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2 Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureauracy 81 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980).Google Scholar

3 The long-term exemption of the INS from ordinary administrative procedure and judicial review has created, by Calavita's account, an extraordinary cult of secrecy and an assumption of entitlement to it. It is the latter that might distinguish the INS from other organizations, all of which would like to control the knowledge they hold and its dissemination. A contrast with another administrative agency is useful. A friend researching drug use policies was told he could have all the information he wanted unless he filed a Freedom of Information Act request. If he did that, he was cheerfully promised, all cooperation from the bureaucracy would dry up. He got what he needed. In contrast, Calavita was urged by the FOIA staff of the INS to sue; without the suit, other requests in the two-year backlog would have priority. Calavita recounts the difficulty of having to rely on public rights. For example, she was told she had to request material as specific documents. Yet until she knew what was there she could not request anything. She asked for an index and was told she had to request that under Freedom of Information. Only through long negotiation did she get access to the files, then finding boxes of files not categorized by program. She tells a story from an earlier study. The researcher discussed with an INS official the Code of Federal Regulations statements of what kinds of material an agency had to give him. The official asked him where he got the CFR; he thought it was confidential. As Calavita points out, methodology is not the tidy steps portrayed in textbooks (at 10–17). The research problem replicates the WS's ability to control programs that Calavita documents.Google Scholar

4 James G. March & Johan Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions (New York: Free Press, 1989), provide a good synthesis of much of the organizational literature. For the problem of state capacity and the mobilization of preferences, see Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, & Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). On American state capacity, see Stephen Skowrownek, Building a New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

5 See, e.g., Eric Nodlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), and Moe, Terry, “Interests, Institutions and Positive Theory: The Politics of the NLRB,” 2 Stud. Am. Pol. Develop. 236 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See James Caporaso, ed., The Elusive State (Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1989).Google Scholar

7 For a discussion of this issue over time in the United States, see Fred Block, “Beyond Relative Autonomy: State Managers as Historical Subjects”in Block, Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Postindustrialism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

8 See Paul DiMaggio & Walter Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For an excellent use of this approach to understand equal ernployment opportunity policy, see Lauren Edelman & Stephen M. Petterson, “Symbols and Substance in Organizational Response to Civil Rights Law” (University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1992).Google Scholar

9 Even a completely discretionary program set within the broadest of frameworks— Nixonb wage and price freeze—found officials focusing on even-handed treatment across cases. Robert Kagan, Regulatory Justice (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1978).Google Scholar

10 Philippe Nonet, Administrative Justice (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1969), addresses the relationship between worked compensation and union organization to understand the pressure to rules and adversariness within the program.Google Scholar

11 Salyer, Lucy, “Captives of Law: Judicial Enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws, 1891–1905,” 76 J. Am. Hist. 91 (1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Stewart, Richard, “The Reformation of American Administrative Law,” 88 Harv. L. Rev. 1669 (1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Susan Lawrence, The Poor in Court (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Martha Davis, Brutal Need (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

14 Joel Handler, Protecting the Social Services Client (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Schuck, Peter, “The Transformation of American Immigration Law,” 84 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Peter Irons, The New Deal Lawyers (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

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18 Jerry Mashaw, Bureaucratic Justice (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

19 Janet Gilboy, “Deciding Who Gets in: Decisionmaking by Immigration Inspectors,” 25 Law & Soc'y Rev. 571, 587 (1990).Google Scholar

20 Id. at 593–94.Google Scholar

21 Shuck, Peter, “The Politics of Rapid Legal Change: Immigration Policy in the 1980s,” 6 Stud. Am. Pol. Devel. 37 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 James Hollifield, Immigration, States and Markets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) (“Hollifield, Immigration”).Google Scholar

23 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

24 Constable, Marianne, “Sovereignty and Govemmentality in Modem American Immigration Law,” 13 Stud. L., Pol. & Soc'y 249 (1993).Google Scholar

25 Hollifield, Immigration 178.I am grateful to Marianne Constable for pointing out to me the congruence between the perspectives.Google Scholar

26 Karen Omen and Stephen Skowrownek have recently argued against what they see as a common assumption in the social sciences of orderliness. See Omen & Skowrownek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order,”in Lawrence Dodd & Calvin Jillson, eds., The Dynamics of American Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993).Google Scholar

27 Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982).Google Scholar

28 Peter H. Schuck, “Membership in the Liberal Polity: The Devaluation of American Citizenship,”in W. Rogers Brubaker, ed., Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989).Google Scholar

29 Not surprisingly, the statute has not made the tensions between the control of immigration and the supply of cheap labor to employers go away, leaving plenty of room for political gamesmanship. In 1994 the California Democratic Party placed a full-page ad in the New York Times castigating Pete Wilson for his support for the Special Agricultural Workers program and for pressure the CDP claims Wilson brought on the INS not to prosecute some San Diego employers. N.Y. Times, 29 April 1994, p. A16. Attorney General Janet Reno has supported a fingerprinting program that would focus on catching and penalizing the migrants rather than their employers. Louis Freedberg, “Reno Wants to Fingerprint Illegals Who Get Caught,”San Francisco Chronicle, 3 June 1994, p. A3. I am grateful to Marianne Constable for bringing this article to my attention.Google Scholar

30 Schuck, 6 Stud. Am. Pol. Devel. 37 (cited in note 21). The extremely complex political alliances that immigration in the West provokes continue. The portrayal in the Nation of the Clinton administration's border blockade in El Paso harkens back to the era of loose enforcement, arguing that it meant that those who needed to make money could cross the border and do so at much better wages. According to this article, some Latino groups in El Paso have not opposed the blockade out of a concern for the burdens undocumented workers are assumed to put on the local economy. “Greenbacks Si! Wetbacks No! El Paso under the Blockade,”Nation, 28 Feb. 1994, pp. 268–70.Google Scholar