Vol. 3 No. 4 (April, 1993) pp. 38-40
INSIDE THE STATE: THE BRACERO PROGRAM, IMMIGRATION, AND THE
I.N.S. by Kitty Calavita. New York: Routledge, 1992. 243 pp.
Reviewed by Peter H. Schuck, Yale Law School.
Immigration politics, law, and policy are only now beginning to
receive the scholarly attention that their importance in American
life deserves. Yet the agency primarily responsible for
immigration policy has attracted remarkably little systematic
empirical study. This monograph on the Bracero program by Kitty
Calavita, a social scientist at the University of California at
Irvine, is a welcome addition to this sparse literature.
The few existing studies of INS behavior (Gilboy on border
inspections and bail determinations, Harwood on enforcement
against illegal aliens, Morris on the political environment, and
RAND/Urban Institute on employer sanctions) focus on small,
though important, areas of the agency's work. Calavita's work,
while also narrow (it examines a single INS program), is
admirably deep. It enriches our understanding of administrative
behavior and bureaucratic politics in the context of a program
whose social effects continue to ramify almost 30 years after it
ended.
Under the program, the INS contracted on behalf of growers for
Mexican "braceros" (farm-hands) to work for certain
periods under specified conditions supposedly enforced by the
agency. Created in 1942, ostensibly in response to war-time labor
shortages in the fields, the Johnson administration ended it in
1964 at the behest of organized labor, which had always opposed
it. Calavita argues, as have others, that the Bracero program
made western agriculture so dependent on Mexican labor that its
termination invited the illegal migration that has vexed U.S.
immigration policymakers ever since. Tracing the government's
subsequent efforts to control this migration, she ends her story
with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which she
views -- again, consistent with most other analysts -- as a
toothless legislative compromise designed to assure growers an
adequate supply of cheap agricultural labor while creating the
pretense of decisive action to control our borders.
Much of this is familiar ground; the general outlines of these
events are well-understood. What is new and most valuable in
Calavita's study, however, is her detailed description of the
bureaucratic dynamics that ultimately shaped the Bracero program.
Calavita wants to use this case study in order to debunk some
now- standard academic theories about the modern administrative
state -- particularly what she calls the
"dialectical-structural model, which emphasizes officials'
dependence on the structural conditions engendered by capitalism
and on the political configuration that those conditions produce.
In this model, the contradictions produced by capitalism are
faithfully reproduced in the state. Governmental policies exhibit
these same underlying conflicts and tensions, which officials are
powerless to resolve. The Bracero program, in this view, cannot
escape the deep conflict between the economic demand for cheap
labor, the social costs of illegal migration, and the symbolic
call for control over borders. Another
"instrumentalist" model, which stresses the links
between powerful groups and public officials, predicts outcomes
consistent with the interests of dominant economic and political
actors.
Calavita, following the work of Theda Skocpol, offers a more
nuanced, complex, contingent, people-centered view of state
action using the Bracero program as the example. Although she
fails to construct anything approaching a full-blown theory, she
does identify some of its key elements. First, the state is not
monolithic but institutionally fragmented among warring
bureaucracies. Here she points to the protracted struggle among
the INS (a unit in the Department of Justice), the Department of
Labor, the State Department (intermittently), and the agriculture
committees of Congress to control the program's goals and
implementation. Second, agencies do not act simply to maximize
support from their key constituent groups (for INS and the
agricultural committees, the growers; for Labor, the unions; for
State, relations with Mexico).
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Agencies also pursue bureaucratic agendas that may diverge from
or even contradict those of outside groups; when their agendas
coincide, Calavita says, it may be due not to cooptation or
subservience but because the agency acts for reasons of its own.
Unfortunately, this important proposition is difficult to test,
and it is only weakly supported by Calavita's data, which include
only one instance (the "Specials" program) in which one
agency (INS) took a position contrary to that of the growers
(although even this is somewhat ambiguous). Third, the agency
uses its discretion to reshape (and sometimes distort) its
governing statute to conform to its own policy needs. Fourth,
even politically weak agencies like the INS contrive to blunt
congressional influence, as when INS Commissioner Swing placed
regional offices in remote locations in order to insulate
officials both from immigration lawyers and from interventions by
individual members of Congress. In sum, the policy that emerges
from this welter of interests proceeds "less according to
some grand plan to rescue the political economy [as some
structural theory predicts] than in response to immediate
institutional needs." The state, Calavita finds, "is
rift (sic) with internal divisions."
Little of this will surprise empirical political scientists, who
have made similar findings about a wide variety of administrative
contexts. But Calavita's careful documentation of her case,
achieved by dint of her dogged assault on INS's vaunted secrecy
and the almost comically adventitious appearance of a long-
sought index to the agency's files, confirms many of the findings
of this literature. Highly sensitive to the dynamic nature of
agency behavior, she shows how the INS frequently shifted its
strategies in response to new leadership, changing political
conditions, and evolving policy dilemmas.
She does not claim that her portrait of the INS accurately
depicts today's agency, and there are many reasons to doubt that
there is a close resemblance. In recent years, Congress has
delegated responsibilities to the INS that dwarf those of other
domestic agencies its size. It conducts mass detentions not only
of adults but of small children; adjudicates asylum and amnesty
claims; has been impressed into the wars on drugs and terrorism;
and administers many new statutes. Although the agency remains a
bureaucratic backwater with low morale and inconsistent
leadership, it is now better funded and staffed. Between 1975 and
1990 the INS budget tripled to over $1 billion while its staff
grew by 70%; just within the last five years, the Border Patrol
budget has grown by 82%. The agency's Justice Department and
congressional superiors now appreciate its importance, if only
because it deals with issues of high public visibility which
carry a perennial risk of political embarrassment. (The public
outcry surrounding the bombing of the World Trade Center by
terrorists with apparent organizational ties to an alien linked
to earlier violence and to whom the INS issued a green card is
only the most recent of many examples that could be cited.) In
addition (as I recently showed elsewhere), the political
interests that shape immigration policy have changed
substantially since the 1960s. Organized labor's influence, for
example, has markedly declined while that of Latino and Asian
groups has grown. Ideas about immigration are increasingly
important political forces in their own right.
For all these changes, there is a striking continuity that
Calavita's study demonstrates. For at least a half-century,
Congress and the INS have pursued one policy innovation after
another in an effort to find a politically viable solution to the
intersecting problems of adequately supplying agricultural
workers, satisfying domestic labor interests, and controlling
illegal migration. All of these policies have failed. Before
World War II, when Calavita's story begins, the government
pursued an essentially opportunistic policy toward Mexican
migration; there was no numerical limit on visas for Mexicans but
the INS would periodically crack down on those who were here,
deporting legals and illegals alike. Beginning with the Bracero
program, the agency attempted to limit the illegal flow by
admitting a cohort of temporary workers under its control, only
to find itself caught between the conflicting political pressures
exerted by growers, the Department of
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Labor representing domestic workers, and the Mexican government
protesting the agencies' lax enforcement of mandated labor
protections. As control continued to elude the INS's grasp, it
turned to a number of spasmodic policy approaches -- de facto
legalizations at the border, "Operation Wetback," the
I-100 card, H-2 guestworkers, commuter aliens, beefed-up border
enforcement, amnesty, and now employer sanctions -- intended to
shore up or replace the program.
None of these strategies has worked, for the economic and
political constraints on their success are too great. The history
that Kitty Calavita so ably recounts strongly suggests, moreover,
that none of them -- or others yet to be devised -- ever will.