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Immigration Law’s Organizing Principles: A Response
by Peter H. Schuck
In response to Immigration Law’s Organizing Principles by Adam B. Cox

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Adam Cox’s recent article, Immigration Law’s Organizing Principles, extends his earlier article’s emphasis on information economics. Like the earlier article, Organizing Principles is a fine paper, although it is flawed in some respects. The basic claim is that the distinction between the government’s selection of new immigrants, which under the plenary power doctrine is largely unconstrained by constitutional rules, and its regulation of immigrants once they are admitted, which is far more legally constrained, shapes the central debates in immigration law. This is a very bold claim, all the more so because Professor Cox is correct that the distinction has indeed been influential in the analysis of many immigration law issues and does collapse to some degree. Nevertheless, the distinction between “immigration” and “immigrant” law is, in fact and in principle, misleading, and perhaps even incoherent, because these two activities actually engender overlapping incentives and effects. Despite this problem, however, his analysis leads to some interesting prescriptions.

>Continue reading (PDF file, 46 KB) . . .





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