Department/School
Ethics and Business Law
Date of this version
2011
Document Type
Article
Keywords
immigration policy; federalism; economies of scale
Abstract
Senate Bill 1070, the controversial immigration bill enacted by the Arizona legislature, utilizes local police to enforce Arizona‘s interpretations of immigration rules. Meanwhile, the "Utah Compact" suggests that all aspects of immigration policy should be handled by the federal government, not by states or localities. In the midst of this contentious debate, this article uses an optimal federalism framework to examine the appropriate locus for immigration policy. It compares economies and diseconomies of scale across enactment, implementation, and enforcement institutions, in order to determine the appropriate level of government for addressing these institutional aspects of immigration policy. It concludes that, due to significant economies of scale in each institutional phase, the federal government should have some dominant role across all phases. However, significant diseconomies of scale appear in both the implementation and enforcement phases, which implies that state and local governments should play important though limited roles in implementing and enforcing immigration policy. The article then offers a complex combination of federal, state, and local authority, in the pursuit of an effective and equitable immigration policy.
Published in
William & Mary Policy Review
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.