Immigration and European Politics

Drawing on a mixed research methodology with a strong qualitative character, this book traces the political impact of the British National Party in the UK, the Front National in France and the Lega Nord in Italy by exploring their contagion effects on immigration politics and policy in particular over the patterns of inter-party competition, public behaviour and policy developments. This book suggests that extreme right party impact on immigration politics and policy is an outcome of the extreme right parties’ electoral threats to established parties alongside the agency of mainstream political elites. It also highlights the decline in the intensity of extreme right parties’ contagion effects on public attitudes to immigration throughout the late 2000s or the potential overstatement of this political process in the past. Featuring detailed case studies of the UK, France and Italy as three mature multi-party democracies where the extreme right was on the rise during the past decade, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of populism, extremism, European politics and comparative and party politics.

This article examines recent attempts to create a common European Union (EU) immigration policy. This “harmonized” policy has faced political blockages, despite being seen by most observers as necessary if the EU is to meet its goal of free movement of labor. Because of this resistance, immigration harmonization has lagged behind other EU policy areas. To explain national resistance to harmonizing immigration policy, our article develops a theoretical and conceptual model of how immigration policy is potentially harmonized at the EU level, but how this harmonization can be blocked or restricted. We explain these political blockages with a model of intergovernmental bargaining that focuses on political salience, political partisanship, and institutions that protect immigrant rights. We argue that these national-level factors have determined the success and the nature of various harmonization proposals, by determining the positions of member states when negotiating in the European Council. Our primary hypothesis is that when the political salience of a given immigration issue is high, any harmonization that results is more likely to be restrictive toward immigrant rights. We also hypothesize that the impact of institutions that protect immigrant rights, and of political partisanship, is variable depending on the issue area and the national context. We use literature on European integration, immigration politics, agenda-setting, venue-shopping, and two-level games to theorize, operationalize, and test these hypotheses. The article helps to advance scholarly work on immigration politics, but our model could also conceivably be applied to other high-salience policy areas in the EU.

This article examines recent attempts to create a common European Union (EU) immigration policy. This “harmonized” policy has faced political blockages, despite being seen by most observers as necessary if the EU is to meet its goal of free movement of labor. Because of this resistance, immigration harmonization has lagged behind other EU policy areas. To explain national resistance to harmonizing immigration policy, our article develops a theoretical and conceptual model of how immigration policy is potentially harmonized at the EU level, but how this harmonization can be blocked or restricted. We explain these political blockages with a model of intergovernmental bargaining that focuses on political salience, political partisanship, and institutions that protect immigrant rights. We argue that these national‐level factors have determined the success and the nature of various harmonization proposals, by determining the positions of member states when negotiating in the European Council. Our primary hypothesis is that when the political salience of a given immigration issue is high, any harmonization that results is more likely to be restrictive toward immigrant rights. We also hypothesize that the impact of institutions that protect immigrant rights, and of political partisanship, is variable depending on the issue area and the national context. We use literature on European integration, immigration politics, agenda‐setting, venue‐shopping, and two‐level games to theorize, operationalize, and test these hypotheses. The article helps to advance scholarly work on immigration politics, but our model could also conceivably be applied to other high‐salience policy areas in the EU.

When it comes to immigration policy, nation-states generally have the power to exclude, admit, or expel noncitizens from their territories. On the other hand, subnational jurisdictions have more often been given the task of formulating and implementing immigrant policy, which entails the incorporation of immigrants into local communities. This division of labor has recently come under intense scrutiny. The local and state politics of immigration and immigrant integration in the United States has been documented in the scholarly literature, focusing on topics such as California’s Proposition 187, the disparity between the national benefits and local costs of immigration, and the increasing role played by nongovernmental organizations and other nonstate actors in the integration of immigrants at the local scale. Four categories of local immigrant and immigration policy have been studied: policies that arise from the devolution of select powers over noncitizens; grassroots policies on areas such as education and human trafficking; policies that are more explicitly about a politics of immigration control; and policies that engage with a politics of immigrant integration. However, there are still avenues that require further investigation so as to better understand the growing involvement of subnational governments in the formulation and implementation of immigrant and immigration policy. For example, more research is needed in which policy outcome is taken as the dependent variable and to document and understand the dynamics of local immigrant integration and immigration policy formation in developing countries.

