Immigration Federalism in the United States: Constructing a Contemporary Institutional Framework Centered on Local Communities Through a Case Study Approach

Abstract

This research study presents a new model of immigration federalism which integrates existing theories into a framework that emphasizes agency at the local level. Unlike dominant models of federalism that observe the cascading effect of higher-level policy on lower levels of government, this research focuses on empirical evidence at the local level to understand its relation to policy at higher levels. Immigration federalism is receiving substantial interest in scholarly work and in practice, but it lacks a cohesive and comprehensive theory explaining variation at the community level. There is little reason to expect sweeping changes in immigration policy at the federal level anytime soon, but immigration policy continues to change in practice. Understanding changes in immigration policy, particularly at the state and local levels of government, is valuable, and a comprehensive theory of immigration federalism focusing on lower levels of government expands perspectives of federalism. The research for this study follows a nested case study design that involves collecting and analyzing secondary and primary data at the federal, state, and local levels. Secondary data were collected at three levels of government--federal, state, and local--for each case study. Semi-structured interviews of public administrators and community leaders were conducted at the local level. This primary data were analyzed using grounded theory and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The five case studies that result from data collection and analysis frame immigration policy at the federal level, across 50 U.S. states and in Oregon particularly, and in the Oregon cities of Sandy, Nyssa, and Madras. These case studies are compared within and across levels of government to construct a new model of immigration federalism. Following this nested approach, I created and refined a theory of immigration federalism by constructing an overarching framework reflecting the institutional context of immigration policy at the federal, state, and local levels of government. Each level yielded understanding which informed, modified, and optimized information gathering at the next level, so construction of the framework was recursive throughout the research project. The resulting model emphasizes a policy's connection to the public at the local level and highlights the role of governance in balancing rather than resolving tensions. This immigration federalism model helps describe the dynamic nature of the intergovernmental influence and the reality of independent local authority in the United States that results in different policy outcomes locally depending on polity perspectives and civic capacity of the community. Therefore, this model offers