Like few other forms of government policy, coercive social regulation calls upon state actors to impose costs upon constituencies hostile to intervention. And yet, not all exercise of the state's social regulatory authority presents an equally momentous challenge. The demands of coercive social regulation vary not only by the constituency targeted, but also over the course of the policy process. In this chapter, we will study the politics of deportation at the final and, arguably, most crucial policy stage: that of street-level implementation. Specifically, we will examine the capacity of field officers to carry out removal orders when faced with grassroots opposition.

By studying those actors upon whose shoulders the task of implementation rests, this chapter provides a crucial test case for our theoretical framework of state capacity. Although enforcement gaps abound in most areas of public policy, few reveal a disparity as drastic as that between immigration law, on the one hand, and its administration, on the other. To illustrate, even when we consider that the 115,000 deportations conducted by the U.S. immigration service in 2002 presented a then-record high in the agency's postwar enforcement history, the number of legally removable immigrants the same year ran into the millions. More generally, given the global proliferation of policy initiatives of stricter immigration control, the presence of millions of illegal migrants across the advanced industrialized world cannot be understood as arising from a lack of legal instruments to enforce their departure. Rather, it is the issue of implementation that strikes at the heart of the reality of illegal immigration.

Among the principal challenges faced by deportation bureaucrats are the political costs associated with enforcement. To the extent that removal imposes severe costs upon migrants, it is likely to be marked by high levels of conflict.