One of the attractions of paying attention to other nations' immigration policies is that there are a huge variety of them to examine; there are something like two hundred different jurisdictions that have their own sets of rules; from the likes of China (though few want to migrate there) to tiny island jurisdictions.
President Woodrow Wilson spoke of the American states as laboratories of democracy; some of the immigration policy labs run by island jurisdictions suggest that a mad scientist may be at work. Occasionally the island policies are worth replication, often not. Here are some examples:
Nauru. Nauru is one of the smallest independent nations in the world, and in a sane universe would be part of a larger entity. Its 9,000 or so people live on a roundish island near the equator in the middle of the Pacific. The entire nation occupies 8.1 square miles, about 2.7 miles by 3.0 miles, the dimensions of a mid-sized ranch in the American West.
Earlier it was a German colony and later a British one. Now it has a vote in the United Nations General Assembly. Once rich because of phosphate deposits, its chiefs squandered the money and now it is poverty-stricken — but still a nation.
Nauru does not have an immigration problem in the traditional sense; no one in his or her right mind wants to migrate there. Unemployment is almost universal and most of the island is a desolate, dug-out strip mine. But since it is a nation it has the power to rent itself out as a resettlement site to Australia, which uses it to warehouse refugees fleeing Asia, i.e., people without legal status who head to Australia in small boats.
Australia's policy of lengthy "processing" of boat people on this remote island is designed to discourage these migrations; it is as if we used Guantanamo as a long-term holding center for groups of illegal aliens approaching our shores. And since the refugees on Nauru are not on Australian soil, they have no access to the Australian legal system.
Nauru's contribution to immigration policy, then, is the precedent that a nation can rent itself out as a detention center. Recently, the local government fired the one resident judge and its (very part-time) chief justice, both Australians, on the grounds that the two of them were critical of the treatment of the boat people on the island. This is according to the Wall Street Journal. If you, the executive, are worried about how judges will rule on an immigration matter, in Nauru you can simply eliminate the whole judicial branch!
I suppose that is innovative in a way.
Meanwhile, in another English-speaking set of islands (in this case still part of the British Empire) we have:
The Turks and Caicos. These islands, some 150 miles north of Haiti, are adjacent to (and were once part of) the Bahamas, but remain a colony of Great Britain. With 46,000 residents and 238 square miles of land (about twice the size of New York's Staten Island) it hardly makes sense as a separate jurisdiction, but it is one and like the other British islands it has its own immigration policies. Offshore finance and tourism are the mainstays of the local economy.
The local challenge is, of course, Haitian boat people as this is both the closest bit of relative prosperity to Haiti and also on the route to Florida, the object of most Haitian emigration. On Christmas Day, 2013, 17 Haitians drowned when their smuggler's boat sank in Turks and Caicos waters, bringing the ongoing problem to a head.
The premier subsequently called for help from both the Bahamas and the UK for a drone program for both law enforcement and rescue operations, as reported in the local weekly newspaper.
That, of course, is an unrealistic request; perhaps there could be one drone that covered both the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos, but a local police plane that actually could fly (apparently the islands' police plane is being fixed) and one with radar aboard would be a better and much less expensive answer. Drones are notoriously costly and require highly trained, if desk-bound, pilots.
Why the premier confined his request for help to the UK and the Bahamas puzzles. The United States should divert a tiny bit of the money it spends on our southern border to help the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos with their maritime patrols, just as it helps Mexico patrol its southern border.
These two island stories should be added to the ones we have covered earlier about how in American Samoa's amnesty the government is going to register the illegals first and change the law (in their favor) later and how, in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (an American territory in the Pacific) the authorities defined a particular class of aliens as rich enough to be regarded as investors, but too poor to pay immigration fees.
The CNMI, thank goodness, no longer runs its own immigration policies, but the other three island jurisdictions mentioned above continue to do so.