The Real World of Immigration Federalism 110514

Writing about immigration federalism has, like much federalism scholarship, long been stuck with an outdated model of federal-state relations. Under that old model, states wield power principally by possessing regulatory autonomy. But the reality today is quite different: as a number of writers have begun to document, state and local governments today are often empowered not by their autonomy, but instead by their incorporation into federal statutory schemes. According to these accounts, sovereignty-based federalism is the past; cooperative federalism is the future.