Constraint through Delegation: The Case of Executive Control over Immigration Policy

This Article proposes recalibrating the separation of powers between the political branches in the context of their regulation of immigration law\u27s core questions: how many and what types of immigrants to admit to the United States. Whereas Congress holds a virtual monopoly over formal decisionmaking, the executive branch makes de facto admissions decisions using its discretionary enforcement power. As a result of this structure, stasis and excessive prosecutorial discretion characterize the regime, particularly with respect to labor migration. Both of these features exacerbate pathologies associated with illegal immigration and call for a structural response. This Article contends that Congress should create an executive branch agency, marked by indicia of independence, to set visa policy-an avenue increasingly contemplated by reformers. Though it may seem counterintuitive, delegation of greater authority can help constrain executive power by substituting a transparent process, subject to monitoring, for decisionmaking that occurs hidden from view. Delegation can also help overcome limitations in the legislative process that contribute to the current regime\u27s dysfunction, making immigration policy more efficient and effective. The Refugee Act of 1980 provides a parallel that is helpful in thinking through what it would mean to delegate ex ante admissions power to the executive

Solution to the Landau-Zener problem via Susskind-Glogower operators

We show that, by means of a right-unitary transformation, the fully quantized Landau-Zener Hamiltonian in the weak-coupling regime may be solved by using known solutions from the standard Landau-Zener problem. In the strong-coupling regime, where the rotating wave approximation is not valid, we show that the quantized Landau-Zener Hamiltonian may be diagonalized in the atomic basis by means of a unitary transformation; hence allowing numerical solutions for the few photons regime via truncation.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure