Policing Immigrants ─ Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines

As the controversies surrounding President Obama’s immigration enforcement policies demonstrate, we tend to examine the immigration dilemma from the top down. Reflecting their backgrounds in law and society studies, Doris Marie Provine and her coauthors instead examine conflicts from the bottom up, focusing on the interactions among local communities, local law enforcement officials, and immigrants and their advocates. For over a century, the federal government had virtually sole authority over immigrant admission and enforcement policy. But the adoption of two federal statutes in 1996 specifically delegated some federal immigration enforcement powers to the local level. Policing Immigrants”is the first book-length study of the this ongoing, turbulent experiment in immigration federalism: its history, its consequences, and the problems it has created. Provine and her coauthors draw upon seven case studies of communities that vary in size, in their political leanings, their economies, and in their location (from Arizona and Texas to Oregon and Connecticut). These studies are integrated with data from three national surveys of local law enforcement executives: police chiefs in large cities, chiefs in smaller communities (suburban and rural), and county sheriffs. Their findings are both fascinating and disturbing--they show, for example, how the enforcement-based approach that the federal government has taken since the late 1990s conflicts with local law enforcement’s commitment to the principle of community-oriented policing. Tellingly, the intensity of local policies is best predicted, not by objective community conditions such as crime rates of demographic shifts, but rather by the degree of conservatism among local voters, leading to a race to the bottom” in enacting extreme measures. In brief, the authors find that the current system is neither just nor effective and that the community-engaging function of local policing is undermined by, and incompatible with, enforcing federal immigration law.

Doris Marie Provine is professor emerita in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is the author of several books, includingUnequal under Law and Judging Credentials, both also published by the University of Chicago Press.Monica W. Varsanyi is associate professor of political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and on the doctoral faculties of geography and criminal justice at the CUNY Graduate Center.Paul G. Lewis is associate professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University.Scott H. Decker is the Foundation Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.