TOC and Intro from WHOSE AMERICA?

Whose America?

U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980

Edited by MARIA CRISTINA GARCIA AND MADDALENA MARINARI

TrusteesoftheUniversityofIllinois

TrusteesoftheUniversityofIllinois

© 2023 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data <to come>

Introduction: Whose America? 1

MARIA CRISTINA GARCIA AND MADDALENA MARINARI

1 Eliminating Immigrants in the Era of Mass Incarceration .............................. 23

ELLIOT YOUNG

2 Families Belong Together: Immigration Policy as Legal Violence............................ 51 LEISY J. ABREGO

3 Give Me Your Best and Brightest: Chasing STEM Workers since World War II .................... 69 MONIQUE LANEY

4 Legislating Diversity in the Immigration Act of 1990 ..................................... 91 CARLY GOODMAN

5 In the Name of National Security: Ideological Exclusion from the Cold War to the War on Terror 118 JULIA ROSE KRAUT

6 “Uncle Sam Wants You Dead or Deported”: How Fears of Sexuality, Gender, and Race Crafted U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980 139

JULIO CAPÓ JR.

7 “Human Rights for All”: The Recent History of Immigration and Human Rights in the United States ........................ 165

CARL J. BON TEMPO

8 Sanctuary Is Justice: Resilience and Ingenuity in the Sanctuary Movement since 1986 ............... 190

CARL LINDSKOOG

9 Misreading History: The Supreme Court and the Thwarting of the U.S. Asylum System since the 1980s 209

YAEL SCHACHER

Contributors .................................... 237 Index ......................................... 241

Whose America?

MARIA CRISTINA GARCIA AND MADDALENA MARINARI

THE 1965 IMMIGRATION and Nationality Act, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, set in motion dramatic changes in U.S. society and in U.S. policy that have been contested ever since. As he signed the bill into law on October 3, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson downplayed the bill’s potential conse quences: “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he said. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”1 Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), one of the bill’s most vocal advocates, also downplayed the bill’s potential impacts: “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”2 Critics and supporters alike disagreed with these assessments, recognizing the law as potentially transformative. Over the next six decades, congres sional policymakers would build on—or reform—this law in response to the shifts in migration flows the 1965 law brought about but also in response to world events the architects of the bill never imagined. The chapters in this anthology examine some of the legislative and policy responses since 1980 to the Hart-Celler Act that have had lasting consequences for U.S. society.

In passing the 1965 act, Congress abolished the racist national origins quo tas that had been in place since the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, but legislators hoped that by prioritizing family reunification in granting immigration visas, the new law would help maintain the United States’ predominantly European heritage. Despite these intentions, European migration to the United States fell in the final decades of the twentieth century. The rapid postwar recovery of western European nations, facilitated by the Marshall Plan and Ameri

cans’ willingness to absorb hundreds of thousands of Europe’s displaced peoples, meant that citizens of these countries no longer felt as compelled to emigrate as they had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In eastern Europe, authoritarian governments blocked aspiring migrants from leaving altogether. Meanwhile, the pressure to emigrate increased in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Improvements in health care and education, and the greater ease of transportation, created highly mobile populations who sought better wages in more developed countries. War, revolution, economic dislocation, or environmental disasters pushed others to leave too. These dynamics dramatically changed the demographics of the United States. As the Johnson-Reed Act went into effect in 1924, the foreign-born population in the United States had peaked at 13.2 percent; by 1965, that per centage had dropped to just under 5 percent. By 2017, however, 13.6 percent of the population was once again foreign born (44.4 million). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than a million immigrants were arriving in the United States each year, over half of whom were prioritized for entry as the relatives of U.S. citizens.3 Since 1965, immigrants have come from all different parts of the world, but especially from countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Mexico emerged as a top source country (roughly 25 percent) and the number of Asian immigrants increased from less than half a million in 1965 to more than 13 million fifty years later. Immigrants from South and East Asia now account for over 27 percent of all immigrants, with China, India, and the Philippines as the top source countries.

The Hart-Celler Act is often blamed for producing a rise in undocumented immigration, especially from the Americas.4 Not surprisingly, many of the subsequent reforms to the 1965 Immigration Act have focused on address ing this issue.5 Prior to 1965, immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean circulated to and from the United States comparatively freely because of the lack of numerical quotas on mi grants from the Americas. It was common for migrants to spend part of their working lives in the United States and then return to their homelands with their hard-earned savings. They were still subject to head taxes, literacy tests, intrusive medical examinations, and detention and deportation if they entered the country without authorization but, in general, U.S. borders were much more permeable, and immigration status less scrutinized by employers and law enforcement, except during periods of economic contraction when American workers demanded their removal.

Once Hart-Celler imposed caps on the Western Hemisphere, these longestablished migratory patterns suddenly—and officially—became “unauthor

ized” and were subjected to escalating levels of surveillance, restriction, and punishment. Hart-Celler’s 20,000 cap on each country meant that many of the workers who had customarily traveled unhindered across U.S. borders for work were now “illegal” and had limited avenues for lawful entry. The 1990 Immigration Act increased the per-country ceiling, but no group of permanent immigrants (family-based and employment-based) from a single country could exceed 7 percent of the total number of people immigrating to the United States in a single fiscal year.

