UC Berkeley

Political actors embedded in the labyrinthian U.S. immigration system make decisions every day that either uphold or challenge the state’s inherent punitiveness towards noncitizens. I argue that some of the variation in punitive outcomes can be explained by partisanship of these actors -- including judges, legislators, and voters themselves. My dissertation evaluates this argument from three different angles. In each paper, I spotlight a different set of political actors and institutions and examine different immigration outcomes depending on the scope of the said political actor or institution's power. First, federal immigration judges have the ability on a daily basis to decide legal outcomes of deportation for many asylum seekers, so I look at whether the appointing party of an immigration judge affects asylum grant rates in immigration courts. Second, county legislators decide whether and how much local detention space to contract to ICE, playing a key role in determining ICE’s detention capacity. I conduct a national analysis of whether the partisan majority of a county council affects their local ICE detention capacity over time. Third, given that health and legal nonprofits bear the responsibility of providing vital human services for many immigrants, I examine whether the spatial accessibility of immigrant-serving nonprofits correlates with political characteristics of cities. Across these three separate analyses, I find that the partisan affiliation of appointed and elected officials does shape punitive outcomes of detention and deportation, while non-electoral political mobilization predicts better access to immigrant-serving health and legal services. In the rest of the abstract, I provide a more detailed synopsis of each study.

In my first paper, “The Role of Party Politics in Asylum Decisions of Immigration Judges,” I examine the puzzling variation in asylum grant rates, both between different courts and between judges in the same court. I argue that the mass hiring of new immigration judges (IJs) in an increasingly polarized political era opens the possibility that party politics plays an important role in asylum adjudication today. Indeed, I find that the appointing party of an IJ likely shapes their asylum adjudication patterns and that IJ behavior has polarized over time. Evaluating all asylum cases between 2003 and 2020, on average, Republican-appointed judges are more likely to deport asylum seekers by 3.8%. Upon further analysis, I find that this difference is entirely attributed to Trump-era IJs, who are more likely to deport by 6.0% compared to all other Republican or Democratic-appointed IJs. My results complement other studies that find no role of partisanship in asylum adjudication during older time periods, because partisan polarization of IJ behavior appears to be a starkly contemporary phenomenon.

In my second paper “Do ICE Detention Levels in County Facilities Depend on Partisanship of County Legislators?” I shift my focus away from the federal government to examine the politics of immigration enforcement in counties. Previous studies have shown that a) local legislators behave differently in some policy areas depending on their partisanship and that b) local immigration policy differs based on the partisanship of voters. Yet, little is known about the mechanism that links the partisanship of local voters with local immigration enforcement outcomes. I posit that the linking mechanism could be local legislators directly influencing immigration detention in their jurisdictions. I also posit that local legislators behave differently in the immigration policy area based on their partisan affiliation. I conduct a multi-method analysis to examine whether electing a Democrat or Republican-majority county council affects the level of immigration detention in their respective local jails and prisons. A quantitative "difference-in-difference" analysis shows that newly-elected Democratic majority county councils tend to house about 20 to 40 fewer detainees daily, relative to comparable counties over time. On the other hand, newly-elected Republican-majority county councils tend to have similar levels of ADP as comparable counties over time. I also conduct a qualitative analysis of county minutes and find that federal policies can restrain newly-elected Republican counties’ attempts to achieve more punitive detention outcomes. There are also stark discursive differences between newly-elected Republican-majority and Democratic-majority councils; the Republican-led councils focused on fiscal consequences of the details of detention contracts whereas the Democrat-led councils moreso led ideological and morality-focused discussions around immigration policy more generally.

My third paper, “Examining Civic and Political Contexts: Why Do Immigrants Have Better Access to Health Services and Legal Aid in Some Places?,” examines some of the city-level characteristics that might explain why human services are more accessible to immigrants in some places than in others. This paper takes a slightly different approach than the previous two papers, in that it examines a network of non-state entities and focuses on immigrant integration outcomes instead of enforcement outcomes. A spatial analysis of all cities in California, Nevada and Arizona shows that partisan vote share does not meaningfully predict spatial accessibility of health and legal services for immigrants. Instead, non-electoral political characteristics of a place -– namely, civic infrastructure and social movement history -– are better indicators of whether immigrants can more conveniently access affordable health and legal services. These non-electoral political characteristics likely serve the key function of increasing “civic visibility” of the immigrant community as legitimate and deserving recipients of aid. My results bolster the prevailing idea that immigrants in “established gateway” cities tend to benefit from a long-standing, robust network of immigrant organizations and public-private partnerships. In an analogous way, immigrants in cities with historical NAACP chapters and/or 2006 immigration reform protests likely also benefit from the community’s long-standing organizing power and advocacy expertise. In sum, at a grassroots level, electoral party politics are not the end-all-be-all. Investing in civic infrastructure and building organizing power in a place can lower the barriers of advocating for, establishing, and continually funding immigrant-serving health and legal clinics. Taken altogether, this dissertation illustrates the politicization of immigration processes and outcomes at the federal, county, and city-levels. Life-altering outcomes of detention, deportation, and access to human services should not depend on the political preferences of individual actors or the political characteristics of a place. In raising questions about the integrity and legitimacy of the U.S. government’s approach to immigration and integration, my work supports scholars and activists who envision an alternate approach to immigration policy that is human-centered instead of security-centered.