Immigration Policy

The chapter on immigration policy provides a good overview of the history of our policies toward immigration and the current status of our federal immigration laws. Immigration is an issue that has been on the systemic agenda of the United States since the mid-19th century. During times of recession, depression, war, or turmoil immigration policy is moved to the institutional agenda, often as a scapegoat for economic and security fears. Immigration policy has historically only been on either agenda at the federal level, but for the past 15 years, immigration policy has been placed on an even more active agenda in many state legislatures. For this reason, I decided to match immigration policy with the theoretical chapter on agenda-setting.

Despite the fact that immigration policy has been on the institutional agendas at both the state and federal-levels since at least September 11th, 2001, it may have surprised you that the core of our immigration policy was created by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The law has been modified by the 1990 Immigration Act and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, but many of the provisions set forth in 1965 are still active. Did this surprise you at all?

Another thing that may have surprised you from the reading is that we place preferences and restrictions on immigration that make it easier for some immigrants to come through legal channels than others. We have tended to give preference to European immigrants over other nationalities, skilled workers over unskilled workers, and the extremely wealthy over all others. Refugees and members of current immigrants' immediate families also receive preferences. Did any of these preferences surprise you or seem unfair?

Since the mid-1990s, we have increasingly been concerned with the problem of illegal or undocumented immigration. I think that this chapter gives a nice balanced overview of the concerns of those on both sides of the debate. It makes clear that increased immigration, particularly illegal or undocumented immigration, may cause problems such as straining the education and public health systems. It may also create benefits through contributions to  social security by young temporary immigrants and creating a supply for both extremely high and low-skilled jobs that Americans are either unwilling or unable to fill. Less obvious in the readings are the human rights concerns associated with a highly demanded underclass supply of labor. Certainly, immigration is a complex issue and one thing that both sides agree on is the need for reform.

One of the strongest parts of the chapter comes in the conclusion of the article. On page 420, Cochran et al. (2011) state:

The arguments over immigration often appear to be driven by anxieties that have nothing to do with immigrants. Immigration is easy to exploit as the cause of many of the nation's problems because immigrants are an easily identifiable and usually relatively powerless element of society. The nativist arguments resonate with people who fear what they do not know or understand. Those who suffer economic dislocation or fear poverty and crime find an easy target in immigrants. Immigrant rights groups often oversimplify the issues and see immigrants as victims in every effort to gain some control over the problems related to immigration. Most observers of immigration policy recognize that some regulation of the flow of immigration is desirable. How to achieve that regulation and how to ensure fairness and humane considerations are at the root of the controversies over immigration policies.

This paragraph perfectly illustrates the difficulty of passing compromise legislation on this issue. One side of the debate is driven by anxiety and the other by a sense of justice. The rational economic man we discussed last week is rarely seen on either side, and policies that appeal to rationality tend to be lobbied against by advocates and activists on both sides of the issue. It is no accident that the only immigration policies we have seen pass recently are highly partisan policies in states with legislatures dominated by a single political party; for example the anti-immigrant SB1070 and Act 2011-535 in Arizona and Alabama, and the pro-immigrant DREAM Act in CA. Of course, the Supreme Court will likely be asked to weigh in on the constitutionality of many of these propositions in the new future. What do you think about the authors' statement? Do you agree? Do you think any of the policies enacted by states will successfully address the problems associated with immigration? Will they ultimately be upheld by the Supreme Court? What policies do you think might help address the issues?