Immigration to the United States increased dramatically during the 1980s.¹
This flow of immigrants has already transformed the face of many Ameri-
can cities and will dramatically alter the composition of our society. High
levels of immigration profoundly affect many different facets of life in the
nation, such as ethnic and language mix, fertility rates, religious affiliations,
popular culture, the labor force, and political coalitions.

Increased immigration in the 1980s also created enormous pressure for
legal change. Congress responded by enacting three major pieces of legisla-
tion--the Refugee Act of 1980,² the Immigration Reform and Control Act
of 1986,³ and the Immigration Act of 1990⁴--which renovated virtually
the entire legal structure for handling immigration.⁵

The increase in immigration, combined with statutory changes, presented
new administrative and judicial challenges. Asylum claims, relatively incon-
spicuous in the 1970s, became a major focus of agency and court adjudica-
tion.⁶ The immigration court, the adjudicator of first resort in exclusion
and deportation cases, acquired new independence and importance in 1983
when it was removed from the Immigration and Naturalization Service
(INS) and put under the auspices of the Executive Office for Immigration
Review (EOIR).⁷ Immigration matters began to emerge as a major compo-
nent of the administrative law caseload in the federal courts.⁸ In addition,
affirmative challenges to INS policies, uncommon before 1980, had by the
end of the decade become a prominent, policy-shaping category of immi-
gration litigation.⁹

The scholars who have analyzed the increase in immigration during the
1980s have taken at least two cognizable approaches. Political scientists,
economists, and demographers have examined the broad social significance
of immigration in a social science context.¹⁰ Immigration law scholars,
however, have taken a narrower approach, looking at how recent immigra-

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