Analysis Shows Immigrant-Friendly Legislation Fares Better at State Level

This study shows that state legislatures enact more laws aimed at expanding immigrant rights than laws trying to crackdown on them. Very interesting. DP

By Caitlin Webber, CQ Staff

cqpolitics.com: State legislation aimed at expanding immigrant rights have a higher passage rate than those intended to crack down on illegal immigration, according to a new Migration Policy Institute analysis of state legislative data.

MPI, a nonpartisan immigration think tank, teamed up with New York University Law School researchers to catalog state immigration bills introduced in 2007, a record year on the issue, in a searchable online database published Monday.

But despite a flurry of legislative activity, only 167 of the 1,059 immigration measures — 16 percent— were enacted.

Researchers found that the bills covered a wide range of topics, challenging the conventional wisdom that most legislation at the state level seeks to challenge immigration enforcement or employment.

The findings also indicate that a state’s prior experience with immigration significantly affects the type of bills legislators are likely to introduce.

“It’s interesting that politicians in traditional immigrant-receiving states — those that account for two-thirds of the foreign-born population in the United States — were more interested in introducing bills that dealt with immigrant assimilation issues than other types of measures,” said Laureen Laglagaron, MPI policy analyst and an author of the report, which touches on highlights from the database.

The report compares legislative activity in traditional immigrant-receiving states — California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey — with those that recently experienced a big jump in their foreign-born populations. These new immigrant-destination states, including Delaware, South Carolina, Nevada and Georgia, were more likely to pass bills relating to employment, public benefit eligibility and law enforcement.
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