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 This outdated model has limited the ability of comparative law to engage with contemporary debates on the administrative state, which instead display considerable skepticism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

Debates on U.S. Immigration

Shoba S. Wadhia is a contributing author: Use of the Term \u27Illegal Alien,\u27 chapter 33, page 529. This issues-based reference work (available in both print and electronic formats) shines a spotlight on immigration policy in the United States. The U.S. is a nation of immigrants. Yet while the lofty words enshrined with the Statue of Liberty stand as a source of national pride, the rhetoric and politics surrounding immigration policy all-too-often have proven far less lofty. In reality, the apparently open invitation of Lady Liberty seldom has been without restriction. Throughout our history, impassioned debates about the appropriate scope and nature of such restriction have emerged and mushroomed, among politicians, among scholars of public policy, among the general public. In light of the need to keep students, researchers, and other interested readers informed and up-to-date on status of U.S. immigration policy, this volume uses introductory essays followed by point/counterpoint articles to explore prominent and perennially important debates, providing readers with views on multiple sides of this complex issue. While there are some brief works looking at debates on immigration, as well as some general A-to-Z encyclopedias, we offer more in-depth coverage of a much wider range of themes and issues, thus providing the only fully comprehensive point/counterpoint handbook tackling the issues that political science, history, and sociology majors are asked to explore and to write about as students and that they will grapple with later as policy makers and citizens. - From the Publisherhttps://elibrary.law.psu.edu/book_contributions/1003/thumbnail.jp

Debates on U.S. Immigration

Shoba S. Wadhia is a contributing author: Use of the Term \u27Illegal Alien,\u27 chapter 33, page 529. This issues-based reference work (available in both print and electronic formats) shines a spotlight on immigration policy in the United States. The U.S. is a nation of immigrants. Yet while the lofty words enshrined with the Statue of Liberty stand as a source of national pride, the rhetoric and politics surrounding immigration policy all-too-often have proven far less lofty. In reality, the apparently open invitation of Lady Liberty seldom has been without restriction. Throughout our history, impassioned debates about the appropriate scope and nature of such restriction have emerged and mushroomed, among politicians, among scholars of public policy, among the general public. In light of the need to keep students, researchers, and other interested readers informed and up-to-date on status of U.S. immigration policy, this volume uses introductory essays followed by point/counterpoint articles to explore prominent and perennially important debates, providing readers with views on multiple sides of this complex issue. While there are some brief works looking at debates on immigration, as well as some general A-to-Z encyclopedias, we offer more in-depth coverage of a much wider range of themes and issues, thus providing the only fully comprehensive point/counterpoint handbook tackling the issues that political science, history, and sociology majors are asked to explore and to write about as students and that they will grapple with later as policy makers and citizens. - From the Publisherhttps://elibrary.law.psu.edu/book_contributions/1003/thumbnail.jp