A BROAD ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY OF US IMMIGRATION POLICY

The administrative history of US immigration policy arguably reflects a history of major shifts in political emphasis: from the economy, to culture, then (at least until recently) to security.

The first immigration office in US history was created under the Treasury Department during the economic depression of the late 1880s to enforce related group exclusions (Donovan, 2005). That office then became the Immigration and Naturalization Services (“INS”) in 1891, which developed a new variety of immigration services emphasizing the need for a somewhat more liberal “commercial”  immigration filter, before being transferred from one cabinet department to another throughout the twentieth-century (more so than any other large federal agency)--first to Commerce and Labor, then to Labor, then to Justice, and finally to Homeland Security, depending on the political winds and the prevailing concerns of the times (Donovan, 2005).

And yet, throughout that history, INS was somehow able to retain a fairly consistent identity--as a soft political punching ball. According to Wilson (2000, p. 158), the agency was “conspicuous for its weak sense of mission and low morale.” Many deemed it a unique model of the most terrible form of bureaucratic inefficiency, and its leaders were frequently fired or otherwise replaced. Still, it retained a sort of organizational “inertia […] in large part due to the lack of consensus about what specifically should be changed” about it (Donovan, 2005, p. 577).

Interestingly, this remained the case even after the 1960s, when the ideal of multiculturalism, following the civil rights movement, arguably led to a new liberalization of immigration policies: “the numbers of foreign-born grew so rapidly that many communities and states felt overburdened with the responsibility to absorb them all” (Donovan, 2005, p.36). And, as the number of immigrants grew, so did their political power base--while the functions of immigration enforcement and services continued to vary on a spectrum, somewhere between interest group politics and client politics, depending on larger public perceptions of the per capita costs and benefits of immigration (see Wilson, 2000).

MISSION, ORGANIZATION, CONSTRAINTS AND CHALLENGES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

While Executive Order 13228 had created the Office of Homeland Security to focus solely on terrorism, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (“HSA”) established the Department of Homeland Security ("DHS") to focus mainly on terrorism. The plain language and structure of the Act made this priority clear: the first three clauses describing the new agency's primary mission referred solely to terrorism, whereas other “natural and manmade crises and emergency planning” were mentioned only once, subsequently, as part of “all functions of entities transferred to [DHS].”

That transfer of entities resulted in the largest and most complex reorganization of the federal government since the Defense Department was created in 1947 (Brook and King, 2007; Moynihan, 2005). With an annual budget exceeding $36 billion, DHS would bring together 180,000 employees from twenty-two originating agencies with very different tasks, cultures and management systems into a coherent whole (Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2007; Donovan, 2005).

Among those agencies were newer organizations, including the Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”), which had been recently created under the Department of Transportation to remedy airport security failures attributed to state and local airport owners and operators (Haynes, 2004). There were also old, well-established or otherwise “independent” organizations such as the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (“INS”). Some of those agencies, such as INS, were broken up into separate entities, while others acquired new functions, sometimes stripped from outside agencies, in order to form new entities like Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”).

This vast collection of agencies was bound to create internal problems.

ORIGINS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

As one commentator put it, 9/11 provided a “visceral answer” to the question, “what objective reality does the term homeland security refer to?” (Bellavita, 2008, p. 3). Prior to that event, the topic of terrorism had no special status in security discourse and procedures (Mabee, 2007). But “9/11 not only became crucial in a securitization process concerning terrorism, it also solidified the idea of a new environment of threat, that would need unprecedented kinds of action [and] the development of new security institutions”(Mabee, 2007, p. 390).

The event also provoked a new focus on transnational actors as security threats (that is, as potential terrorist threats)--a shift that would come to deeply affect immigration policy and enforcement, directly and indirectly (Mabee, 2007).

At the same time, beyond the visceral sense, the attacks brought little clarity or consensus on the analytical definition of homeland security (Bellavita, 2008). And, accordingly, if a new homeland security institution was to be created, it was unclear whether its mandate should also include natural disasters and other hazards (limited or not by state and local jurisdictions), or even traditional national security functions served by pre-existing agencies. On the one hand, “there just is not that much terrorism in the United States to warrant spending the billions of dollars” the United States would come to spend on homeland security concerns (Bellavita, 2008, p. 3). On the other hand, too large a concept or institution of homeland security would seem to make bitter turf wars with well-established organizations (such as the Defense Department or the FBI) unavoidable.