…for Cornerstone…

The broken U.S. immigration system is flooding federal courts with low-level cases involving non-violent defendants, and inundating federal prisons with individuals whose only crime was to enter or remain in the country without permission. Thanks to this ever-widening immigration dragnet, a disproportionate share of the Latinos and non-U.S. citizens who wind up in federal courts and prisons are there solely because of immigration violations. In other words, the federal government is wasting its limited law-enforcement and criminal-justice resources on immigrants who do not pose a threat to public safety or national security…

Read the rest…

…for Society…

The United States needs a new immigration policy that is based less on wishful thinking and more on realism.  Spending vast sums of money trying to enforce arbitrary numerical limits on immigration that bear no relationship to economic reality is a fool’s errand.  We need flexible limits on immigration that rise and fall with U.S. labor demand, coupled with strict enforcement of tough wage and labor laws that protect all workers, regardless of where they were born.  We need to respect the natural human desire for family reunification, while recognizing that even family-based immigrants are unlikely to come here if jobs are not available.  And we need to create a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants who are already here so that they can no longer be exploited by unscrupulous employers who hang the threat of deportation over their heads…

Read the rest…

…for the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy…

Since 9/11 the watchword in the debate over immigration reform has been “security.”  As a result, most policymakers and pundits now approach the subject of immigration largely from a law-enforcement perspective.  That is, the focus is how best to fortify U.S. borders so as to prevent the illicit entry into the country of terrorists or weapons of mass destruction.  This concern has been especially acute in the case of the U.S.-Mexico border, across which hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants enter the United States undetected each year.  However, the current border-enforcement strategy, which tends to lump together terrorists and undocumented jobseekers from abroad as groups to be kept out, ignores the causes of undocumented immigration and fuels the expansion of the people-smuggling networks through which a foreign terrorist might enter the country.…

Read the rest…

…for the Stanford Law and Policy Review…

U.S. immigration policy is based on denial.  Most lawmakers in the United States have largely embraced the process of economic “globalization,” yet stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that increased migration, especially from developing nations to developed nations, is an integral and inevitable part of this process.  Instead, they continue an impossible quest that began shortly after World War II: the creation of a transnational market in goods and services without a corresponding transnational market for the workers who make those goods and provide those services.  In defiance of economic logic, U.S. lawmakers formulate immigration policies to regulate the entry of foreign workers into the country that are largely unrelated to the economic policies they formulate to regulate international commerce…

Read the rest…