The 1980 Cuban influx represented a unique challenge to federal refugee policy mechanisms and to prevalent concepts of policy analysis and evaluation. The persistence of unworkable policies across two Presidential administrations suggests that organizational, structural, and decisional rather than personality or motivational factors were principally determinative of policy failure. This work suggests elements of a causal theory based on these factors, and a mode of normative evaluation based on mixed analytical strategies that attend to both decisional process and institutional structure.