A Theoretical and Empirical Examination of the American Bureaucracy and the Externalization of U.S. Immigration Enforcement
The United States has developed and sustained a border-transcending system to regulate the movement of migrants. This system deploys U.S. actors and technologies across the world to intervene in the movement of people long before individuals have reached U.S. territory. Political scientist Angie Bautista-Chavez will examine how and why the U.S. has developed this system. She will investigate the following questions: 1) What role does U.S. bureaucracy play in extending U.S. immigration enforcement beyond U.S. borders? 2) Who are the managers of U.S. migration control? Additionally, she will hire, train, and supervise a team of four graduate students to create two original datasets: The U.S. Bureaucratic Immigration Policy Dataset and the U.S. Migration Managers Dataset. Bautista-Chavez argues that the immigration bureaucracy is itself a political institution comprised of powerful actors who set agendas and advocate for and develop policies that drive the enforcement of U.S. borders.