Criminal Law & Migration Control: Recent History & Future Possibilities

Immigration enforcement in the United States has undergone a revolutionary transformation over the past three decades. Once episodic, border-focused, and generally confined to the efforts of a relatively small federal agency, immigration enforcement is now exceedingly well-funded and integrated deeply into the everyday policing of the interior United States. Not only are federal immigration agents more numerous and ubiquitous in the interior, but immigration enforcement has been integrated into the policing practices of state and local officials who once saw their purview as largely distinct from that of federal immigration enforcement agents. This essay briefly explains these developments, from shortly before the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 through the present day, and assesses their consequences. It includes a brief discussion of the ways states and localities have responded to federal enforcement trends, whether through amplification or constraint.

Introduction

This introductory chapter lays out the key questions of the book. It explains the background assumptions at play and the key philosophical commitments supporting the different arguments in the book. This chapter also explains the key arguments of the following chapters and how they come together to support a partial theory of immigrations that avoids both open borders and complete control of immigration on the part of states. It also explains how the theoretical framework defended in the first part of the book affects the applied questions pursued in the second part of the book, such as the ethics of asylum, family migration schemes, the brain drain, and immigration enforcement.

Immigration Policy and the Rise of Self-Employment among Mexican Immigrants

The recent dramatic growth in self-employment among Mexican immigrants in the United States in the past two decades is a puzzling trend, in stark contrast to the stagnant growth or even decline among other demographic groups. The authors propose that the expansion of interior immigration enforcement, a characteristic of the US immigration policy during that time span, contributed to this unique trend by pushing Mexican immigrants into self-employment as an alternative livelihood. Exploiting temporal and geographic variation in immigration enforcement measures from 2005 to 2017, the authors show that tougher enforcement has been responsible for approximately 15% of the rise in Mexican self-employment in the United States.