Immigration Stories

This publication includes cases that depict the Supreme Court s broad deference to the political branches in the immigration realm, the so-called plenary power doctrine. Selected cases are presented in chronological order, beginning with the Supreme Court s consideration of the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1880s and 1890s. The book then examines how the Cold War tested the constitutional limits of the government s plenary power over immigration, and how phantom constitutional norms were later used to defeat the government s broadest claims. Other cases explore the immigration enforcement system and the difficulty of balancing the demands of enforcement against other societal goals.