Toward a Better Immigration System: Fixing Immigration Governance at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
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Highlights
DHS's fragmented immigration structure undermines effective governance. Immigration functions should be consolidated under stronger DHS leadership, along with IT modernization and stronger oversight.
- The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2003 by merging 22 separate agencies, but immigration functions were split among U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) without a unified strategy.
- DHS leadership lacks authority to coordinate across immigration components; legal authorities are dispersed, data-sharing is weak, and enforcement and services operate with minimal strategic alignment.
- Recommendations include consolidating immigration functions under stronger DHS leadership, reforming USCIS funding away from its near-total reliance on fees, modernizing IT, and establishing clearer performance metrics.
In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from a patchwork of agencies charged to varying degrees with counterterrorism and broader responsibilities relating to the protection of the homeland. The functions of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Customs Service became one of the department’s largest sets of responsibilities. Its three resulting immigration components—U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services—made up 34 percent of the DHS budget and 44 percent of its personnel in fiscal year 2020.
Almost two decades since the department was founded in 2003, the immigration functions of these three components have been heavily defined by their national security dimensions, even as their missions encompass a much wider array of national interests—from economic competitiveness and travel facilitation, to legal immigration, and global leadership in refugee protection and foreign student education.
With action on immigration stalled in Congress, this report examines questions of structure—rather than policy—and proposes changes within the authority of the executive branch to enable DHS and related agencies to treat immigration as a system, allowing them to operate as one to successfully carry out the immigration mission in all its aspects.
The report is part of MPI’s Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy Initiative, launched in 2019. The initiative is generating a big-picture, evidence-driven vision for the role immigration can and should play in America’s future.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Immigration as a System
3 Department and Component Missions
4 DHS Institutional Structures: Chain of Command and Policy Coordination
A. Challenges for Intradepartmental Collaboration
B. DHS Institutional Structures for Managing Immigration as a System
5 Challenges for Interdepartmental Collaboration
A. The Department of Justice
B. The Department of State
C. The Department of Health and Human Services
D. The Department of Labor
6 Funding Priorities and the Budget Process
A. U.S. Customs and Border Protection
B. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
C. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
D. The Executive Office for Immigration Review: A Key Partner Agency
E. Coordinated Budget Planning
7 Institutional Culture
A. Senior Career Leadership
B. Recruitment, Retention, and Vulnerability to Corruption
C. Public Opinion and Staff Morale
8 Recommendations
9 Beyond Executive Action
10 Conclusion
About the U.S. Immigration Policy Program
The U.S. Immigration Policy Program provides analysis of U.S. immigration pathways, the impacts of enforcement and other policies, and the characteristics of immigrant populations.
Rethinking U.S. Immigration Policy Initiative
This Initiative is generating a big-picture, evidence-driven vision of the role immigration can and should play in America’s future by providing policy ideas that reflect new realities.
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