For the Symposium on Adam Cox and Cristina Rodriguez, The President and Immigration Law (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Robert L. Tsai
Adam Cox and Cristina Rodriguez
have written a brave and valuable book. In The President and Immigration,
they de-center Congress in America’s system of immigration law and reveal to us
a troubling truth many don’t wish to hear: the President sits “atop a massive
deportation state” that allows significant leeway to remove whole groups of
unwanted migrants from our midst. That makes policies like President Trump’s
ban on Muslim travelers and his supercharged efforts to remove unauthorized
Hispanic migrants more consistent with the past than representing a clean break
from it. Moreover, in a breathtaking transfer of power through “de facto
delegation,” a president has been afforded policymaking authority to enforce
federal law in a highly discretionary manner—creating a “shadow immigration
system.” Collectively, it has meant that presidents can initiate policy and
even contradict policies set by Congress, encountering only rare pushback by
Congress or the courts. Certainly presidents have grown accustomed to treating
the system as theirs alone to shape, whether it’s Obama creating the DACA
program and Biden promising to revive it, or Trump’s plan to drastically reduce
admissions of refugees.
This is a bracing and realistic
portrait of what America’s immigration system has become. Given my own interest
in presidentialism, particularly involving FDR and Obama, I
applaud the authors’ choice to give presidential leadership pride of place in
their theory of immigration law’s development. In clear prose and through sharp
analysis, Cox and Rodriguez show us how even when Congress disapproves of
presidential adventurism, they have often ratified the policy decisions of past
presidents. That raises a tough set of empirical questions. Has legislative
action ever constrained a president or has it merely enlarged the menu
of legal sources and arguments from which a president may choose to justify the
policy to which he is already committed? If, as Cox and Rodriguez strongly
suggest, the answer is “no” more often than the answer is “yes,” then what
kinds of reforms are worth the investment?
I’d like to push on the Cox-Rodriguez story a bit, which I take to be a historical-legal account that is institutionalist and internal. By institutionalist, I mean that the authors are less interested in the specific motivations of particular historical actors and their policy effects and more interested in the bureaucracies that have been established, abolished, or reorganized, the ways that lines of authority between the federal government and the states have shifted, and the sheer number of immigration-related laws and rules that have grown over time.
By internal, I mean that their explanation
traces the trajectory of development from the perspective of constitutional
actors from within the legal order (presidents, agencies, aides, legislators,
judges), rather than from that of actors who stand outside of the formal policymaking
and enforcement system, such as grassroots activists, political parties, business
groups, or civic organizations. Indeed, Cox and Rodriguez reject certain
external explanations for the development of our modern immigration system,
such as hyper-partisanship, and don’t grapple with others, such as changes to
views on immigration on the part of political parties or unions.
What might
be learn if we widened the lens to encompass other patterns of development? Although
the Cox-Rodriguez story focuses on presidential vision and how to implement it,
there are other dynamics—some cyclical, some seeming to operate as one-way
ratchets—that create opportunities and can give that vision potency. The current
regime allows presidents and their allies to engage in what I’ve called the
politics of demographic control. Cox and Rodriguez rightly identify a
president’s role in pursuing these efforts at shaping the country’s makeup as
well as promoting a vision of political community.
When we get to mechanics, though, it’s
more than just a story about presidential leadership; it’s also one about how
presidents position themselves vis-à-vis other actors to gain or entrench
influence. Trump’s ambition to do so much in such a short period of time,
despite winning a narrow victory in 2016, had everything to do with electoral
advantages enjoyed by the Republican party but was propelled by
anti-immigration forces. Other presidents not clearly backed by a consolidated
part of the electorate and his party, or well-organized on the issue of
immigration, would enjoy less actual policymaking latitude (measured not just
formally in terms of precedent but also in terms of how deferential Congress
and federal judges can be expected to be).
The
Cox-Rodriguez model favors “political responsiveness” in the making of
immigration policy, and the authors point out that the modern presidency has
various attributes that make it well equipped for exerting such popular
influences. Yet there are different kinds of forces that act on a president. Our
constitutional order has shown itself to be increasingly open to capture by not
just political parties, but also whole social movements, as Sidney Milkis and
Dan Tichenor explore in their terrific new book, Rivalry
and Reform. This development of course is a popular work-around the
amalgamation of republicanism and liberalism into a form that doesn’t often
serve the needs of citizens. It’s rarely the case, however, that a social
movement’s policy preferences represent those of the median voter. So the
ascendance of presidential lawmaking has also opened the door to a new form of
interest-group influence when presidents present themselves in part as movement
leaders, as LBJ and Trump both did.
