The Politics of Interior Immigration Enforcement

Abstract

Calif. J. Politics Policy 2014; 6(3): 381–399 Tom K. Wong* The Politics of Interior Immigration Enforcement Abstract: Who supports and who opposes legislation that seeks to tighten interior immigration enforcement among members of Congress, and why? Interior immi- gration enforcement is one of the critical, but often overlooked aspects of the com- prehensive immigration reform debate in the US. An analysis of 3330 roll call votes among U.S. House Representatives since H.R. 4437 in 2005 shows that voting pat- terns can overwhelmingly be explained by partisanship, as Republicans are sig- nificantly more likely to support tightening interior immigration enforcement than Democrats. Moreover, the only factor analyzed here that leads Republican repre- sentatives to become less likely to support stricter interior immigration enforce- ment is the size of the Hispanic/Latino population in a district. However, what the data also show is that Republicans and Democrats tend to align when it comes to opposing the most restrictive attempts to tighten interior immigration enforcement, as evidenced by bipartisan opposition to the Sullivan amendment to H.R. 4437. Keywords: immigration; interior immigration enforcement; politics; SAFE Act. DOI 10.1515/cjpp-2014-0005 1 Introduction Interior immigration enforcement is one of the critical, but often overlooked com- ponents of comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) in the US. While contentious debates over the question of how to address the status of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country, as well as how to secure the nation’s borders, continue to dominate the discussion, an increasing number of studies have shifted the analytical lens to the growing role that subnational actors – state and local governments, in particular – are playing in the design, implementation, and enforcement of federal immigration policies (De Genova 2002; Coleman 2007, 2012; Esbenshade 2007; Varsanyi 2008; Hopkins 2010; Ram- *Corresponding author: Tom K. Wong, University of California, San Diego, Department of ­Political Science, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093, USA, Tel.: +16193549913, e-mail: tomkwong@ucsd.edu