This chapter investigates the politics of US immigration reform from the early 1950s until the mid-2010s. The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act marks the beginning of a policy regime anchored in family ties and occupational skill. While the 1965 Act abolished the quotas, it imposed a ceiling on western hemisphere immigration and created an immigration system dominated by family reunification, rather than employment-based admissions. The second case study examines the political process leading up to the 1990 Immigration Act which enacted historically unprecedented levels of admissions. The chapter’s third case study analyzes three failed attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform – which encompasses economic admissions, family admissions, temporary foreign worker recruitment, border enforcement, and, most controversially, the legalization of undocumented immigrants – under the Bush and Obama presidencies. Tea Party Republicans made sure that Republican legislators would come to see any step in immigration liberalization as a potential electoral liability. Even though the growing electoral strength of Latino voters provided an important impetus for reform, in the end legislators’ lack of insulation from popular restrictionism came to determine the outcome of reform.

By the late nineteenth century the prevailing ethno-nationalist ethos of the day established that noncitizens were incapable of federal citizenship because of both racial distinctions and questions about their loyalty. At the same time, however, local citizenship was coming to be understood as something entirely different, determined by mobility and choice rather than loyalty and identity. Some cities have accordingly granted the right of suffrage to noncitizen residents on the grounds that they share a common interest with other local residents in the provision of municipal services. Perhaps more importantly, cities are required to give noncitizens many “social rights” that have increasingly come to be synonymous with citizenship, such as education and security. Noncitizens have been granted these social rights on the premise that such rights should be distributed based on residence rather than nationality. In order to make local citizenship a matter of private consumer choice, local services are bundled together with residence so that local “consumer-voters” can more efficiently shop for municipalities in which to settle.