Fortress Europe Revisited

Abstract

Immigration and the Transformation of Europe. Edited by Craig A. Parsons, Timothy M. Smeeding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 500 pp., $99.00 (ISBN: 0521-86193-4). Rechtlos, aber nicht ohne Stimme. Politische Mobilisierungen um irregulare Migration in die Europaische Union. [Without Rights, But Not Without a Voice.] By Helen Schwenken. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2006. 374 pp., $29.80 (ISBN: 3-89942-516-1). Immigration is high on the political agenda in Europe. Even though states compete for high-skilled migrant workers, immigrant scapegoating has become a common currency in public debates. On the policy level, borders are systematically fortified, refugees criminalized, and vast amounts of money invested in new technologies to enhance border control and surveillance and to ensure fraud-resistant immigration procedures. It seems that Fortress Europe is being built. Yet, two recently published books— Rechtlos, aber nicht ohne Stimme [ Without Rights, But Not Without a Voice ], by Helen Schwenken, and Immigration and the Transformation of Europe , edited by Craig Parsons and Timothy Smeeding—paint a more nuanced picture of migration trends and policies in Europe than the notion of “Fortress Europe” suggests. Both books add illuminating empirical material to migration studies, but they differ widely in subject matter and approach. Whereas Rechtlos, aber nicht ohne Stimme provides an indepth analysis of the possibilities of and limitations to the self-organization of illegal migrants, Immigration and the Transformation of Europe is a comprehensive stock-taking of immigration-related challenges and policy responses. Whereas Schwenken's book is clearly part of the field of sociologically inspired political science and adopts a critical approach, the Parsons and Smeeding volume is avowedly interdisciplinary, with the majority of articles falling into mainstream traditions. Finally, unlike Rechtlos, aber nicht ohne Stimme , which has a solid theoretical underpinning, most of the contributions to Immigration and the Transformation of Europe are notably silent on theory. The central thesis of Immigration and the Transformation of Europe is the uniqueness of the challenge that immigration poses to Europe. As Parsons and Smeeding put it in their introduction, this uniqueness is rooted in the “severity and immediacy of demographic and pension-funding problems, in the size and integration of already-established immigrant minorities, and in the availability …