From Practice to Policy: Excluding Asylum Seekers at the US Border

Abstract

When countries experience a surge of migrants at their borders, they search for ways to assert control, often using strategies aimed at slowing, reducing, discouraging, or blocking entry. To the extent that national and international law confers rights on some migrants, in particular laws allowing individuals to cross borders to claim asylum, the tools for directly impeding entry may be limited. In this context, states may develop administrative practices to accomplish indirectly what they cannot accomplish directly by law. This article examines the case of metering in the US as an administrative strategy of border control. It traces an unusual path to this strategy, from its origins in informal street-level practices to its evolution into a formal administrative policy extending and ostensibly legitimating those practices. This analysis brings a comparative street-level perspective to the socio-legal analysis of law-in-practice.