Hart-Celler’s imposition of a ceiling for each nation—once presented as an egalitarian remedy to the discriminatory national origins quotas of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act—created new forms of discrimination and inequal ity. National Visa Center bulletins showed that the waiting period for an immigrant visa (the so-called “green card”) could be as long as a decade or more for applicants of certain countries, especially if they did not have U.S. citizen spouses or other immediate family members to sponsor them. This prompted many aspiring immigrants either to enter the United States without authorization or to come in with temporary visas and then remain in the United States past the expiration of these visas. The rise in undocumented immigration is rooted in these legal changes that tried to alter longstanding practices of migration flows. From 1990 to 2007, the unauthorized popula tion tripled in size, from 3.5 million to a record high of 12.2 million in 2007; but, by 2017, because of more intensive policing and the Great Recession, that number had declined to 10.5 million.6

The immigration legislation passed after 1965 responded to the realities of undocumented immigration, but it also addressed three other issues: a changing economic landscape, national security, and new humanitarian concerns. The following sections offer a brief overview of these legislative and policy changes. Together they reveal American priorities in the six decades after Hart-Celler and the competing understandings of who had the right to migrate to the United States and who had the right to remain— in other words, who had the right to claim the United States as home or refuge. We focus particularly on the legislative developments since 1980 when the U.S. Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980, the first of many significant changes to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. These legislative changes, which many regarded as “domestic policy,” occurred against the backdrop of (but also in response to) significant changes in the international arena: the end of the Cold War and the political realignments that followed; neoliberal economic reforms including the rise of “free trade” policies; and the global War on Terror.

Responding to Undocumented Immigration

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) was the first major congressional response to the spike in undocumented immigration. Passed with bipartisan support, IRCA increased the budgets of the Immi gration and Naturalization Service (INS), which handled immigration en forcement, and the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), which handled deportation cases, so these branches could adequately address the perceived challenges. IRCA increased the number of Border Patrol agents by 50 percent and established new criminal penalties for the use of fraudulent identity documents and the harboring and transporting of unauthorized immigrants.7 Following the recommendations of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP), IRCA also introduced a one-time “amnesty” provision that provided a pathway to citizenship to some three million undocumented immigrant workers—70 percent of them Mexican—if they met certain criteria.8 More surprising, Congress imposed for the first time civil and criminal penalties on employers who knowingly hired undocu mented immigrants. This last provision proved to be an ineffective deterrent because employers who sought cheap and exploitable labor found other ways to skirt the law.9 It also increased discrimination against nonwhite workers because employers who feared penalties ceased hiring workers who fit their stereotypes of undocumented workers.

When IRCA failed to substantially limit the number of undocumented immigrants, the 1990 Immigration Act authorized the creation of yet another Commission on Immigration Reform to “review and evaluate the imple mentation and impact of U.S. immigration policy.” Chaired by former Texas representative Barbara Jordan, the commission released its interim and final reports from 1994 through 1997. The Jordan Commission’s reports recom mended the expansion of family- and skills-based visas to provide more opportunities for legal entry, but it also addressed the economic drivers of unauthorized entry, including the role U.S. employers played in luring and exploiting unauthorized workers. To counter this, the commission urged the “vigorous” enforcement of labor standards; the targeted investigation of in dustries that had a history of hiring unauthorized workers; stronger sanctions on those employers who knowingly hired and exploited the undocumented; and increased penalties on those who produced counterfeit identification documents. To produce a long-term reduction in unauthorized migration, the commission also urged the government to reassess the country’s dip lomatic and economic development policies abroad.10 Declassified Clinton administration records do not reveal if policymakers acted on this advice.

Throughout the first half of the 1990s, Congress did debate the specifics of a more proactive immigration policy that would address IRCA’s perceived gaps and limitations, but legislators focused primarily on deterring migrants from undertaking the journey rather than punishing the employers who lured and exploited them. These debates culminated in the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), a compre hensive bill whose 750 pages covered topics as diverse as “mail-order brides,” foreign physicians, employment eligibility, and visa processing.11 However, its most punitive provisions focused on controlling unauthorized immigration, which, though not specifically referenced in the bill, was commonly associ ated with migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

IIRIRA targeted unauthorized migration by imposing harsher penalties on immigrant smuggling; expanding the U.S. Border Patrol; authorizing the purchase of state-of-the-art technologies to patrol the U.S.-Mexico bor der; and imposing harsher penalties for individuals who crossed the border without authorization or who stayed past the expiration of a visa. Those unlawfully present in the United States for 180 days or more, but less than a year, were now barred from entering the United States through any visa (tourist, student, etc.) for a period of three years. Those unlawfully present in the country for more than a year were barred from future admission for up to ten years.12 To facilitate the incarceration and deportation of immigrants, IIRAIRA reclassified several misdemeanor crimes as aggravated felonies if committed by an undocumented immigrant and allowed deportation for mi nor offenses even if these were committed decades before passage of the law. These reclassifications reinforced Americans’ perceptions of unauthorized immigrants as criminals, ignoring the reality that sectors of the American economy relied on their labor.

During the Clinton administration, the INS, staged highly publicized policing operations along the “busiest illegal border-crossing corridors in the nation”—operations with names such as Hold the Line (El Paso), Gatekeeper (San Diego), Rio Grande (McAllen, Brownsville, and Laredo), and Safeguard (Tucson). The administration heralded its success by releasing statistics on the apprehension, detention, and “removal” of aliens. The increased surveillance along specific corridors did not end unauthorized entry; it merely shifted the routes away from more populous urban crossings into the deserts of eastern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas where border crossings became more dangerous and deadly.13

The expanded policing of the U.S.-Mexico border mandated by the 1996 law came just as the Clinton administration was creating “the world’s largest free trade area” through the North American Free Trade Alliance (NAFTA).14

Policymakers wanted the free movement of commodities but not the free movement of workers displaced by those free trade policies.15 The INS budget grew from $1.5 billion in FY 1993 to $4.8 billion in FY 2001. INS personnel ex panded from 17,000 to 30,000, including 6,700 new Border Patrol agents and immigration inspectors.16 By the end of FY 2000, the Border Patrol had over nine thousand agents and considerable funding for more high-tech equip ment, including stadium lighting, electronic sensors, surveillance cameras, infrared night-vision equipment, and specialized aircraft. From fiscal year 1993 to 2000, the average daily population of INS detainees increased from 5,877 to approximately 19,000; and more than 181,000 “criminal and other undocumented aliens” were “removed,” quadruple the number in FY 1993.17

