Immigration Reform: A System for the 21st Century

Yesterday, Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy held a public conference, "Immigration Reform: A System for the 21st Century," where immigration experts, scholars, and political figures debated issues and solutions related to immigration reform in the U.S.

Fourteen working papers were submitted to and presented at the conference, one of which was our own Center for Homeland Defense and Security professor Dr. Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez's paper entitled "Ctrl+Alt+Del: Rebooting Immigration Policies Through Socio-technical Change."

According to Dr. Nieto-Gómez, the existing technological architecture of U.S. immigration policy has serious limitations. He argues that the U.S. currently employs "aspirational technologies over effective ones" which leads "policymakers to follow the same technology paths that reward individual past success, even at a cost of systemic dysfunction."

"This paper advances three central arguments vis-à-vis the socio-technical regime that currently surrounds immigration policy in the United States: 1.The regime has self-organized to its current form and its technology legacy hardens its current shape. 2.The regime encourages deviant innovation and clandestine technologies to be developed to respond to the challenge created by its technology. 3.The regime has not adapted to changes in the socio-technical system it scaffolds. Innovation impacting the immigration socio-technical system has modified the environment, but the regime lags behind."

The last part of the paper identifies "some policy alternatives to radically improve the immigration system of the U.S. through a better technology design and an explicit understanding of the interdependencies and counterintuitive forces affecting the immigration socio-technical system." Nieto-Gómez asserts that the whole U.S. immigration system is in dire need of a "reboot…to update it to a more adaptive design."

Video footage of the entire conference is available on the conference's webpage, along with full text versions of the thirteen other papers.

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