U.S. Immigration Policy Program
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This policy brief examines the United States’ complex employment-based immigration system, which admits foreign workers through five permanent immigration categories and dozens of nonimmigrant visa categories for temporary workers. It evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the current demand-driven system and offers recommendations for improvement based on this analysis.
This report examines the connections between the United States’ temporary and permanent systems of admission to the United States. It describes the goals and structure of each system, discusses the relationship between immigrant and nonimmigrant admission flows, and describes the critical data gaps that impede understanding of the underlying realities of immigration to the United States.
Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States Department of Justice has sought to engage local police in the systematic enforcement of routine civil immigration violations, marking a sea change in immigration and local law enforcement practices. This report provides the first public glimpse of how the new NCIC policy has affected on‐the‐ ground policing strategies across the country and which immigrant groups have been most heavily impacted.
This policy brief examines the flaws in the United States’ existing employer sanctions regime and proposes six types of reform that could strengthen the system: improvements to document security, document consolidation, mandatory use of employment databases, increased enforcement staffing, a revised penalty structure, and better worksite access for investigators.
This report provides an overview of United States border enforcement throughout the 20th century, highlights how it has changed since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act nearly two decades ago, and further examines its unprecedented expansion in the aftermath of 9/11. The author concludes with a set of policy questions.
This report explores the successes and failures of various attempts to create an employment verification system that reliably establishes an employee’s eligibility to work since the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Through this analysis, the author evaluates the effectiveness and potential contributions of the current system and seeks to inform proposals for future initiatives.
This brief provides a historical overview of various attempts at implementing workplace enforcement in the United States before arguing in favor of a process not unlike credit-card verification that allows employers to swipe a card at the point of hire and receive a response in real time from the Social Security Administration informing them whether an employee is authorized to work in the United States.
This report examines the sweeping changes in the way identity documents are issued and used under the REAL ID Act, an effort to enhance the security of identity documents in post-9/11 America. It takes a detailed look at how this legislation will affect document issuing agencies, state budgets, and the employment verification system, in addition to immigrants and citizens.
The Los Angeles Declaration Could Represent a Big Step for Real Migration Cooperation across the Americas
The Los Angeles Agreement on Migration and Protection signed by leaders from 20 countries across the Western Hemisphere at the 2022 Summit of the Americas marks a significant step forward in creating a common language and a coherent set of ideas for more cooperatively managing migration movements across a region that has seen very significant mobility in recent years, as this commentary explains.
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