While some Americans expressed concern over the perceived threats undocumented immigrants posed, others called for a pathway to citizen ship for those who had long contributed to the economic life of this country. There was particular concern for those who had entered as children of the undocumented, spent most of their lives in the United States, and called this country home. During the Obama administration, Congress took up the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) to address these concerns, at least temporarily. The DREAM Act pro posed granting conditional residency, with the right to work, to qualifying immigrants who had entered the United States as minors. After Congress failed to pass the DREAM Act, President Obama signed an executive order creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012. DACA provided a two-year renewable deferment from deportation, and eligibility for a work permit, to undocumented young adults in the United States. Applicants for DACA had to be under the age of thirty-one (as of June 15, 2012), had to prove continuous residence in the United States (since June 15, 2007), and had to be physically present in the United States at the time of their application. Moreover, applicants had to be in school, graduated from a high school or have a GED, or be an honorably discharged veteran of the Coast Guard or armed forces of the United States. Lastly, applicants had to have no felony convictions and no significant misdemeanors, and they had to demonstrate that they did not pose a threat to national security or public safety. According to the Migration Policy Institute, at the time of the executive order, 1.9 million immigrants in the United States were potentially eligible for the DACA program.18

By June 2016, USCIS had accepted 844,931 applications, most of which were from individuals of Mexican ancestry. When President Trump took office in January 2017, his administration moved quickly to end the program and deport DACA recipients, but the Supreme Court blocked these efforts.

The Biden administration subsequently proposed a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients and other unauthorized immigrants, but any legisla tive change could only come from Congress, and, at the time of this writing, legislators in the 117th Congress remained much too divided on this issue.19

Immigration in a Changing Economic Landscape

Unauthorized immigration was not the sole focus of post-1980 immigra tion reforms. Meeting the country’s labor needs became another priority for policymakers. IRCA, for example, expanded the temporary visa program to include several additional occupational sectors. The H-2A visas, for example, which some likened to the Bracero Programs of 1942–1964, gave growers continued access to a steady stream of temporary agricultural labor, while the H-2B workers, or nonagricultural “wage shortage occupations,” provided employers with workers in landscaping, hotel cleaning, and various other forms of seasonal work.20

The Immigration Act of 1990 further expanded the temporary worker programs and introduced several other features that significantly increased the number of people who could legally enter the United States. Signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, the 1990 act created the H-1B skilled worker visa program that allowed employers to secure up to 65,000 nonimmigrant visas per year for employees in STEM fields like healthcare, engi neering, and high-tech industries but also in business and finance. From 1999 to 2003, Congress authorized an increase in H-1B visas (115,000 to 195,000 each year), before settling on 85,000, where it has remained since 2004.21 This increase in skilled temporary workers, many of whom were able to extend their visas for up to six years, dramatically reshaped migration flows to the United States. Bush administration officials regarded the 1990 act as a “major accomplishment in the President’s domestic agenda” that would “ensure a sufficient number of skilled workers to meet the demands of the 1990s.”22

The demand for H-1B workers increased steadily. Between 2012 and 2017, the H-1B visa cap was met within a week of the opening of the application period in April, peaking at 236,000 applications in 2017. If the number of applications exceeded the annual cap set by Congress during the first five business days of April, visas were then awarded through a lottery system. According to the Pew Research Center, Indian nationals received more than half of all H-1B visas between 2001 and 2015 (50.5 percent). During the same period, the second-largest share went to workers from China (9.7 percent), followed by workers from Canada (3.8 percent), the Philippines (3.0 percent),

and South Korea (2.8 percent).23 The Trump administration also targeted these temporary work visas for overhaul: in an executive order, the president directed federal agencies to implement a “Buy American, Hire American” strategy and “reform” the H-1B program.24 Almost immediately, applications dropped to 199,000 in 2018 and those who did apply during his administra tion found the visa pipeline significantly clogged if not blocked altogether. The 1990 immigration act also raised the ceiling on regular immigra tion (excluding refugees) to a flexible cap of 700,000 until 1995 and 675,000 thereafter and introduced several new features to the immigration system. Key among these new features was the Diversity Visa lottery to allow oppor tunities for admission to those who had been adversely affected by the family preference system of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. At the signing ceremony, President George H. W. Bush said, “Immigration reform began in 1986 with an effort to close the back door on illegal immigration. And now as we open the front door to increased legal immigration, this bill . . . credits the special role of immigrants to America, and it will promote a more competitive economy.”25 Although initially intended to remedy a backlog of Irish, Italian, and other European applicants, the diversity lottery enabled a significant number of non-Europeans to immigrate, particularly high-skilled labor from African nations. The Pew Research Center and the Migration Policy Institute found that immigrants from sub-Saharan African nations, many of whom arrived on Diversity Visas, were more educated than the U.S.-born population and the foreign-born population.26

Immigration and the Post–Cold War National Security State

As the twentieth century came to an end, immigration reform was increas ingly subsumed into the country’s national security agenda. Following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). Passed with broad bipar tisan support in Congress, AEDPA expanded the grounds for detaining and deporting immigrants, including those who were long-term legal residents. Together with IIRIRA, AEDPA increased the number of immigrants held in indefinite detention.27

The discovery that one of the six perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was living in the United States on an expired student visa raised concerns about the dangers international students might potentially pose to the United States. Since the end of World War II, the United States

has admitted international students in ever greater numbers as a form of cultural or soft power diplomacy. Legislators regarded international students as part of a knowledge economy where “talents” became a key kind of capital. Some of these students later naturalized, applied their skills, and served the economic interests of the United States, but others returned to their home countries to promote the free-market ideology that U.S. policymakers wanted to encourage around the world. In the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, however, the U.S. government subjected international stu dents to increased security screening through the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, students from countries with large Arab and/or Muslim populations faced particular screening and surveillance, which policymakers justified as neces sary to prevent another terrorist attack.28 While international students were still seen as providing a net benefit to the United States, many Americans wanted greater assurances that would-be terrorists would not manipulate the student visa system in order to establish a foothold in the United States.

