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Penetrability of Administrative Systems: Political “Casework” and Immigration Inspections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Janet A. Gilboy
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Abstract

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To achieve institutional goals, public agencies commonly rely on the political support of interest groups, the executive, and the legislature. While much is written about public agency vulnerability to pressures from these sources, little is known about how influence and agency behavior are linked. This article provides an in-depth look at one agency's response to an important segment of its environment. Drawing on an empirical study of administrative discretion, the study explores the Immigration and Naturalization Service's dependence on the support of politicians and pragmatic response to their “casework” on behalf of constituents. The article highlights a neglected feature of the influence process—how it affects the behavior of front-line public officials, particularly through their anticipation of the possibility that there will or might be casework complaints. It describes the inspection context as understood by front-line immigration inspectors, the asymmetric risks posed to them by casework, and the strategies they “rationally” employ to deal with these risks—strategies that promote accommodation as well as responses based on the perceived power of violators. The article suggests that a lack of countervailing incentives in certain kinds of cases underlies a cultural-political environment of accommodation to outsiders.

Type
Context and Process in Court and Bureaucracy
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , 1992 , pp. 273 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Financial support for this study was generously provided by the National Science Foundation (SES-8911263) and the American Bar Foundation. I would like to express my great appreciation to the district administrators of the Immigration and Naturalization Service whose extensive cooperation and willingness to open their doors to scholarly research made this study of exclusion/admission decisionmaking possible. Their interest in this research provides us with a better understanding of the nature of government action within what is often a difficult environment of public purposes and private interests. I also am indebted to each of the inspectors working at the ports of entry studied; they kindly included me in their everyday activities and gave generously of their time to explain the nature of their work. I would like to thank Barry Boyer, Kitty Calavita, Terence Halliday, John R. Schmidt, and Peter H. Schuck for their indispensable commentary on earlier drafts of this paper, and Robert A. Kagan and Doris Meissner for their valuable insights relating to portions of this paper. Editor Frank Munger, Robert M. Emerson, and the anonymous reviewers of the Law & Society Review provided especially useful insights and advice for the final draft. Bette Sikes is to be thanked for energetically editing the article.

References

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