Prioritization in the American Immigration Bureaucracy

Abstract

My dissertation book project examines how and why certain enforcement and service policies are chosen for prioritized attention, resource allocation, and regulatory activity in the administrative agencies that oversee immigration policy. These activities include border enforcement activities of border security and customs facilitation, interior enforcement activities of investigations, and deportation and detention, and service activities of adjudication, and refugee and asylum processing. The agencies accounting for what I term ``the immigration bureaucracy'' are the Department of Justice's former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the Department of Homeland Security's current three sub-agencies, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). My analyses begin in the period after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, spanning multiple decades and allowing for a greater understanding of prioritization trends and changes. The first chapter explores how enforcement and service responsibilities are prioritized by Congressional subcommittees in oversight hearings towards immigration bureaucracy commissioners and managers, using over 200 hearings from 1965 to 2020. Findings demonstrate that oversight prioritization does not follow a single overarching motivation, but instead changes over time. Hearings reflect an information gathering approach during the 1970s-1980s, when legislators recognize undocumented migration and humanitarian relief as the most important problem, and rely on immigration bureaucrats to pro-actively develop legislative solutions. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, however, subcommittees begin to use oversight as a signaling exercise to voice dissatisfaction with border enforcement on national security issues. This signaling emphasizes failure and incapacity, but lacks any attempt to develop legislative solutions, unlike earlier periods of oversight. These findings suggest even within a single policy domain like immigration, competing theories of oversight might explain different periods of interbranch behavior. The second chapter examines how executives in the immigration bureaucracy prioritize funding towards enforcement and service activities. I use a novel data set of program-level budget requests before the Congressional appropriations subcommittee on funding amounts from budget justifications in the INS and DHS agencies, spanning 1980 to 2024. Findings show that enforcement activities are consistently prioritized in funding, while budgeting for service activities like adjudication, and refuge and asylum, are purposely de-prioritized with an inefficient reliance on fee revenue extracted from immigrant populations. I also use examples from appropriation hearings to argue that the budgetary prioritization of enforcement over service results from administrative preferences that narrowly conceive of immigration policy as an exclusionary responsibility, rather than alternative explanations like legislative responsiveness or event shocks. The third chapter focuses on the regulatory activity of the USCIS, the service arm of the modern immigration bureaucracy Hundreds of administrative documents are quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed to determine whether regulatory behavior accommodates or restricts immigration. I also look for any association of inclusive and exclusionary outcomes with two features: the partisanship of the administration overseeing the USCIS; and the choice of regulatory method between legislative rulemaking that requires public participation, and non-legislative notices and memoranda that avoid public input. I find that the inclusive or exclusionary dimension of administrative immigration policy is mostly determined by the partisanship of the presidential administration in control of the USCIS, and that these administrations employ regulatory methods differently. Democratic administering of the USCIS under Presidents Obama and Biden promote accommodating rules to ease requirements for labor and family visas, but use notices and memoranda to provide humanitarian relief for vulnerable populations. Conversely, Republican administering of USCIS under President Trump uses rules to instead exclude asylees from relief, and relies on policy memoranda to impose costly requirements on visa applicants. My findings show that regardless of regulatory method, the executive branch has great discretionary power to impose whatever type of inclusive or exclusionary policy it desires. My book will contribute to a greater understanding of both bureaucratic politics, immigration policy, and racial and ethnic politics. Descriptively, my book will shed light on how the immigration bureaucracy makes important decisions at the higher levels of administration. Current social science research on the immigration bureaucracy offers great insight into the actions and psychology of rank-and-file enforcement or service agents, and the conflicts and traumas of immigrants enduring often exclusionary policy implementation. This offers political science an opportunity to help explain the overarching administrative structure behind these realities. Broadly, my dissertation will offer insight into how administrative agencies confront ambiguity and conflict in their goals and missions. It also invites more novel approaches to using observational administrative data to analyze bureaucratic behavior.