In the months leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration had been working on a bipartisan im migration reform package that included expanding special temporary visa programs to meet the needs of American employers. After 9/11, the admin istration shelved those plans indefinitely and pivoted to focus on the vulner abilities in the immigration system that had allowed the 9/11 terrorists to enter the United States and remain undetected. Subsequent investigations revealed that the 9/11 terrorists had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years—and that fifteen of the nineteen men might have been intercepted by the INS had the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency (NSA) shared the information in their separate databases with immigration and customs of ficials. Instead, the men entered the United States with relative ease despite their past activities, visa violations, and fraudulent documents.29

Three weeks after 9/11, President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress, formally announced a War on Terror that would be fought on domestic and international fronts. Immigration reform became critical to the War on Terror: while the first goal of the administration was to track down any persons who might have entered the United States with the intent of executing an attack, the second was a structural redesign of the im migration bureaucracy so screening and interception could be more effective. To achieve the first goal, the Department of Justice used the administrative proceedings of the immigration system to interrogate and indefinitely detain persons under suspicion. Immigration inspections denied suspects the due process rights and protections generally available through the criminal court

system. Hundreds of noncitizens—mostly Arab or Muslim—were arrested for alleged immigration violations and, while in detention, interrogated about their possible ties to terrorist groups. These “special interest detainees” re mained in prison with no chance of posting bond and were denied consular, family, or attorney access until they convinced authorities that they did not have connections to terrorist groups. By November 2001, the Department of Justice’s Office of Public Affairs reported the detention of more than twelve hundred men from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries, plus an ad ditional seventy material witnesses. After public criticism of these actions intensified, the government stopped releasing data related to security-related detentions and never officially disclosed the total number of detainees. Of ficials subsequently charged 752 of these special interest detainees with im migration violations and deported them.30 By 2006, only one individual had been charged with a terrorism-related crime.

In 2002, to monitor those who entered the United States more effectively, the Justice Department implemented the National Security Entry-Exit Reg istration System (NSEERS) which required men (sixteen years of age and older) from twenty-five countries on certain types of visitor visas to register with the federal government and be interviewed, photographed, and finger printed. That same year, Congress also passed the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act (EBSVERA), which added three thousand new immigration inspectors; required heightened scrutiny of visa applications from countries believed to be harboring terrorists; and required university administrators to keep better track of the international students admitted to their schools.

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To achieve the structural overhaul of the immigration bureaucracy, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act in 2002 that brought together twenty-two federal departments and agencies into a new cabinet-level De partment of Homeland Security (DHS). The INS was subsumed into DHS and its responsibilities distributed across various agencies within the department: the United States Customs and Border Protection (USCBP), which included the Border Patrol, now oversaw immigration inspections at all ports of entry; the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) oversaw all matters relating to immigration visas and naturalization, including asylum and refugee adjudications; and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) oversaw the detention and removal of those detained for immigration violations (including asylum seekers waiting resolution of their cases). The Department of Homeland Security became the largest federal agency in U.S. history.

These post-9/11 reforms created more bureaucratic hurdles for all those wishing to travel to the United States, including foreign-born students, scholars, merchants, business executives, tourists, and immigrants. Consular officials now evaluated the eligibility of visa applicants under new federal guidelines to promote national security. By 2004, the number of non-immi grant visas issued by U.S. consular officials dropped by one-third; but visas to citizens of countries with large Muslim populations dropped between 50 and 83 percent.31 To better record the entry and departure of visitors, in 2004, DHS replaced NSEERS with the U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indication Technology (US-VISIT) that collected biometric data at a port of entry/exit and ran this data through the new consolidated criminal and security databases. Congress funded new detention facilities and enforce ment capabilities through the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004 and mandated the construction of over seven hundred miles of double-fencing and improved electronic surveillance along the U.S.Mexico border through the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Humanitarian Priorities

By mid-2000, a new post Cold War national security state was in place. These developments had a profound impact on the refugee and asylum tracks within the immigration bureaucracy. By 2020, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) took, on average, eighteen to twenty-four months to vet each applicant for refugee status and the asylum adjudication process could take three years or longer.

While the United States has accommodated refugee populations through out its history, Congress did not establish a distinct and permanent track for refugee admissions until after the Second World War.32 The 1965 Immigration Act (Hart-Celler Act) allowed for the “conditional entry” of 10,200 refugees per year and defined a refugee as the “oppressed or persecuted . . . because of their race, color, religion, national origin, adherence to democratic beliefs, or their opposition to totalitarianism or dictatorship, and to persons uprooted by natural calamity or military operations who are unable to return to their usual place of abode.” During the Cold War, most refugees came from com munist countries, especially the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba. The White House also drew on the humanitarian parole authority granted by the 1952 Immigration Act (McCarran-Walter Act) to grant entrance to those who were of special humanitarian interest. Under this parole authority, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them fleeing communist nations, entered the

United States outside of immigration quota during the Cold War. Congress later created opportunities for permanent residency for these humanitarian parolees through the passage of so-called “adjustment acts.”

