Friday, July 10, 2015
S09 (13 rue de l'Université)
Historically in the United States, state immigration policy making has been largely limited to integration efforts; the courts have successively guarded the power of the federal government to create and enforce regulatory immigration regimes. However, from the mid 1990s onward, the federal government deliberately created openings for states and localities to engage in the enforcement and administration of national immigration policies. At a time when much has been made of the devolution of U.S. immigration policy to the states and local governments and some have signaled the rise of a new era in which global migratory and economic changes are producing fissures in the nation-state, my research leads to a different conclusion: even in the absence of policy coherence, general patterns in policy making at the state level show that the discourse of state responsibility is symbolic, but state policies by and large serve nationally defined, and not locally defined, goals.
The analysis and argument are based on a yield of over 1000 state laws covering fourteen major domestic policy areas between 2006 and 2011. I focus on three of the fourteen major policy areas (enforcement, employment verification and driver licenses/ personal identification) to show the legal and practical limits of state policy independence. Despite high profile efforts by some states to venture beyond their legal jurisdictions, states are best understood as agents in a policy complex that is still largely structured by both the national government, and national (as opposed to subnational or regional) immigration discourses.
