Chapter 31 — Further Reading

The literature on US immigration policy is large, contentious, and uneven in quality. The following annotated list emphasizes works that, in the chapter authors' judgment, present their positions at the strongest version available — recognizing that readers across the ideological spectrum will find different items more or less congenial.

Steel-manned restrictionist / pro-borders

George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative (2016). The most influential academic case for restriction. Borjas, a Cuban-American economist at Harvard, argues that the immigration economics literature has systematically understated wage effects on similar-skill native-born workers and that current immigration policy serves the interests of employers and high-skill workers at the expense of less-educated workers. Borjas's earlier work, Heaven's Door (1999), develops the theoretical framework. Methodological criticism from David Card, Giovanni Peri, and others should be read alongside.

Reihan Salam, Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders (2018). A centrist-restrictionist case from the editor-in-chief of National Review (later president of the Manhattan Institute). Salam, the son of Bangladeshi immigrants, argues that current immigration policy fails working-class immigrants and native-born workers alike, and that lower numerical levels paired with tighter legality would produce better outcomes for the people it nominally serves. Particularly useful as a non-nativist version of the restrictionist position.

Mark Krikorian, The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal (2008). A harder-line restrictionist position from the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Krikorian argues for substantially lower legal-immigration levels, not merely tighter enforcement. The book is more polemical than Borjas or Salam but represents an important voice in the policy debate; CIS's research is widely cited in restrictionist policy proposals.

Yuval Levin's writing on immigration in National Affairs and The Atlantic. Levin argues for restrictionist policy on cultural-cohesion grounds in the tradition of Burkean conservatism — emphasizing the slow work of assimilation and the institutional capacities required to integrate newcomers.

Robert VerBruggen's writing in National Review and American Compass. VerBruggen's empirical pieces on labor-market effects and assimilation patterns provide accessible entry points to the restrictionist data debates.

Steel-manned pro-expansion

Bryan Caplan, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration (2019). The strongest libertarian/expansionist case, presented as a graphic novel for accessibility. Caplan, a George Mason economist, argues that the moral and economic case for immigration restriction is much weaker than its defenders suppose, and that substantially open borders would produce enormous gains for migrants and aggregate economic gains for receiving countries. Critics will find positions to contest, but Caplan presents them at the strongest version pro-expansion advocates offer.

Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell, Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions (2021). A Cato Institute economist and a free-market academic make the case that immigration does not erode the institutional foundations of receiving countries — answering the strongest public-choice version of the restrictionist case.

Cato Institute research on immigration. The Cato Institute's website maintains an extensive library of immigration economics research, with policy briefs and longer studies on labor-market effects, fiscal effects, crime, and assimilation. The Cato position is broadly pro-expansion but is empirically rigorous and often cited by mainstream economists across the spectrum.

Jonathan Portes, various works on UK and US immigration. A British economist whose work on the labor-market effects of immigration provides the European complement to the US literature. Portes's policy papers are widely cited in the comparative-immigration literature.

Cristina Rodríguez, The Civil Rights Cases of the Twenty-First Century (2022) and her academic articles. Rodríguez, a Yale Law professor, presents a center-left legal account of immigration law, including a defense of executive authority in the absence of legislative reform and a critique of the political-economy dynamics that have produced the stalemate. Among the most rigorous legal-academic voices on contemporary immigration policy.

Progressive / pro-immigrant

Aviva Chomsky, They Take Our Jobs! and 20 Other Myths About Immigration (2007, expanded 2018). A historian's case against several common restrictionist claims. The book is polemical but concise; readers should pair it with the empirical economics literature from Borjas, Card, and Peri.

Roberto Gonzales, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (2015). An ethnographic study of DACA-eligible young adults that informs the human stakes of the policy debate. Gonzales, a Penn sociologist, has shaped much subsequent qualitative research on unauthorized residence.

Tom Wong, The Politics of Immigration: Partisanship, Demographic Change, and American National Identity (2017). A pro-immigration political scientist's analysis of how immigration politics has reshaped party coalitions.

Comprehensive-reform / centrist

The Niskanen Center's immigration research. The Niskanen Center, founded by former Cato analysts who broke from movement libertarianism, has produced some of the most thoughtful comprehensive-reform analysis of the past decade. Their policy briefs on labor-market integration, asylum reform, and country-cap reform are accessible and rigorously argued.

The Bipartisan Policy Center's immigration work. BPC has consistently produced policy proposals attempting to bridge the partisan divide, including detailed work on agricultural labor, asylum processing, and visa reform.

American Compass's writing on immigration. American Compass, founded by Oren Cass, represents a center-right position somewhat distinct from movement conservatism — generally restrictionist but emphasizing labor-market and family-formation considerations rather than cultural-cohesion ones.

On the politics of immigration

Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (2002). The standard political-historical treatment of US immigration policymaking, tracing the recurring dynamics of nativism, expansion, and reform across two centuries. Predates the recent intensification but remains essential background.

Jeff Bloodworth, recent writing on immigration politics. Bloodworth's analysis of how immigration interacts with class, region, and partisan coalition formation is useful for understanding the contemporary political dynamics.

Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004). The standard historical treatment of how the legal category of "illegal alien" was constructed in twentieth-century US law. A historian's account, not policy advocacy, but indispensable for understanding the legal architecture.

On the empirical literature

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (2017) and The Integration of Immigrants into American Society (2015). The two NAS consensus reports synthesize the empirical literature on fiscal and economic effects (2017) and on assimilation patterns (2015). Both are committee products with broad expert input and are the standard non-partisan summaries.

Pew Research Center's "U.S. Hispanic Trends" and immigration research. Pew's publicly available data on the unauthorized population, Hispanic political behavior, and immigrant integration are the most accessible primary-source data for student research.

Migration Policy Institute (migrationpolicy.org). A Washington-based research organization providing accessible policy briefs and country-of-origin analyses. MPI is generally moderate-to-progressive in orientation but its empirical work is widely cited across the spectrum.

On law and the Constitution

Stephen H. Legomsky and Cristina M. Rodríguez, Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy (8th edition, 2023). The standard law-school casebook. Legomsky and Rodríguez are pro-immigration in orientation but the casebook is comprehensive and is the standard reference for the legal architecture.

Gabriel J. Chin's articles on plenary power, birthright citizenship, and immigration constitutionalism. Chin, a UC Davis law professor, has written extensively on the constitutional foundations of US immigration law, including originalist analyses of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright-citizenship clause.

The Federalist Society's immigration symposia. The Federalist Society has hosted detailed debates on contemporary immigration legal questions, including birthright citizenship and executive authority. Recordings and papers are publicly available and present originalist and conservative legal positions at their strongest.

Primary sources

For students writing on immigration, the most useful primary sources include: CBP encounter statistics (cbp.gov), USCIS application and adjudication data, EOIR immigration-court statistics, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey for demographic data, and the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Most policy debates can be reframed productively by going to the underlying primary data rather than relying on advocacy summaries — and most mistakes in popular writing on immigration come from not doing so.