In 1980, concerned over the overuse of the parole authority, Congress passed the Refugee Act to establish “a permanent and systematic proce dure for the admission [of refugees] of special humanitarian concern to the United States.” Drawing on the United Nations’ definition, the 1980 act now defined a refugee as “any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, or is unable and unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”33The law also established guidelines for granting asylum to those already physically present in the United States or requesting refuge at a port of entry. The 1980 law allowed for a minimum of 50,000 refugees per year but, most years, the number of refugees admitted to the United States has been larger.34

The 1980 Refugee Act also authorized temporary assistance to refugees to facilitate their cultural integration and economic self-sufficiency in the United States—in short, to help them assimilate and become “Americans.” The Office of Refugee Resettlement contracts with national, state, and lo cal agencies to help refugees find housing, furnishings, food, and clothing as well as language instruction and employment training and placement.35 After one year in refugee status, refugees are eligible to adjust their status to lawful permanent resident status; and after five years of residence in the United States, they can apply for citizenship, like other immigrant groups. Once the Cold War ended and anticommunism ceased to be the ideologi cal lens through which Americans interpreted who was worthy of admission as a refugee, policymakers considered a wider range of populations as poten tially eligible for refuge; but soon anti-terrorism became the new ideological lens through which the government determined eligibility and refugees were subjected to increased scrutiny.36 The vetting of individual applications could take as long as two years, which was an additional hardship for those trying to escape threats against their safety. The end of the Cold War presented American policymakers with yet another challenge: the growing number of people who petitioned for asylum on U.S. soil or at a port of entry. By the late 1980s, petitions for asylum had increased due to the political turmoil in Haiti and the civil wars in Central America.37 In response to the growing number of asylum seekers, IIRIRA streamlined the adjudication process to

ease the backlog of cases but also tried to discourage the filing of “frivolous” asylum claims through such measures as “expedited removal,” the denial of work authorization, and indefinite detention.

IIRIRA required immigrants to apply for asylum within one year of enter ing the United States and barred them from work authorization for 180 days or longer pending the resolution of their asylum case. The IIRIRA provision that elicited the loudest objections from refugee advocates, however, was the provision requiring the “expedited removal” of all who could not convince officials at ports of entry that they had a “credible fear” that warranted a fur ther evaluation of their case. Refugee advocates argued that the “expedited removal” of individuals, without the chance to have a full asylum hearing, was a violation of the international norm of nonrefoulement (no forced return to dangerous conditions), especially since the expedited removal screening was a highly subjective evaluation with virtually no oversight.38 During the Trump and Biden administrations, immigration officials relied on yet an other deterrence tool—the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (more commonly known as the Remain in Mexico Program)—which required asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border to remain in Mexico pending a resolution of their asylum case, even if it meant a wait of several years.

One beneficial reform to the humanitarian system of protection was the creation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The 1990 Immigration Act created this status to allow those unable to return to their countries of origin because of an ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or “extraor dinary and temporary conditions” to remain and work in the United States until the attorney general (after 2003, the secretary of homeland security) determined that it was safe to return home. Legislators framed TPS as “the statutory embodiment of safe haven for those aliens who did not meet the legal definition of refugee but [were] fleeing—or reluctant to return to—dan gerous conditions in the homeland.”39

TPS is generally granted on an eighteen-month basis and can be renewed by the Department of Homeland Security if the qualifying conditions persist. However, to qualify for TPS one must be physically present in the United States by a particular date—as a tourist, student, or even as an unauthorized immigrant. Congress imposed this requirement to address some legislators’ concerns that TPS might lead to a surge in migration from hard-hit areas. TPS grants temporary employment authorization and a stay of removal (un less otherwise barred by law because of misdemeanor or felony records). Individuals with TPS do not qualify for state or federal welfare assistance but they contribute to the U.S. economy through their labor and the payment of payroll, social security, property, and sales taxes. Temporary Protected

Status has been one way, albeit imperfect, the United States has fulfilled its humanitarian obligations.

Anthology Overview

The chapters in this anthology explore the long-term impact of the im migration legislation and policies created in the aftermath of the Hart-Celler Act. The authors assess how laws like the 1980 Refugee Act, IRCA, the 1990 Immigration Act, AEDPA, and IIRIRA, among others, have reshaped migra tion flows and other forms of entry; the policing of borders and immigrant incarceration; political institutions and civil society organizations; and the experiences of immigrant groups in communities across the United States. The history of this legislation—and the movements that emerged to counter or minimize their consequences—reveal a broader ideological struggle over who should be allowed to enter and remain in the United States.

The anthology is organized around the four major developments in U.S. immigration policy since 1980 outlined in this introduction. The first two chapters explore policymakers’ responses to undocumented immigration and their consequences for immigrant families. Elliott Young examines im migrant incarceration and deportation, which, he argues cannot be fully understood without discussing the criminal justice reforms of the past de cades. The criminalization of immigrants predates the period under study, but the “tough-on-crime” policies that began in the 1980s, and which led to more intense policing of communities of color and the implementation of mandatory sentencing guidelines, also affected immigrants, trapping them in a “crimmigration web” that resulted in an unprecedented number of deten tions and formal removals. Analyses of immigrant incarceration and removal cannot be viewed in isolation from the increasingly stricter policing of U.S. citizens that led to mass incarceration, writes Young, for they are two sides of a “mass elimination system.” Today, more than half a million immigrants are incarcerated on immigration-related charges every year and more than 50,000 can be found in ICE detention centers on any given day. Young traces the evolution of these policies and their impact on immigrants, the com munities where they settle, and their countries of origin.

Using one of the Trump administration’s most controversial policies, the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border, as a starting point, sociolo gist Leisy J. Abrego examines the impact of this punitive turn on families who tried to cross the border or seek asylum. Abrego notes that, in 2018, in response to the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance Border Policy” that separated parents and children, without any plans for reunification, a social

movement was born using the hashtag #FamiliesBelongTogether. While well-intentioned, this reaction missed the larger historical context, writes Abrego. Since 1980, U.S. foreign policies and U.S. immigration policies have caused multiple forms of suffering for families. Not only have these policies separated spouses, parents, children, and other family members for lengthy periods of time, they have made migrants vulnerable in their neighborhoods and places of work. The fear of deportation has limited the life chances they hoped to improve in the United States. Drawing on years of oral interviews in the United States and Central America, Abrego discusses the painful con sequences of policies on individuals and families that are often obscured in Washington’s policy reports and assessments.

