Non‐policy making: The case of comprehensive immigration reform, 2005–2006

Abstract Immigration policy reached the fore of the political agenda during the 109th Congress of 2005–2006, achieving near‐record levels of congressional committee attention. Literature on agenda setting typically portrays such attention spikes as evidence that the inertial forces of a status quo policy regime are losing the ability to keep the issue off the political agenda. Change may not necessarily follow, but from this perspective, opponents to change are in a vulnerable position. Yet, as this paper shows, opponents of immigration reform were the ones driving the flurry of committee activity. By demonstrating that opponents of policy change wielding agenda control can also leverage attention as a means of obstruction, the paper identifies a potential limit to using certain attention indicators as evidence of policy momentum. In the second part of the paper, I hypothesize conditions under which status quo defenders in Congress might abandon their negative agenda power. I argue that it is most likely when policy entrepreneurs elevate an issue with two or more unstable policy images that divide the majority party. The findings here offer further evidence of the congressional committee system's declining role in policy development and the intractability of immigration reform.