From Practice to Policy: Excluding Asylum Seekers at the US Border

Abstract

When countries experience a surge of migrants at their borders, they search for ways to assert control, often using strategies aimed at slowing, reducing, discouraging, or blocking entry. To the extent that national and international law confers rights on some migrants, in particular laws allowing individuals to cross borders to claim asylum, the tools for directly impeding entry may be limited. In this context, states may develop administrative practices to accomplish indirectly what they cannot accomplish directly by law. This article examines the case of metering in the US as an administrative strategy of border control. It traces an unusual path to this strategy, from its origins in informal street-level practices to its evolution into a formal administrative policy extending and ostensibly legitimating those practices. This analysis brings a comparative street-level perspective to the socio-legal analysis of law-in-practice.

Keywords:

• Immigration
• asylum seekers
• street-level organizations
• comparative public policy and management
• political institutions
• Administrative Procedure Act
• judiciary
• case study

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The street-level approach to comparative analysis of migration and asylum is discussed in the introduction to this Special Issue (see Breidahl et al. 2024, this issue).

2. See note 1 above and also Lipsky (1980); Brodkin (2013); and Breidahl and Brodkin (2023, in this issue).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vicki Lens

Dr. Vicki Lens is currently a professor at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, City University of New York. She has dual degrees in both social work (B.S.W., M. S. W., Ph.D.) and law. Prior to receiving her Ph.D. in Social Welfare, Dr. Lens worked as a legal aid lawyer providing legal services to low income people and as an Assistant Attorney General under the New York State Attorney General. Her primary research interest is in socio-legal studies, where she uses qualitative methods and legal analyses to study the judicial system and other government institutions.