Managing immigrants and citizenship in a separated domestic system

It is unquestionably true that lawmakers and executive branch officials in recent years have sought to prioritize removal of serious criminal offenders among other things (Bush and McClarty 2009, 28-29). Still, even such a scheme suffers from the drain on resources spent catching routine violators. The impact of such constraints is plain in the fact that the so-called ‘catch and release’ policy – whereby non-Mexican unauthorized border-crossers were essentially released into the USA pending removal – persisted into 2006 because of the enormous number of overall apprehensions that needed to be managed by the authorities (Wein, Liu, and Motskin 2009).