Immigration Benefits America

David Stoll suggests that because contemporary immigrants are non-European, uneducated, poor, and uninterested in joining the moral community of American society, their presence threatens national unity, obscures citizens’ obligations to one another and will shortly change the US into a minority–majority society. Drawing from historical accounts and statistical evidence, this article asserts that immigrants provide American society with social, economic and demographic benefits. Moreover, while pundits have long predicted that immigrants with national origins distinct from those of natives will transform American life to its detriment, the record reveals the US has been able to incorporate diverse nationalities to the benefit of immigrants and the native-born alike.

Immigration Policy and Hispanic Representation in National Elections

For the first time in U.S. history, after decades of unprecedented growth in interior immigration enforcement disproportionately impacting Latinos, ten percent of the U.S. House of Representatives is Hispanic. Using congressional district-level data on all candidates participating in general elections to the U.S. House of Representatives between 2008 and 2018, we show that intensified immigration enforcement suppressed Hispanics’ representation in congressional elections. The effect—nonexistent for other minorities, such as non-Hispanic Black candidates, as well as in primary elections—is driven by local police-based measures and diminished electoral support. Furthermore, it appears more harmful during midterm elections and in localities without a sanctuary policy.     

Talking the Talk: Immigration Policy Since 1962

Immigration policy has repeatedly failed to fulfil the ambitions of its advocates. Successive governments have neither willed the means nor been open about the obstacles in their way to restricting immigration. Disappointing results have contributed to disillusionment with the political system and help to create the ground on which UKIP has prospered.     

Defining Indecency as an Artifact of Cultural Policy

This article examines the United States’ enforcement of indecency norms in the broadcast arena to discern how it illuminates cultural policy. The article looks at several examples of how enforcement of indecency norms has contributed to the development of an indecency policy that is in tension with other aspects of cultural policy including diversity of voices and localism.     

Immigration and Refugees: Punctuations in the Commonwealth Policy Agenda

In April 2013, Australia's population reached 23 million. Up to 60 percent of population growth in Australia comes from immigration and 40 percent of population growth comes from natural increase. It is therefore not too surprising that the issue of immigration receives a considerable amount of attention in the overall Commonwealth policy agenda. However, immigration policy is a complex policy area that is vulnerable to sudden increases in policy attention. Such increases in policy attention may be related to external shocks, wars or changing global economic conditions. This article charts some of the contextual factors, which result in high‐salience punctuations and intense policy activity in the area of immigration.     

Immigration Policy and the “Crisis of British Values”

It is widely believed that there is a lack of common values in contemporary Britain. One influential explanation is that immigration has created an ethnically “diverse” society with a multiplicity of values that have displaced the common culture. This article argues to the contrary that it is immigration policy that departs from an earlier consensus on British values. The article looks at the disagreement within the British elite over the measures adopted to deter asylum-seekers and argues that, in their effect on individual liberty and universal welfare provision, these measures indicate that a significant part of the political class has abandoned the post-war political consensus over what constituted British identity. Not only is the disagreement over the key values that make up British identity located at the heart of the establishment, rather than between native and immigrant, but it is the official deterrence of immigration which most clearly expresses the lack of consensus.     

Managerialism, Politics and Legal Bureaucratic Rationality in Immigration Policy

Against claims that public sector reforms have made the functions of managers similar to those in private firms, critics of the managerialist model point to constraints on public sector managers that make their decisions on resource allocation and policy development different from those affecting corporations. Through an examination of policy formulation, program management and decision-making in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, this article demonstrates that managerialist program planning, outcome orientation and performance measurement have been introduced, but that this has not precluded an expansion in non-market oriented routine, non-discretionary decision-making involving bureaucratic legal rationality within a legislative and regulatory framework. While some clients have been defined and assessed in terms of economic criteria, they access departmental processing not in terms of market signals, but according to their compliance with the Migration Act and Migration Regulations. Managerialism has not occurred at the expense of classical administrative practices, rather managerialist and legal bureaucratic forms have both grown and influenced political calculations on policy-making.     

The Limits of Deliberation: Institutions and American Immigration Policy

I take issue with the Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable’s assertion that the mode of deliberation that facilitated the formulation of its report might serve as a model for bridging deep disagreements on immigration policy among politicians. I point out that the institutional dynamics that have shaped immigration politics and policy-making in the United States have tended toward horse trading and desperate last minute deals rather than reasoned compromises. Whereas the Roundtable suggests that its sensible recommendations might hold the key to shaping a politically viable comprehensive reform package, I maintain that the way forward may lie in abandoning efforts at comprehensive reform and focusing instead on piecemeal changes to discreet aspects of the immigration system.     

Policy Legacies,Visa Reform and the Resilience of Immigration Politics

Comparative scholarship tacitly assumes immigration politics to be relatively rigid. A state's immigration policy legacy is said to institutionalise policy preferences, thereby making it difficult to implement lasting reforms that are inconsistent with that legacy. This presents difficulties for states with restrictionist legacies wanting to implement liberal reforms in response to the emergence of labour shortages or demographic problems. The supposed rigidity of immigration politics is scrutinised in this article through a systematic process analysis of developments in the United Kingdom over the past decade, where the Blair government confounded the UK's characterisation as a ‘reluctant immigration state’ to implement various liberal work visa reforms. The uncoordinated nature of policymaking and implementation, and the limited involvement of state and societal institutions in the reform process, reflect the UK's historical experience with restrictionist policies, and help to explain the subsequent reintroduction of strict visa controls. The case demonstrates that policy legacies indeed play a significant role in defining the character of the policymaking institutions that shape a state's immigration politics.     

How Information Scarcity Influences the Policy Agenda: Evidence from U.K. Immigration Policy

This article explores how patterns of information supply on policy problems influence political attention. It advances two central claims. First, different policy areas are associated with distinct practices in monitoring policy problems: Some produce abundant, ongoing, and reliable information, while others yield scarce, sporadic, and/or unreliable data. Second, these variations in information supply are likely to influence political attention, with information‐rich areas associated with a more proportionate distribution of attention, and information‐poor areas yielding punctuated attention. The article tests these claims through comparing U.K. political attention to asylum and illegal immigration. Asylum is observed on an ongoing basis through bureaucratic data, court hearings, and lay observations, producing more constant and proportiate political attention. Illegal immigration is observed sporadically through focusing events, usually police operations, eliciting more punctuated attention. These insights about political attention may also help explain why policy responses may be punctuated or incremental.     

Is it Population or Personnel? The Effects of Diversity on Immigration Policy Implementation by Sheriff Offices

Abstract

The federal-local cooperative immigration removal program Secure Communities (S-Comm) has resulted in wide variation into how aggressively national interior immigration policy has been implemented locally. Some communities have removed thousands, but others have removed few if any. Community composition explains much of the variation, but representative bureaucracy tells us agency diversity also influences implementation. Focusing on county sheriff offices, a vital local partner in S-Comm, this study finds that agency personnel diversity (specifically, offices with larger percentages of Hispanics and African Americans) produce fewer removals and submissions to ICE for immigration background checks. Other agency-specific factors are also important. Both the agency’s total budget and whether it has a 287(g) agreement with federal immigration authorities increase removals. Despite recent efforts to blur the distinction between immigration and criminal justice policy, this study finds no relationship between local removals and local crime.