Undocumented and Undertheorized: Immigration in the Land of American Federalism.

There is a paradox in U.S. immigration law and policy: this domain comes under the federal government's plenary power authority, yet states have been busy enacting laws that target immigrants since the colonial times. The literature in the field is equally paradoxical: social science has produced many theories about national-level immigration policy, but the states have been lost in the shuffle. As a result, we have no systematic study of the types of state immigrant policies in existence today, how they have changed over time, what forms and patterns they have followed, what drives them or how they vary across regions or even within regions. This study aims at going past the national level which has been the focus of much of the immigration literature in political science to take an in-depth look at the states. The focus is on immigration politics, the actors involved in it and the political institutions that give it shape and structure. Specifically, I look at how political institutions and interest groups at the state level interact to produce various immigration policy outcomes that differ across states in predictable ways. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]