This book investigates and analyses how administrative law works in
practice through a detailed case-study and evaluation of one of the UK's
largest and most important administrative agencies, the immigration
department. In doing so, the book broadens the conversation of
administrative law beyond the courts to include how administrative
agencies themselves make, apply, and enforce the law. Blending
theoretical and empirical administrative-legal analysis, the book
demonstrates why we need to pay closer attention to what government
agencies actually do, how they do it, how they are organised, and held
to account. Taking a contextual approach, the book provides a detailed
analysis of how the immigration department performs its core functions
of making policy and law, taking mass casework decisions, and enforcing
immigration law.
The book considers major recent episodes of immigration administration
including the development of the hostile environment policy and the
treatment of the Windrush generation. By examining a diverse range of
material, the book presents a model of administrative law based upon the
organisational competence and capacity of administration and its
institutional design. Alongside diagnosing the immigration department's
failings, the book advances positive proposals for its reform.
