Immigrants, Markets, and Rights: The United States As an Emerging Migration State

In the pages that follow, we will develop the concept of the migration state and examine U.S. immigration trends from the late nineteenth century up to 2003 in light of labor market dynamics and the business cycle. We then look at the emergence of the United States as a migration state and the rise of rights-based politics and rights-markets coalitions in the period from 1945 to 1990. These coalitions in the U.S. Congress are key to understanding immigration policy outputs and outcomes. The argument can be generalized to cover other liberal democracies in Western Europe, Canada, and Australia

From Expert Administration to Accountability Network: A New Paradigm for Comparative Administrative Law

Notwithstanding the radically changed landscape of contemporary administrative governance, the categories that guide comparative administrative law and that determine what will be compared remain similar to those used at the founding of the discipline in the late 1800s. These categories are rooted in confidence in an expert bureaucracy to accomplish public purposes and are mainly twofold - administrative organization and judicial review. This outdated model has limited the ability of comparative law to engage with contemporary debates on the administrative state, which instead display considerable skepticism of public administration and are premised on achieving the public good through a plural accountability network of public and private actors. This Article seeks to correct the anachronism by reframing comparative administrative law as an accountability network of rules and procedures designed to embed public administration and civil servants in their liberal democratic societies: accountability to elected officials, organized interests, the courts, and the general public. Based on this paradigm, the Article compares American and European administrative law in a global context. Among the many differences explored are parliamentary versus presidential political control, pluralist versus neo-corporatist forms of self-regulation and public-private collaboration, judicial review focused on fundamental rights versus policy rationality, and reliance on ombudsmen in lieu of courts. The Article concludes with a number of suggestions for how comparative law can speak to current debates on reforming administrative governance

Means to an End: An Assessment of the Status-blind Approach to Protecting Undocumented Worker Rights

This article applies the tenets of bureaucratic incorporation theory to an investigation of bureaucratic decision making in labor standards enforcement agencies (LSEAs), as they relate to undocumented workers. Drawing on 25 semistructured interviews with high-level officials in San Jose and Houston, I find that bureaucrats in both cities routinely evade the issue of immigration status during the claims-making process, and directly challenge employers’ attempts to use the undocumented status of their workers to deflect liability. Respondents offer three institutionalized narratives for this approach: (1) to deter employer demand for undocumented labor, (2) the conviction that the protection of undocumented workers is essential to the agency’s ability to regulate industry standards for all workers, and (3) to clearly demarcate the agency’s jurisdictional boundaries to preserve institutional autonomy and scarce resources. Within this context, enforcing the rights of undocumented workers becomes simply an institutional means to an end

The Congressional Dynamics of Immigration Reform

This paper focuses on the congressional dynamics of American immigration reform. Working paper presented at the Baker Institute Latin America Initiative conference "Immigration Reform: A System for the 21st Century."Unauthorized immigration and the status of millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States are subjects that for years have spurred ferocious debate over the airwaves, on campaign trails and in statehouses across the country. Yet these fiery battles stood in bold contrast to the deep freeze that enveloped comprehensive immigration reform in the halls of Congress since the start of the Obama administration. But at the start of Obama’s second term, the changing demography of American democracy produced the seemingly impossible: the emergence of significant, bipartisan legislation tackling this issue. This paper focuses on the congressional dynamics of American immigration reform. How Congress shapes immigration politics and policy reflects several recurrent and emergent patterns. One of the most important dynamics is the fact that the federal courts long have granted Congress sweeping control over immigration while the issue also generates distinctive partisan and intraparty conflicts that regularly bedevil major reform efforts. These political fissures point to a second pattern: Congressional action on immigration reform typically requires the formation of “strange bedfellow” alliances that are unstable and demand “grand bargains” to address disparate goals. The result is often legislation that introduces a new set of daunting immigration policy dilemmas. Finally, one of the most crucial dynamics of congressional immigration policymaking has been a shift over time from relatively insulated client politics to increased engagement by mass publics and key voting blocs. This expanding scope of conflict and its impact on congressional immigration politics receives the most extensive attention in this essay. In the contemporary politics of immigration reform, lawmakers now balance the demands of well-organized lobbies and advocacy groups with grassroots constituency pressures and electoral calculations

“A State of Immigrants”: A New Look at the Immigrant Experience in Oregon

136 pagesThis work was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

“A State of Immigrants”: A New Look at the Immigrant Experience in Oregon

155 pagesEn 2008, docentes de la Universidad de Oregón publicaron un reporte titulado “La experiencia de los inmigrantes en Oregón.” Ya que la población inmigrante y refugiada en Oregón ha presentado un mayor aumento desde la década del 1990, les autores buscaban ampliar el conocimiento público sobre la experiencia de les inmigrantes en Oregón, documentar las contribuciones de les inmigrantes tanto en la comunidad como en los espacios de trabajo, y ofrecer recomendaciones que ayudarían a un exitoso proceso de integración de les inmigrantes a la vida social, económica y cívica del estado. El informe se difundió ampliamente y generó un debate reflexivo sobre el papel vital de las inmigrantes en el estado y la necesidad de generar acciones y políticas que aborden sus necesidades e intereses

Wafer and reticle positioning system for the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Engineering Test Stand

This paper is an overview of the wafer and reticle positioning system of the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUVL) Engineering Test Stand (ETS). EUVL represents one of the most promising technologies for supporting the integrated circuit (IC) industry's lithography needs for critical features below 100nm. EUVL research and development includes development of capabilities for demonstrating key EUV technologies. The ETS is under development at the EUV Virtual National Laboratory, to demonstrate EUV full-field imaging and provide data that supports production-tool development. The stages and their associated metrology operated in a vacuum environment and must meet stringent outgassing specifications. A tight tolerance is placed on the stage tracking performance to minimize image distortion and provide high position repeatability. The wafer must track the reticle with less than {+-}3nm of position error and jitter must not exceed 10nm rms. To meet these performance requirements, magnetically levitated positioning stages utilizing a system of sophisticated control electronics will be used. System modeling and experimentation have contributed to the development of the positioning system and results indicate that desired ETS performance is achievable