havior is a crime that needs to be dealt with. Legislators, the public, civil rights groups, and policy entrepreneurs themselves, seldom agree on all the separate issues connected with immigration. It might be argued, for example, that there is a political right-and-left split on the question, with the right-wing favoring limits and harsh treatment, and the left in favor of relatively open immigration and easy access to public services for all immigrants. Yet, as the literature responding to current legislative proposals demonstrates, such a scheme is very misleading.
Even among those who agree on the need for action, there are substantive disagreements about the immigration legislation under consideration in the Congress. For instance, while it was often the economic concerns of city, state, and local government that first placed immigration on the public agenda, these same bodies do not like many of the proposed solutions. The withholding of public aid from immigrants, one of the solutions being prepared by the federal government, raises the strong possibility that local governments will simply be burdened with supporting those immigrants who have not been deterred by the threat of withholding public aid. As a result, many of the early proponents of these measures, who were partly responsible for raising the issue in the first place, have begun to question the advisability of such legislation. As Shaforth and Quist have pointed out, the new immigration bills would "shift as much as $1 billion in new, unfunded federal mandates onto the backs of state and local taxpayers" (1996, p. 1). This figure includes meeting enforcement requirements for various proposals as well as paying for many of those public services federal law would prohibit for various categories of immigrants. The entire debate over immigration features similar reversals and disagreements, as entrepreneurs and politicians struggle to respond to the issue, and...