DONDENA Seminar - Asya Magazinnik

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“An Agency Perspective on Immigration Federalism” 

SPEAKER: Asya Magazinnik (Hertie School).

ABSTRACT:

American local law enforcement agencies now engage in an unprecedented degree of cooperation with the federal government to police immigration in the nation’s interior. I argue that this regime of “cooperative federalism” in immigration enforcement is an intentional and strategic use of the federal executive’s authority. Drawing insight from the bureaucratic agency literature, I develop a formal model that analyzes the president’s decision to invite subnational participation in policymaking. An empirical analysis of the 287(g) program highlights the model’s central trade-off. By deputizing local officers with the powers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, 287(g) allowed willing local participants to share the costs of enforcement with federal authorities. But the localities that selected into the program were preference outliers who wielded their newfound agency differently from their federal counterparts: rather than using the immigration system to help police felonies, they deployed the criminal justice system to police immigration.
 

BIO: 

Asya Magazinnik is the Professor of Social Data Science at the Hertie School. Her research interests include electoral geography, federalism, local politics, and law enforcement. She also works on political methodology, in particular at the intersection of causal inference and formal theory. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and other outlets. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT. She earned a PhD in Political Science from Princeton University in 2020 and holds an MPP from the Harris School at the University of Chicago.