Population Research Discovery Seminars
Co-Sponsor(s):
Evans School of Public Policy & Governance
Center for Global Studies – Jackson School of International Studies
In the forty years since the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), no significant reform to the structure of immigration law has made it through the U.S. Congress. Yet during those forty years, how immigrants enter the United States, where they come from, where they settle, who employs them, and how they adapt to American life have all changed dramatically. During the same time, a shadow state of immigration regulation has developed, based not on statutory law but on precedents, executive action, federal agency guidance, and state and local policy entrepreneurship. None of these provides a stable legal structure for immigrants, their families, their employers, or their neighborhoods and communities.
In Let States Select Immigrants, I argue that states – rather than the federal government or individual employers — should govern immigration selection, basing their decisions on economic development strategies, interest in population growth, and family and community resources. Potential immigrants would apply for state-specific work or entrepreneurship permits, which could be further restricted as to economic sector and geographical area. States would also take community applications for refugee resettlement, based on plans submitted by sponsoring families, groups of interested citizens, and agencies. In support of this state-based framework, the federal government would enforce identity-based verification for entry and exit from the United States and for state work permits. Citizenship, based on birthright or naturalization, would continue to be determined by the U.S. Constitution and appropriate national law.
Why states? The role of immigration in the economic development of both geographical areas and industries is generally understood. But ideological polarization around the issue of illegal immigration, and the control of legal immigration by private actors (employers and families), have prevented the use of immigration as an economic development tool. States and localities that might wish to use immigration as a workforce and/or community development strategy have been largely unable to make the argument in the political and policy categories that are available to them. And yet states and localities not only have the most knowledge of their economic development needs, but are best equipped to develop political compromises between those who champion and those who fear immigration.
Ann Chih Lin is an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She was part of the Detroit Arab American Studies Team that produced the landmark Citizenship in Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11 (Russell Sage 2009). She has also conducted research on national security investigations of Chinese American scholars, and written and edited books on prison rehabilitation, on poverty, and on racial disparities. In 2021, she was named Lieberthal-Rogel Professor of Chinese Studies and currently serves as Director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.