New open-access from @pamela_herd, Julie Gerinza and I: we track the use of administrative burdens in the Trump era to make legal processes of immigration more onerous. 🧵@pmmg2018 @PMRA1991
academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-a…
We use the metaphor of Kafka's bureaucracy to reflect what immigration processes morphed into under Trump: confusing, arbitrary, and illogical. This anecdote we culled from @crampell's reporting demonstrates the impossible situations immigrants found themselves in. 2/
The Trump administration adopted more than 450 executive actions. We sorted through these to focus on 78 that explicitly increased administrative burdens. After a while it becomes almost overwhelming to see the sheer scale and relentless of the changes. 3/ academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-a…
In addition to documenting burdens in immigration, our research offers a number of takeaways.
First, the paper puts to rest the claim that the Trump admin was focused only on illegal immigration. They targeted legal processes of immigration. 4/ academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-a…
Second, Trump remade the immigration system without legislation. We show how he used two levels of executive power: legal powers and administrative directives. These can be fruitful levels of analyses for studying how burdens emerge, esp. the overlooked latter form of power. 5/
Principal-agent theory warns of bureaucratic agents engaging in sabotage. We challenge this standard assumption, arguing that immigration under Trump represents a case where the political principals engaged in sabotage, and offer normative criteria to evaluate this claim. 6/
For scholars of administrative burden, we point to the benefit of taking a policy-wide approach, showing how it reveals coherent efforts to change policies via administrative means. 7/ academic.oup.com/ppmg/advance-a…
Final point: in administrative burden work we focus on psychological costs, which includes stress, frustration, uncertainty. We add *fear* to these subset of administrative burdens, arguing it was used deliberately, and its effects fell on citizens and non-citizens alike. 8/
Hat tip to the many whose work we drew on incl @billresh @AlasdairRoberts @MartinBaekgaard @CJ_Heinrich @KayCookPhD @aaroe_lene @SBishu @SarahPierceEsq @jessicabolter @rudalev @mollymotoole @jchaltiwanger. Hope folks find the paper useful.
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