There can also be crucial yet unruly
bureaucratic effects that come from a unity between presidents and social
movements. Just as the civil rights movement has continued to try to hold or
recapture key offices such as the Department of Justice or the Civil Rights
Division, so too agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security have
become the new sites for social conflict over certain constitutional principles
such as federalism, equality, and fairness, as well as cultural values such as belonging
and community. But a political order in which social movements are constantly
warring with one another for control of the government’s bureaucracies has enormous
costs as well as its benefits.
One possible conflict-centered
reaction is that the legal order should let everyone duke it out and allow the
chips fall where they may, even if that leads to wild swings in federal policy
and a less stable sense of citizenship rights and institutional powers.
Another, perhaps more technocratic, response is that we should do what we can
to harness the beneficial aspects of activism while finding ways to reduce its
extremes, so that policymaking by presidents can proceed mostly on the basis of
empiricism and efficacy rather than identity and outrage.
Accounting for these external
developments may make it harder to be indifferent whether it is an
ethno-nationalist movement or pro-equality movement that is pushing for
dramatic legal changes, given what a movement can do to (and for) a political
order. For someone who worries about the differential impact of ultra-right and
illiberal movements in eroding governing values and the relationships among
inhabitants, there is much to be concerned about a presidency that can so
easily harness such deconstructive forces.
In related
fashion, their theory feels somewhat less moored to familiar constitutional
signposts. Few, if any, particular actions by a president would be patently
unconstitutional under the Cox-Rodriguez approach, and the two don’t contend
that the president-centered system that has emerged violates an originalist
understanding of separation of powers or the ideal vision of a well-balanced,
mixed constitutional order. For instance, they say that President Obama could
have gone farther in using his parole power on behalf of unauthorized migrants
and would even be open to expanding a president’s ex ante prerogative to
admit non-citizens at the border. While that spirit of general tolerance lends
their model great capacity to explain the changes that have occurred, it does
leave the reader wondering where the authors believe are the outer boundaries
of constitutional permissibility.
For those
of us who believe something
transformative happened in 1965 when Congress enacted the Immigration and
Naturalization Act as part of the civil rights revolution, the principles of
anti-discrimination and family integrity were brought into a new domain. The
Trump administration’s efforts to inject religious and racial considerations
into admission and removal policies (overtly and surreptitiously), as well as
its persistent labors to undermine family reunification as “chain migration” widened
inequalities in this domain and attacked these achievements in a fundamental
way. But we would want to know more about how Cox and Rodriguez see such
moments which were partly generated through presidential leadership and how the
principles yielded during these moments might be safeguarded.
When it comes to reforming the
existing system, the unceasing drum of realism that beats through the Cox-Rodriguez
account may be more compatible with legal tinkering than radical reimagination.
The authors themselves are “optimistic” and hope to “shrink the domain of
enforcement,” and thereby a president’s discretion, by reducing the number of
laws that render someone deportable. They also propose trimming certain emergency
powers such as the authority to admit migrants during a crisis. If these
legislative fixes could be accomplished, it would really do some good. But we
have to imagine that the factors that have led to the dramatic criminalizing of
unwanted presence and the legislative choice to give presidents so much responsibility
through discretion can be undone or will dissipate on their own.
For my part, I am actually left
less hopeful about the efficacy of tinkering after reading The President and
Immigration Law. Instead, I find themselves convinced that major
reorganization of bureaucracies such as DOJ, DHS, and ICE must be on the table,
along with substantive reforms that bring more people living productively into
a less precarious legal status.
Perhaps other answers can come from
looking further inward, given that presidents are likely to remain at the
center of the immigration system for a lot of other reasons besides legislative
inertia (just a few: the sheer number of unauthorized migrants in the country,
the uncertainty about reforms that lead to citizenship, our international and
humanitarian commitment to refugees, the desperate economic and political
conditions of so many other countries etc.).
Of course, we might have to change how we think about how such internal measures operate. We’d have to think not just in terms of constraining a president or his allies, but in terms of maximizing the political value of time by making it harder to make enduring transformative changes unilaterally. An ambitious president should not be able to so easily run roughshod over basic principles in a single term. If a president isn’t likely to give up power and Congress doesn’t want it back, then at least part of an executive branch official’s job must be to create more obstacles to future demagogues that will inhabit the office.
Robert L. Tsai is Professor of
Law at Boston University. You can reach him by e-mail at