participated in activism surrounding Maryland’s DREAM Act, which allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at Maryland’s public colleges and universities. In tandem, these policies allowed Sati to complete his associate’s degree. More importantly, his courses in philosophy provided the language and lens to understand law and immigration and what it means for laws and governments to call individuals “illegal” or “alien.”
Sati then continued his college education, activism, and research at the City College of New York (CCNY). While a student, Sati was a youth organizer for African Communities Together, where he mobilized African youth around immigration issues. He also co-designed and co-taught a black political thought course at CCNY that explored texts such as The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins, The Racial Contract by Charles Mills, Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The course is now a permanent offering in CCNY’s Political Science Department.
As a PhD student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at UC Berkeley and a JD candidate at Yale Law School, Sati’s work examines the intersections of law, epistemology, and philosophy as they relate to contemporary issues of noncitizenship and illegality. His work fleshes out a concept he titles “illegalization,” defined as the legal-institutional processes that continuously cast people as less-than-capable knowers in the law.
Award to support work toward a JD at Yale Law School
HaoYang (Carl) Jiang was born in Tianjin, China and attempted to claim asylum in the United States at an early age. After he arrived, Jiang faced an uncertain immigration status, experienced intermittent hunger and homelessness throughout adolescence, and was abandoned by his family while residing on the South Side of Chicago.
Jiang survived with the support of friends and teachers, and at age 15 was fostered by his high school debate coach and received permanent residency. His foster care experience and admiration for the educators who saved his life motivated him to become a seventh grade English teacher in Las Vegas through Teach for America following college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
While inspired by his students’ successes, Jiang grew increasingly frustrated with the wider educational landscape, and in particular, the school-to-prison pipeline. As a result, he transitioned from the classroom to the courtroom, becoming an Urban Fellow at the New York City Law Department within the Family Court Division. There, he worked on issues related to juvenile delinquency, restorative justice, and implicit bias—ultimately facilitating bias reduction trainings for the Perception Institute, a consortium of social scientists and public interest attorneys. Jiang also became a certified peacemaker at the Red Hook Community Justice Center, where he worked with misdemeanor offenders to take healing steps in repairing harm caused to their victims and communities.
Jiang hopes to return to Chicago and work alongside underserved communities at the intersection of education, community economic development, and criminal justice reform.
Award to support work toward a JD at Yale Law School
Aseem Mehta imagines a world without borders, real or imagined. His vision is informed by interlocking histories: the Indian independence movement, social mobility through migration, and racial justice organizing in the United States. These forces shaped his family’s experiences and conspired to bring him to life as a New American in Syracuse, New York.
Recognizing the liberating power of people in motion, Mehta is committed to dismantling the laws, ideologies, and structures that deny communities agency and mobility. As a Fellow with Immigrant Justice Corps, Mehta advocated alongside immigrant communities against deportation in New York and South Texas. While representing detained refugee families in Dilley, TX, he organized with incarcerated individuals to expose discriminatory policies and unjust conditions of confinement to national media outlets, building momentum for related litigation. Mehta’s engagement with movement strategies also includes collaborating with community organizers at the Urban Justice Center to advocate for fairer treatment of welfare recipients and helping to facilitate a campaign to bring faith leaders to the forefront of the fight for “net neutrality” with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
Mehta is delighted to have returned to New Haven to study legal strategies for supporting social movements. At Yale Law School, he is grateful to work with thoughtful mentors and colleagues in the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic to challenge exclusionary practices that underlie the logic of borders.
