Immigration to the United States

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April 10, 2026

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April 10, 2026

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"This study analyzes databases of decisions from all four levels of the asylum adjudication process: 133,000 decisions involving nationals from eleven key countries rendered by 884 asylum officers over a seven-year period; 140,000 decisions of 225 immigration judges over a four-and-a-half-year period; 126,000 decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals over a six-year period; and 4215 decisions of the U.S. courts of appeals during 2004 and 2005. The analysis reveals amazing disparities in grant rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country. For example, in one regional asylum office, 60% of the officers decided in favor of Chinese applicants at rates that deviated by more than 50% from that region’s mean grant rate for Chinese applicants, with some officers granting asylum to no Chinese nationals, while other officers granted asylum in as many as 68% of their cases. Similarly, Colombian asylum applicants whose cases were adjudicated in the federal immigration court in Miami had a 5% chance of prevailing with one of that court’s judges and an 88% chance of prevailing before another judge in the same building. Half of the Miami judges deviated by more than 50% from the court’s mean grant rate for Colombian cases. Using cross-tabulations based on public biographies, the paper also explores correlations between sociological characteristics of individual immigration judges and their grant rates. The cross-tabulations show that the chance of winning asylum was strongly affected not only by the random assignment of a case to a particular immigration judge, but also in very large measure by the quality of an applicant’s legal representation, by the gender of the immigration judge, and by the immigration judge’s work experience prior to appointment."

- Immigration to the United States

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"If the adoption of the Alien Friends Act represented a dramatic short-term political triumph for the Federalist Party, however, it proved virtually inconsequential as a matter of national policy. The long-term importance of the Act lay instead in the galvanizing effect that it had on Republicans, spurring them to develop competing, and ultimately much more influential, accounts of the constitutional status of immigrants and governmental authority over immigration. Republican House leaders Edward Livingston of New York and Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania spearheaded the opposition to the Act. They refuted at length the dual Federalist contentions that foreigners lacked constitutional rights, and that the Constitution permitted the federal Congress and President to usurp the authority of the states to regulate immigration. Republicans rejected the argument made by Otis and others that "the Constitutional compact was made between citizens only, and that, therefore, its provisions were not intended to extend to aliens." "[T]he Constitution expressly excludes any.. .distinction between citizen and alien," Livingston maintained, and it was "an acknowledged principle of the common law ... that alien friends...residing among us, are entitled to the protection of our laws." Citizens and aliens alike thus enjoyed "the same equal distribution of justice [and] ... the same humane provision to protect their innocence. "So indistinguishable was the constitutional status of aliens and citizens, Livingston warned, that the same rationale for subjecting "a few unprotected aliens" to the Act's "inquisitorial power" would "apply with equal strength ... in the case of citizens." The same "plea of necessity," he warned, could justify the banishment of both."

- Immigration to the United States

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"Over the first half of the nineteenth century, even as Americans developed progressively sharper critiques of immigration, they nevertheless retained a basic faith in the fundamental moral natures of immigrants and in the capacity of American economic and political institutions to transform foreign migrants into patriotic republicans. The problems associated with European immigration were generally considered fatal neither to the nation's historically liberal immigration and naturalization policy, nor to the regeneration narrative that underwrote that liberality. So long as immigrants were properly diffused throughout the nation, contemporaries maintained, the warm bath of economic freedom and republican political fellowship would dissolve away the residue of Old World economic and political oppression, and infuse them with economic and political independence, habits of strenuous labor, and devotion to their adopted nation. It was only in the late 1840s and 1850s that a politically robust nativist movement gained broad support and political influence. There began to take hold a critique of immigrants as fundamentally, irredeemably foreign, animated by a deep suspicion that they either carried no "dormant seed of virtue" as a matter of nature, or, if they once had, that it had atrophied beyond any hope or revival. Although the nativist movement was ultimately unsuccessful in its primary policy demand-the extension of the period of residency required for naturalization-and was soon swallowed up by the Civil War and the increased demand for immigrant labor, it nevertheless represents an important chapter in the legal construction of foreignness."

