ABSTRACT
Ambitious legal aspirations underlie the system for allocating scarce access to lawful permanent residence, for establishing reciprocal obligations between immigrants and society, and for allowing immigrants to assume the central role of citizenship within the state. Those aspirations are all the more ambitious in light of the powerful social and economic forces that encourage continued migration to a country such as the USA (Vertovec 2003). At the same time, the hot glare of politics has come to complicate the work of nearly every aspect of the American immigration system, including the historically evolving interplay of obligation and responsibility governing the position of migrants in the USA. Despite a host of costs and burdens produced by our existing arrangement, the political economy of American immigration law limits the space for and speed of change in this domain. At the same time, the system’s political logic also creates some possibilities for reform – particularly when policy-makers and civil society take seriously some of the critical and often misunderstood aspects of that political economy.
