Thursday, April 14, 2016
Concerto A (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Scholars have often depicted restrictionist, relatively autonomous governing elites as the driving force behind policymaking related to immigration and immigrants in the UK. While an elite-centered approach does seem to explain many recent developments in this policy area effectively, such an approach seems surprisingly ill-equipped to account for certain policy developments related to undocumented immigrants. In this paper, I examine one of these anomalous developments: the UK’s program for clearing its “legacy case” backlog between 2006 and 2011. This initiative sought to review and resolve hundreds of thousands of longstanding asylum cases; some of these cases involved immigrants who had been denied asylum and continued to reside in the UK in an irregular status. The program also entailed the review of 40,000 older immigration cases. As a result of this program, approximately 172,000 individuals gained leave to remain in the UK, leading one parliamentary committee to characterize the program as a regularization “in practice” for undocumented immigrants. I argue that a combination of bureaucratic incapacities and liberal legal institutions ultimately brought about this highly consequential program.