As U.S. immigration laws became more restrictive and enforcement more punitive for some groups of immigrants, others found new opportunities for entry, as chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate. Monique Laney’s chapter focuses on the development of the U.S. preference system for skilled immigrants, which she argues created a global race for “the best and the brightest.” Laney traces the ideological origins and evolution of this preference system from World War II to the Trump administration. “Traditionally, the United States has not had to worry about attracting the most talented and highest trained individu als,” writes Laney, “but thanks to increasing international competition, the situation has changed in recent years.” Laney gives particular attention to the H-1B and OPT programs, among others, that policymakers have imple mented to attract highly skilled workers to the United States from all over the world, but she also examines how the international competition for the highly skilled has reinforced a neoliberal logic that all workers are exploit able commodities. She discusses how the United States has fallen behind in the global race for the highly skilled, especially during the Trump and Biden administrations. Instead of looking for ways to increase the number of permanent visas for highly skilled migrants, the United States has modified its visa programs on an ad hoc and piecemeal basis, reflecting the tensions and growing divide between policymakers who wish to restrict entrance and employers who demand specific forms of labor.

Carly Goodman’s chapter, in turn, asks “Why, amid decades of increased restrictions, enforcement-centered policy, and zero-sum thinking did Con gress create an entirely new immigration visa program, outside the previously accepted categories of family, labor, and humanitarian need, to serve an ab stract value like ‘diversity’?” The author answers this question by examining the ideological origins of the Diversity Visa lottery, a topic that has received comparatively little attention from scholars of immigration. Her analysis focuses on those who advocated on behalf of the Diversity Visa Program and

why they were successful in creating this new track for admission. She dem onstrates how the program proved far more expansive than its proponents had initially intended and eventually became a major channel of African immigration, and not just European. The program’s successful inclusion in the 1990 legislation, and its longevity and survival even into the Trump era, writes Goodman, speaks to how the program “tapped into something fundamental about how Americans, especially American liberals, like to imagine themselves” and the American Dream.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine the specter of the post Cold War national security state on immigration and travel policies. Julia Rose Kraut’s chapter discusses the history of ideological exclusion from the Cold War to the War on Terror. During the 1980s, in response to actions by the Reagan adminis tration, Congress and members of the public pushed to repeal the security provisions in place since the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 that had barred certain individuals from immigrating—or even traveling to—the United States because of their political associations, views, and expressions. Despite some success in repealing certain national security provisions, the apparatus and mechanisms used to carry out ideological exclusions remained intact well into the twenty-first century. Kraut notes that, as the perceived national security threat shifted from communism to terrorism, the national security provisions also shifted to a focus on antiterrorism, which produced a public outcry not unlike that raised during the height of the Cold War, as Americans worried about the suppression of dissent and the continued use of guilt by association to restrict entrance to the United States.

Julio Capó Jr. examines how particular notions of sexuality, gender, and anti-Black and anti-Brown animus coalesced in the formation of U.S. im migration policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Capó offers a new interpretation of this period by examining the major policy shifts alongside influential but lesser-known judicial decisions and executive orders that barred sexual nonconforming immigrants and others the state deemed dangerous and objectionable. “U.S. immigration policy took shape through a combination of conservative and moralist impulses and reforms,” writes Capó, but also through “liberal and radical challenges to those efforts.” Understanding the past four decades requires not only an appreciation for how immigration policy dovetailed with U.S. foreign policy interests but also how shifts in political culture, including changes in the LGBTQ, feminist, Black, and Latina/o/x movements, brought about change.

The last three chapters of the anthology discuss the ways humanitarian pri orities shaped U.S. immigration policies, as well as the role activists, refugees, and asylum seekers played in pushing the U.S. government to prioritize them.

Carl J. Bon Tempo’s chapter focuses on the human rights based campaigns for immigrant rights. Bon Tempo examines three key moments in the history of U.S. immigration policy in the 1980s and early 1990s: the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, the intensification of polic ing along the southern border in the 1980s, and the passage of Proposition 187 in California in 1994 restricting immigrants’ access to schools, medical care, and welfare programs. These episodes, Bon Tempo argues, sparked a fierce countermovement in the United States that advocated on behalf of immigrants’ rights and dignity. Pro-immigrant activists drew on human rights language and principles, which acquired greater currency to advocate on behalf of immigrants who were increasingly vilified and dehumanized. Human rights became both a rallying cry and a tool of political organizing. Bon Tempo traces both the promise and limitations of human rights politics in immigration affairs, as well as the endurance of the “human rights idea.”

Carl Lindskoog traces the evolution of the Sanctuary Movement from its origins in the early 1980s to its more multifaceted expressions in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The movement, which first emerged in the early 1980s, came in response to the U.S. proxy wars in Central America and the U.S. government’s subsequent refusal to grant asylum to the hundreds of thousands who fled the political upheaval in the region. Lindskoog traces the national network of faith and secular communities that gave refuge to Central Americans in violation of U.S. immigration law, as well as the U.S. government’s crackdown on these sanctuary activists; but he also examines the legal tools and strategies activists developed to protect the movement against government overreach. These strategies allowed the movement to survive and expand over the next few decades. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the movement had developed into a more far-reaching campaign for human rights, economic justice, and peace.

