Every day thousands of individuals stand at the borders of the United States and seek to be admitted. Many are United States Citizens returning from vacations or business trips. Others are aliens seeking to enter the country. Should the border inspector challenge the qualifications of an individual seeking to enter the United States, his or her admissibility will be determined in exclusion proceedings before an Immigration Judge. These decisions are extremely important and affect not only those who desire to enter, but also U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and companies who stand to benefit from the alien's admission. Moreover, decisions over the entry of foreign nationals have important international implications and are a potential source of tension between countries. Despite its importance and concerns about the immense discretionary power delegated to immigration government officials, little is known about the nature of governmental decisionmaking in controlling the flow of foreign nationals into the United States. This study is an empirical examination of Immigration and Naturalization Service and Immigration Judge decisionmaking regarding aliens seeking to enter or reenter the United States. The major focus for exploration of how national exclusion laws and procedures are implemented will be the Chicago, Illinois immigration court since it is the second largest in the country and conducts several hundred formal exclusion hearings a year. Applying the organizational approach to the exclusion decisionmaking process, the study will explore three broad areas of practical and scholarly interest: (1) the organizational environment of the Immigration Service, including its functioning in relation to the wider administrative, legal and political system; (2) the nature of the internal process through which Service employees adjudicate applications for admission to the U.S.; and (3) the patterns and practices of immigration regulation by the Immigration Service and immigration court through the use of aggregate data. Immigration exclusion laws are one of many interrelated mechanisms of social control of foreign nationals by a sovereign state. The results of this study will have important policy implications as well as contributing significantly to theoretical knowledge about decisionmaking in a little studied area of the law. In addition, the study will explore the interrelationships among a variety of state institutions (the Immigration Service, immigration court, the State Department, the U.S. Customs Agency, and U.S. Attorney's Office) and private enterprises (airline carriers) that shape decisionmaking. Consequently, the study offers an opportunity to examine some interesting and intricate ways in which discretionary decisionmaking by a local entity of a Federal bureaucracy may be shaped by institutional relationships and ties operating at both the local and national levels.