- Immigration to the United States

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"In contrast to the immigration restriction movement of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the 1850s even those critics who were most skeptical of immigrants' capacity for assimilation usually advocated limiting access to American citizenship rather than excluding immigrants from American territory. ' Foreigners' "opinions need to be recast before they [can] intelligently participate in public affairs," wrote the Know Nothing Anspach. "[E]ven a residence of fifteen or more years is absolutely essential in most instances before a man can vote intelligently," he counseled. Indeed, to the extent that leading nativists sought to reduce the number of immigrants entering the country, they proposed to do so not by restricting immigration per se, but rather by removing the "inducements" furnished by "[t]he existing laws of naturalization, by which the meanest serf of Europe could be converted into a voter in five years. "'This exclusive focus on naturalization stands in sharp contrast to the anti-immigrant program of the 1880s and 1890s, in which foreign laborers' very presence on American territory-and particularly their participation in the labor market-threatened to corrode republican institutions. Despite the intensity of the nativist fervor, it faded from political prominence as rapidly as it had emerged. The nation's enduring, if increasingly cautious, faith in assimilation combined with the surging labor demands of the Civil War to submerge for another generation the immigration illiberalism of the 1850s."

- Immigration to the United States

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"If you’re a refugee, first, you apply through the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees, which collects documents and performs interviews. Incidentally, less than one percent of refugees worldwide end up being recommended for resettlement. But, if you’re one of them, you might than be referred to the state department to begin the vetting process. At this point, more information is collected. You’ll be put through security screenings by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. And if you’re a Syrian refugee, you’ll get an additional layer of screening called the Syria in-house review, which may include a further check by a special part of Homeland Security, the USCIS Fraud detection, and National Security directors. And don’t relax yet, ‘cause we’ve barely even started. Then, you finally get an interview with USCIS officers and you’ll also be fingerprinted so your prints can be run through the biometric databases of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense. And if you make it through all that, you’ll then have health screenings, which let’s face it, may not go too well for you, ‘cause you may have given yourself a stroke getting through this process so far. But if everything comes back clear, you’ll be enrolled in Cultural Orientation classes all while your information continues to be checked recurrently against terrorist databases to make sure that no new information comes in that wasn’t caught before. All of that has to happen before you get near a plane. This process typically takes 18-24 months once you’ve been referred by the U.N. to the United States. This is the most rigorous vetting anyone has to face before entering this country. No terrorist in their right mind would choose this path when the visa process requires far less effort."

- Immigration to the United States

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"The narrative of immigration as regeneration imagined the republican system itself, as well the economic arrangements on which that system rested, as a great hopper of assimilation with the capacity to transform the oppressed dregs of the Old World into patriotic republicans. The regeneration narrative evinced a certain optimistic, almost self-congratulatory confidence that the transformative power of geography and political institutions would preserve for all time the core republican values of personal independence and citizenly virtue. Notwithstanding the hopper's tremendous power, however, its machinery was also remarkably fragile. Its effectiveness depended entirely on the integrity of its various constituent parts: independent, virtuous citizenship rooted in individual economic proprietorship; the immersion of immigrants in social and political institutions that promoted the adoption of republican values; and finally, the moral and political natures of immigrants themselves. These were the essential conditions of the nation's liberal immigration and naturalization policy, and virtually from the beginning they appeared threatened by the same dangers that jeopardized virtuous republican citizenship generally: concentrations of population in great manufacturing centers; the clustering of immigrants into ethnic enclaves where, instead of assimilating, they allegedly formed distinct political identities and interests defined by their shared national origins; and finally, the emergence of a permanent class of "dependent" laborers."

- Immigration to the United States

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"To observers with an eye on the nation's burgeoning cities, the confluent problems of increasing economic dependency, intense wage competition from foreign workers, and progressively greater concentrations of both economic production and population, were seismic historical upheavals that threatened to erode the very pillars of republican government. The Jeffersonian republic of economically independent, politically virtuous producer-citizens appeared to be slipping from view, crowded off the historical stage by new, characteristically "European" forms of economic social and economic organization. As Americans' confidence in the great hopper of assimilation wavered, critics of the United States's liberal immigration and naturalization policies typically invoked two intertwined arguments for curbing the nation's traditional generosity. First, they argued that the disappearance in recent decades of vacant lands and the increasing concentration of industry and population had skewed two of the hopper's integral components: immigrants' ready access to individual economic proprietorship, and their immersion in American life and labor. The effect was to radically impair the capacity of American economic and political institutions to transform Europe's outcasts into patriotic republicans. Second, and most often, however, critics pointed to the poor quality of the raw material that the assimilationist hopper was tasked to digest: the fundamental moral natures of immigrants themselves. A leading contemporary chronicler of the Know-Nothing movement, Frederich Anspach, was representative in blending an account of changing economic organization and settlement patterns with a palpable distain for immigrants' moral constitutions. When the naturalization laws were first formed, Anspach explained, "we were an infant nation . ..with an immense territory . . ..It was an object of paramount importance at the time, to have our lands occupied, our solitudes peopled, our roads opened, and our cities built." Faced with such exigencies, policymakers sought to encourage immigration by permitting foreigners to acquire property and, most importantly, providing for easy access to American citizenship. If former circumstances warranted liberality, however, "[s]uch is not our condition now." In the new, post-agrarian republic, where "[m]uch of our territory is peopled, our wide domain is rapidly filling up, our coasts are protected, [and] our cities built," the time had come to "guard against the evils which do accompany the unparalleled influx of foreigners." In order to prevent hastily enfranchised foreigners from "convert[ing] this asylum . . .into a despotism of oppression," Anspach counseled the erection of substantial new barriers to United States citizenship."