The anthology ends with Yael Schacher’s chapter on how Supreme Court cases have influenced the rights accorded asylum seekers. Schacher begins with an analysis of the Supreme Court decisions from the 1980s regarding how asylum seekers prove they should not be returned to countries where their lives are threatened, the cornerstone of protection for refugees in in ternational law called “withholding of removal” in U.S. law. Schacher shows that the failure to scrutinize U.S. government practice in handling asylum seekers in the 1960s and 1970s led the Supreme Court to set the standard of proof too high. The second part of Schacher’s chapter analyzes Supreme Court cases from the 2010s regarding the procedures accorded asylum seekers who ask for protection at the U.S.-Mexico border. Decisions in these cases again misread the past, particularly the long history of immigrant court chal

lenges of detention and deportation. Schacher ends by calling for historical research and strategic advocacy that could shift the United States toward a fairer treatment of asylum seekers. * * *

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the U.S. immigra tion system faces several challenges. Many of today’s immigration policies and practices—the dramatic shift toward border militarization and the use of deterrence practices such as expedited removal and indefinite detention, for example—have been decades in the making and have their ideological and discursive origins in the 1980s and 1990s. The demographic changes brought about by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the socioeconomic shifts brought about by global neoliberal trade policies, and the political realignments of the post Cold War period have elicited a corresponding impulse to reinforce borders, reassess humanitarian commitments, and privilege specific forms of labor. Even the Trump administration’s draconian policies—the bans on immigration from certain countries, the dramatic reductions in the number of refugees admitted into the United States, the increased use of asylum deterrence policies such as the separation of family members (including children) in detention facilities, and the use of the COVID-19 pandemic to curtail all types of immigration—have roots in the anti-immigrant rhetoric that emerged after the passage of the 1965 immigration act. This history also explains the challenges the Biden administration faces in reversing some of the Trump administration’s policies and in pushing for an overhaul of the country’s immigration system. Immigration policy has long been shaped by Americans’ changing understanding of who they are as a nation, and who they want to welcome into the fold. We hope that these chapters will help readers understand the long history behind these developments and encour age a more informed public response to new policies in the future.

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Notes

1. “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-baines -johnson/timeline/lbj-on-immigration.

2. “Edward Kennedy,” U-S-History.com, http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h2015 .html (accessed March 24, 2021).

3. Jynnah Radford, “Key Findings about U.S. Immigrants,” Pew Research Center Fact Tank, June 17, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/key -findings-about-u-s-immigrants/; American Immigration Council, “How the United

States Immigration System Works,” October 1, 2019, https://www.americanimmigration council.org/research/how-united-states-immigration-system-works.

4. See, for example, Bipartisan Policy Center, “Immigration in Two Acts,” Novem ber 2015, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/BPC-Immigration -Legislation-Brief.pdf; Jane Hong, “The Law That Created Illegal Immigration,” Los Angeles Times, October 2, 2015, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe -1002-hong-1965-immigration-act-20151002-story.html.

5. The 1965 Immigration Act has been called the law that “inadvertently created the illegal immigration problem.” See, for example, Tom Gjelten, “The Immigration Act That Inadvertently Changed America,” The Atlantic, October 2, 2015, http://www .theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/immigration-act-1965/408409/.

6. According to the Pew Research Center, the decline in the unauthorized im migrant population is due largely to a fall in the number from Mexico. During this period, however, there was a rise in the number of immigrants from Central America and Asia. See Radford, “Key Findings about U.S. Immigrants”; Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Mexicans Decline to Less Than Half the U.S. Unauthorized Immi grant Population for the First Time,” Pew Research Center Fact Tank, June 12, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/us-unauthorized-immigrant -population-2017/.

7. Muzaffar Chishti, Doris Meissner, Claire Bergeron, “At Its 25th Anniversary, IRCA’s Legacy Lives On,” Migration Policy Institute, November 16, 2011, https://www .migrationpolicy.org/article/its-25th-anniversary-ircas-legacy-lives.

8. SCIRP, headed by the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh and also known as the Hesburgh Commission, was a bipartisan committee created in 1978 to offer recom mendations on immigration reform.

9. Muzzafar A. Chisti, “The Impact of IRCA’s Employer Sanctions Provision on Workers and Workplace,” Defense of the Alien 12 (1989): 189–191; Rhonda McMillion, “IRCA Employer Sanctions: GAO Report Prompts Congressional Review,” ABA Journal 76, no. 6 (1990): 94.

10. The first report, U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility: A Report to Congress: 1994 Executive Summary (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Immigra tion Reform, 1994), was released in September 1994. A second interim report, Legal Immigration: Setting Priorities (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, 1995), was released in 1995. Two final reports were released in 1997: U.S. Refugee Policy: Taking Leadership: A Report to Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Com mission on Immigration Reform, 1997) and Becoming an American: Immigration and Immigrant Policy: 1997 Executive Summary (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, 1997).

11. “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,” https:// www.congress.gov/104/crpt/hrpt828/CRPT-104hrpt828.pdf.

12. Battered women and children under the age of eighteen were exempted from these penalties, as were the spouses and children of U.S. citizens and permanent

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residents if they could demonstrate that their deportation would result in extreme hardship to the citizen or permanent resident.

13. Clinton Administration History Project, A History of the US Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration, 1993–2001 (Washington, DC, 2001), 79–82, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/collections/show/21.

14. Office of the United States Free Trade Representative, “North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),” https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/ ustr-archives/north-american-free-trade-agreement-nafta (accessed August 8, 2022).

15. For an excellent discussion of NAFTA’s disruption of labor, see David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).

16. Clinton Administration History Project, “A History of the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration, 1993–2001,” 79–80.

17. Clinton Administration History Project, “A History of the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration, 1993–2001,” 82.

18. Migration Policy Institute, “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Data Tools,” https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/deferred-action -childhood-arrivals-daca-profiles (accessed March 24, 2021).

19. Supreme Court of the United States, Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, June 18, 2020, https://www.supremecourt .gov/opinions/19pdf/18 587_5ifl.pdf. By the end of 2021, the only significant change in the DACA program to come from the Department of Homeland Security was to allow application for renewals without a work permit.

20. The government required employers to provide free and adequate housing, comply with minimum wage standards for immigrant workers set by the U.S. De partment of Labor, and guarantee that the shortage in domestic labor was not a consequence of poor working conditions.

21. American Immigration Council, “Fact Sheet: “The H-1B Visa Program, A Primer on the Program and Its Impact on Jobs, Wages, and the Economy,” April 2, 2020, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa-program -fact-sheet.

22. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Fact Sheet: Immigration Act of 1990,” in File “Immigration Reform,” Office of the Press Secretary, George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, College Station, TX. Starting in 2005, Congress capped H-1B visas at 65,000 a year, plus an additional 20,000 visas for foreigners with a graduate degree from a U.S. institution of higher learning.

23. After 2010, federal administrative rule changes led companies to shift away from employing H-2B workers to J-1 visa holders where third parties (online interna tional student exchanges) facilitated the flow of foreign labor. Neil G. Ruiz, “Key Facts about the U.S. H-1B Visa Program,” Pew Research Center, April 17, 2017, https://www .pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/key-facts-about-the-u-s-h-1b-visa-program/.

For more on the prehistory of temporary worker programs, see Ronald L. Mize, “The State Management of Immigrant Labor: The Decline of the Bracero Program,

the Rise of Temporary Worker Visas,” in A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965, ed. Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Y. Hsu, and Maria Cristina Garcia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 123–143.

24. Abby Phillip, “Trump Signs ‘Buy American, Hire American’ Executive Order, Promising to Fight for American Workers,” Washington Post, April 18, 2017, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/04/18/trump-signs-buyamerican-hire-american-executive-order-promising-to-fight-for-american-workers/.

2 5. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President in Signing Ceremony for the Immigration Act 1990,” November 29, 1990, in File “Im migration Reform,” Office of the Press Secretary, George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, College Station, TX.

26. Carlos Echevarria-Estrada and Jeanne Batalova, “Sub-Saharan Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, November 6, 2019, https://www.migration policy.org/article/sub-saharan-african-immigrants-united-states-2018#English_ Proficiency; Monica Anderson and Phillip Connor, “Sub-Saharan African Immigrants in the U.S. Are Often More Educated Than Those in Top European Destinations,” Pew Research Center, April 24, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/04/24/ sub-saharan-african-immigrants-in-the-u-s-are-often-more-educated-than-those -in-top-european-destinations/.

27. ACLU, “Analysis of Immigration Detention Policies,” https://www.aclu.org/ other/analysis-immigration-detention-policies (accessed March 24, 2021).

28. Chenyu Wang, “International Students Have Long Been a Policy Tool for U.S. Leaders,” Washington Post, July 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ outlook/2020/07/10/international-students-have-long-been-policy-tool-us-leaders/.

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29. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Ter rorist Attacks Upon the United States (Washington, DC: National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, 2004), 353–357. See also Donald Kerwin, “The Use and Misuse of ‘National Security’ Rationale in Crafting U.S. Refugee and Immigration Policies,” International Journal of Refugee Law 17 (2005): 749–763; and chapter 3, “Refuge in the National Security State,” in Maria Cristina Garcia, The Refugee Challenge in Post Cold War America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

30. Daniel B. Prieto, “War About Terror: Civil Liberties and National Security after 9/11,” Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, February 2009, 17; Migration Policy Institute, “America’s Human Rights Challenge: International Human Rights Implications of U.S. Immigration Enforcement Actions Post September 11,” Sep tember 2006, 18n51, 19, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/americas-human -rights-challenge-international-human-rights-implications-us-immigration. MPI reported that some community-based and legal services organizations placed the total number of detainees at three thousand. The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights brought two federal cases to contest all these practices, which resulted in two contradictory decisions—one ordering access and the other upholding secrecy. Migration Policy Institute, “America’s Human Rights Challenge,” 19–22.

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31. Migration Policy Institute, “America’s Human Rights Challenge,” 42.

32. Two important works that provide an overview of the Cold War period are Carl J. Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Gil Loescher and John A. Scanlan, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1986). For a discussion of refugee policy in the post Cold War period, see Garcia, The Refugee Challenge in Post Cold War America.

33. “The 1980 Refugee Act (PL 96–212),” March 17, 1980, https://www.gpo.gov/ fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-94/pdf/STATUTE-94-Pg102.pdf.

34. The president submits to the House of Representatives a proposal (known as the consultation document) with the administration’s suggested refugee ceiling for the upcoming fiscal year. Following congressional input, the White House is sues the “presidential determination” establishing the official refugee numbers for the upcoming fiscal year. Andorra Bruno, “Refugee Admissions and Resettlement Policy,” Congressional Research Service, March 6, 2014, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/ misc/RL31269.pdf.

35. U.S. Department of State, “U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) Fre quently Asked Questions,” May 31, 2013, https://2009 2017.state.gov/j/prm/releases/ factsheets/2013/210134.htm. Refugees are generally expected to have employment within six months of arrival in the United States. They may apply for legal permanent residency after one year of residence and may apply for citizenship after five years. If their airfare to the United States is not paid by the family or sponsoring organization, the government grants a loan to the refugee applicant, which must be repaid to the government.

36. Garcia, The Refugee Challenge in Post Cold War America.

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37. For a discussion of U.S. responses to Haitian migration see Carl Lindskoog, Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018). For a discussion of U.S. policy toward Central American asylum seekers see Maria Cristina Garcia, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

38. To mitigate the chances that a true asylum seeker might be removed, immigra tion officers were given specialized training in country conditions. However, since the system offered little oversight and no real chance for appeal, mistakes were bound to occur. In 2005, for example, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported that one-sixth of those observed at U.S. ports of entry who expressed a fear of return were still denied the opportunity to apply for asylum. United States Com mission on International Religious Freedom, Report on Asylum Seekers in Expedited Removal, Vol. 2 (February 2005), 20–23; cited in Kerwin, “The Use and Misuse of ‘National Security’ Rationale in Crafting US Refugee and Immigration Policies,” 758.

39. Lisa Seghetti, Karma Ester, and Ruth Ellen Wasem, “Temporary Protected Status: Current Immigration Policy and Issues,” Congressional Research Service, July 1, 2015, https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/library/P10429.pdf.