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

doi:10.4324/9781315714967-19

Chapter

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

ABSTRACT

In the USA, however, the early twenty-ﬁrst century legal architecture of migration has produced a mixed system – a resilient capacity to integrate newcomers into American citizenship, alongside a system with many self-defeating features eliciting near-universal derision (Archibold and Thee-Brenan 2010). In that system, some putatively eligible