Less than the sum of its parts: institutional realities and legal aspirations in early twenty-first century American immigration

This essay considers the implications of some of the legal and institutional forces shaping immigration in the early twenty-first century, and explores what the character of the American system implies for citizenship and migration in an advanced industrial democracy with a complex regulatory state. The essay argues, first, that immigration law must be understood not as a raw reflection of mass public attitudes or a carefully reasoned prescriptive scheme, but instead as a politically generated, fractured system allocating benefits and burdens among a variety of constituents and public agencies. This allocation plainly affects more than just actual or potential migrants. It also shapes the lives of employers, law enforcers, politicians, and the larger public of American citizens. These interactions showcase how much the future of the nation-state may depend not only on seemingly inexorable forces reshaping the international system, but on how law is understood by the public, adjudicated by courts, and enforced by public organizations. Put differently, how much even powerful nation-states are able to shape their context heavily depends on often-tenuous compromises at the intersection between law, politics, and organization.