The Globalization Era American Illegal Immigrants Governance Research

With the further development of the globalization process, as an integral part of international migration, illegal immigration also shows increasingly expanding, scattering trend due to technical innovations and the change of concepts. As the world's most developed economy, the United States becomes the main destination for the world's illegal immigrants, especially those from Latin America.The development history of U.S. illegal immigration can be divided into three stages, namely, the initial stage, the controllable stage and the severe stage. The current situation of U.S. illegal immigration is still in a serious phase. These illegal immigrants have the traditional characteristics of illegal immigrants and also shows new trends: (1) the number of illegal immigrants is still huge, but the total number has declined in recent years; (2) the residence time of illegal immigrants in the United States has prolonged; (3) the distribution of illegal immigrants in the U.S. generally shows the feature of concentration, but the tendency of dispersion has been increasing; (4) illegal immigrants have limited impacts on the U.S. labor markets. From the historical and practical perspectives, the inducement factors for the U.S. illegal immigrants include economic motivation, political motivation and social motivation, and economic motivation is one of the most important factors.Illegal immigration in the United States has a long history and its impacts on the United States are multifaceted, mainly covering economic development, national security, internal politics and foreign affairs, etc. Among them, the impacts on the job markets and U.S. wages are particularly concerned by the Americans, which is also controversial.Faced with a huge number of illegal immigrant groups, the U.S. government has tried to control illegal immigration by two channels, domestic unilateral governance and international cooperation governance, in which domestic governance is the most important way: firstly, the U.S. government has built legal frameworks for governing the illegal immigrants by enacting the immigration laws. Secondly, the U.S. government has adopted two main means, namely, rigidity governance which strengthens border enforcement forces and the intensity of domestic law enforcement and flexible governance which includes"legalization"and"guestworker program", which tries to play"blocking","squeezing"and"diverting"roles to realize the goals of controlling and managing illegal immigration.However, these governing measures did not work well, the reasons for which mainly due to two factors: (1) the imbalance development of international economy, which makes"push-pull"effect in economy always the main incentive for the international illegal immigration; (2) institutional problems in the United States, which lies not only in the U.S. immigration system, but also in U.S. domestic political system, such as interest groups, political polarizations and so on. These factors make it difficult for the U.S. government to form a joint force in the governance process of illegal immigration, which has seriously hampered the effective implementations of governing measures. In short, the governance of illegal immigration in the U.S. still has a long way to go.