Welcome to Amerizona - Immigrants Out: Assessing Dystopian Dreams and Usable Futures of Immigration Reform, and Considering Whether Immigration Regionalism is an Idea Whose Time Has Come
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, we introduce the heuristics of “dystopian dream” and “usable future” to assess competing visions for immigration reform. We apply these heuristics to visions for immigration reform, efforts to change the U.S. immigration system, and specific possible changes to immigration federalism as reflected in legislative and law enforcement activities, policy proposals, speeches, and scholarship. We consider President Obama’s recent revival of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” and aspects of the Schumer/Graham blueprint for comprehensive reform alongside the dystopian dream of immigration reform reflected in Arizona’s SB 1070 and other state- and local-level efforts to regulate both immigrants and immigration. We also consider side-by-side recent work on immigration and localism and comprehensive immigration reform by urban futurist Joel Kotkin and immigration law professor Dean Kevin Johnson, respectively. In addition providing valuable insights on the relationship between immigration and economic, social, and cultural dynamism and the prospective parameters of much-needed “truly comprehensive” reform, their work illustrates the ambivalent attitudes about localism within contemporary immigration policy debates, even amongst those who emphasize the fundamentally economic and labor-driven forces behind immigration today.Our bottom line recommendation is that immigration policy formulation and implementation occur on a regional basis, federally created with strong federal oversight and without constitutional disruption of immigration federalism. What we call “immigration regionalism” would move debate beyond the state power v. federal power question that has taken center stage with the Rehnquist Court’s so-called “New Federalism.” Acting pursuant to the Commerce Clause, the Supremacy Clause, and foreign policy objectives, the federal government would create immigration regions and a governance structure that incorporates representatives of state and local governments, as well as private sector and civil society groups. The regional units would gather and assess data and formulate policy recommendations. In this way, immigration regionalism would split the difference between a purely federal approach and a subnational one as exemplified by states like Arizona and municipalities like Hazleton, Pennsylvania, wherein legislators take dangerous, overreaching self-help measures. An “immigration regionalism” would also feature core commitments and principles and promote salutary outcomes that bring together what is best in Kotkin’s and Johnson’s respective “usable futures” and that resonates with recent important work on equitable regionalism and rethinking immigration federalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".