The political economy of the U.S. immigration system: an analysis of the failures of U.S. immigration policy reforms, 1994-2010.

Summary This thesis analyzes the inability of the U.S. government to change its immigration policy in any significant way. It shows that its main explanatory factor is institutional: the resilience of the immigration system, understood as a mode of regulating the admission of immigrants, is explained by its capacity to rely on a structuring of the political economy of immigration that is conducive to blocking reforms. To demonstrate this proposition, our study is therefore articulated in two blocks: the factors generating a crisis in the regime, and those allowing its status quo. First, the structural and conjunctural factors of the regime's crisis are studied. An empirical analysis of the regulation of immigration highlights its two structural dysfunctions: on the one hand, a growing imbalance between the number of applicants for immigration and the supply of visas, and on the other, the formation of a stock of illegal residents. Nevertheless, an analysis of the American population's perceptions of this regulation shows that the desire to reform immigration admission conditions is also based on subjective factors. A deteriorating economic situation intensifies the perception of a crisis in the system, and the preference for its closure. In a second step, the explanatory factors of the absence of closure of the regime are analyzed. The validity of two explanatory hypotheses for its resilience is demonstrated by an analysis of reform episodes from 1994 to 2010. First, the political implementation of a reform gives primacy to the preferences of organized interest groups (immigrant communities, employers, unions, nativists) over those of public opinion. Second, the antagonistic preferences of these interest groups make them unable to cooperate: despite its non-optimality, the immigration regime therefore corresponds to a stable outcome of legislative negotiations, because it limits the losses of all the actors involved.