- Immigration to the United States

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"As much as complaints of unassimilability grew more commonplace in the 1850s, however, the view that a large portion of immigrants were indelibly stamped by nature as alien to the American character had not yet taken hold among a broad swath of the American public, and failed to shape federal immigration and naturalization policy. Indeed, even writers who in one breath condemned immigrants' corrosive effect on the quality of American citizenship could, in the next, affirm their faith in assimilation. The renowned clergyman and author Edward Everett Hale, for example, described with alarm the "Celtic Exodus," and consequent "annual invasion" of the United States by "a horde of discouraged, starved, beaten men and women" whose "inferiority as a race compels them to go to the bottom."' Within a few pages, however, Hale pivoted sharply, adopting a markedly more optimistic vision of assimilation."[T]he country [is] richer for the coming of the foreigner," he declared, and "to attain the full use of this gift, the emigrant must be cared for." Rather than throwing up obstacles to immigration, Hale insisted, the nation "must open its hand to receive the offering of Europe." Once here, the immigrant should be welcomed warmly into the American political fellowship, not as a gesture of national generosity, but as a spur to assimilation. "The stranger cannot serve the country while he is a stranger," Hale counseled, but "must plunge, or be plunged, into his new home." "He must, for the purpose we seek, profit by the measure of its civilization. He must be directed by its intelligence. His children must grow up in its institutions. He must be, not in a clan in a city, surrounded by his own race." Notwithstanding Hale's dark assessment of the Irish "race" pouring in on the republic, his proposed solution was a familiar one: geographical dispersion. In order to "'stimulate the [nation's] absorbents,"' Hale urged, "private action and public policy in this matter should unite ...[so] that each little duct, the country through, may drink its share, of those drops which some do not taste at all, of the perpetual Westward flood.""

- Immigration to the United States

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"Before the 1870s, the federal government exercised very little authority over immigration, neither establishing terms of eligibility for foreigners' admission into United States territory nor processing theirentry. Rather, the seaboard states-foremost New York and Massachusetts-administered the landing of immigrants, and each individual state determined the rights and privileges of foreigners residing within its territory. Even in the decade following the Civil War, most Americans continued to view the problems associated with mass immigration as an acceptable burden to bear in exchange for the overwhelming economic benefits reaped from the nation's traditionally liberal immigration and naturalization policy. Because such problems were understood to be local and discrete, the regulation of immigration continued to fit comfortably within the province of state police authority, under which states and municipalities regulated all aspects of public health, safety, morals, and welfare throughout the nineteenth century.' This Section maps the logic of immigration localism that shaped the regulation of non-citizens for the first half of the nineteenth century. That logic rested on two pillars: (1) a broad consensus that the regulatory challenges and political interests implicated by the presence of foreigners-the problem of economic dependency and crime, for example, or the desire to attract laborers or settlers-were fundamentally local in nature; and (2) the lack of any meaningful regulatory competition from the federal government."

- Immigration to the United States

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"We found that applicants had a significantly greater chance of winning if their applications included a request for protection of a spouse or minor child in the United States. Perhaps family applications are more persuasive, because judges don’t believe that married applicants would flee from danger and leave a spouse or child behind, or because the judges feel additional sympathy for spouses and children, or because they suspect that unmarried applicants are more likely to commit fraud or be terrorists. The reasons for the increased odds of prevailing if one has dependents in the United States merit further study. Perhaps the most interesting result of our study is that the chance of winning an asylum case varies significantly according to the gender of the immigration judge. Female judges grant asylum at a rate that is 44% higher than that of their male colleagues. The work experience of the judge before joining the bench also matters: The grant rate of judges who once worked for the Department of Homeland Security (or its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service) drops largely in proportion to the length of such prior service. By contrast, an asylum applicant is considerably advantaged, on a statistical basis, if his or her judge once practiced immigration law in a private firm, served on the staff of a nonprofit organization, or had experience as a full-time law teacher."

- Immigration to the United States

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