Reviewed by: The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman Kathryn Schumaker (bio) The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America. By Sarah Coleman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. $35.00 cloth; $35.00 ebook) Historians of immigration in the twentieth-century United States have long noted how restrictive policies created a class of unauthorized people who lived in the shadow of the law. At the same time, the 1960s spurred a revolution in individual rights, expanding the scope of claims all persons—including noncitizens—could make through the Fourteenth Amendment. Sarah Coleman's The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America examines the people caught in between these two important developments, exploring the battles over the rights of unauthorized immigrants. This well-written and thoroughly researched book tells an often-surprising story that reveals how the states—and not the federal government—were frequently the laboratories of restrictive immigration policies in the late twentieth century. Coleman begins with Plyler v. Doe (1982), a landmark United States Supreme Court case that questioned the constitutionality of a Texas state law that allowed school districts to charge tuition to students who could not prove their legal status. The Supreme Court had ruled a decade earlier that the Fourteenth Amendment did not include a constitutional right to education. Could Texas charge tuition to unauthorized families or exclude them from public schools entirely? The first two chapters examine how these questions vexed the Carter and Reagan administrations, where officials saw unauthorized children as sympathetic figures, but also recognized that immigration [End Page 449] was a hot-button issue with voters. Though unauthorized immigrants were a convenient political target for members of state legislatures—especially in their inability to respond at the ballot box—officials were wary of punishing children. The Supreme Court eventually ruled the law unconstitutional in 1982. But the concerns about childhood that restrained some policymakers and judges in Plyler did little to deter efforts by state legislatures to target adults. Amid press warnings that linked rising unemployment rates to unauthorized workers, states passed laws criminalizing the employers who hired them. The next two chapters examine how this issue scrambled traditional partisan divides. The Chamber of Commerce and many Republicans opposed a federal law because it targeted business owners. Latino advocacy groups recognized that the law risked the possibility that, fearful of prosecution, employers could refuse to hire any identifiably Latino person. Ultimately, these concerns contributed to the passage of the 1986 federal immigration law that included (largely unenforceable) sanctions for employers, but also prohibited discrimination on the basis of alienage and national origin in hiring. The final chapters focus on the 1990s, when both political parties lurched rightward on immigration. The fifth chapter examines how immigration again came to the fore amid an economic downturn, culminating in Clinton-era welfare reform that ended the ability of noncitizens to access public benefits, including cash assistance and food stamps, regardless of their legal status. The final chapter explains how states paved the way for new restrictive immigration policies, leading Congress to ultimately buttress the authority of state and local officials to carry out immigration enforcement in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The Walls Within is a story of lawyers, judges, policy advisers, senators, and other elites as they made immigration law and policy in courtrooms and offices. Unauthorized immigrants existed abstractly for these people, especially for politicians who sought to use [End Page 450] immigration policy to woo conservative white voters (in the case of Clinton) or appeal to Latino voters (as Reagan did). The book, therefore, has less to say about how these legal and policy changes affected immigrants' everyday lives. Nonetheless it offers a clear policy and legal history of the fraught issue of immigrants' rights in the modern United States, especially in its contributions to the growing scholarship on federalism and immigration. [End Page 451] Kathryn Schumaker KATHRYN SCHUMAKER is a historian at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s and is at work on a new book project about interracial families in...

Since 2005, local governments in southern California’s Inland Empire region have attempted to pass various types of immigration regulation. I examine several cases from this region that symbolize the contemporary national debate on immigration in the U.S. Using a conceptual framework derived from a body of work by critical geographers on immigration, I argue that geography is integral to the construction of immigration politics and policy. Specifically, I use the concepts of spatial targeting and discursive production of scale to understand how local and national immigration politics and policies fit together. Thus, I compare the local case studies from the Inland Empire to national immigration politics and policies. I discuss the Bush administration immigration policies, immigration bills passed in the U.S. Congress since 2005, and their constitutive arguments. I conclude that the contradiction between liberal trade and restrictive immigration policy, which has frustrated the implementation of immigration reform at the national level and has opened the floodgate to local immigration reform initiatives, is creating a complex topography of regulations and enforcement. This new geography of rights and citizenship is a process of spatial targeting whereby local immigration regulations have taken the place of national immigration reform. Like other critical geographers, I argue that these local resolutions to the contradictions of the U.S. neoliberal state allow for the continuation of the current status quo of a flexible labor market made up of undocumented workers with contingent rights.

The immigration issue seems insistently with us in the late 2000s, though immigration policy seems persistently elusive. Seeking an intellectual handle on this disjunction, a cluster of Forum authors focus on immigration politics in its many forms. Daniel Tichenor maps the difficult terrain for policymaking in this realm, while Ben Marquez and John Witte address alternative congressional strategies for making immigration policy. Randall Hansen looks at American policy in comparative perspective, while Peter Schuck raises the possibility of giving the individual states wider latitude to legislate. Peter Skerry argues that observers have misperceived the reality of immigration politics and policy; Jack Citrin and Matthew Wright link notions of American identity with public preferences in this realm; while Gary Freeman considers the inescapable links between immigration and welfare policy. Among reviews, Daniel DiSalvo considers Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. In other pieces, Gregory Koger analyzes the agenda-setting choices of President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders, Matthew Grossman asks how political scientists differ from political practitioners in thinking about election campaigns, and Brendon O‘Connor reviews Sergio Fabbrini, America and Its Critics: Virtues and Vices of the Democratic Hyperpower, with a response from Fabbrini.

Although the Statue of Liberty, one of the premier symbols of the United States, welcomes “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” America’s relationship with its immigrants has long been ambivalent. Throughout the United States’ history, there have been persistent and charged debates over the nature and consequences of immigration. At times, America has greatly restricted the number and characteristics of newcomers, despite its aspiration to be identified as a “nation of immigrants” and a “melting pot.” The heated, contentious debate over who should be included in the United States, and how they should be included, persists in the halls of Congress, the judiciary, the executive branch, and at the state and local levels. The literature related to history and contemporary debates regarding immigration politics and policy in the United States is expansive. This article addresses scholarship on a number of specific policy debates, as well as popular reactions to these polemics. The works below focus on three overarching themes. First, we discuss scholarship about the policies themselves. This research includes a historical perspective, looking back at early immigration policies that were characterized by a quota system and the exclusion of Asian immigrants, as well as a view on contemporary policy debates emerging since the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. This significant piece of legislation overturned the system of national origin restrictions and led to the development of the current immigration policy regime. The second broad theme explores the immigrants themselves, including demographic trends, political and economic incorporation, and political participation. The final major theme includes reactions to contemporary policy debates by both the public and the press. Works in this area focus on public opinion about immigration policy, social movements emerging in response to the immigration debate, the anti-immigrant backlash, and media coverage of immigration politics. The end of this article also highlights key data sources for those wishing to conduct additional research in this area.

While the history of U.S. immigration policy has traditionally been directed “inward,” toward questions of American law, institutions, policy regimes, and modes of national belonging, an emerging historical scholarship is asking how U.S. immigration policy has been shaped by U.S. foreign relations. This essay draws together, builds on, and transforms this literature by foregrounding new questions of transnational, imperial, and global inequality in the making of U.S. immigration politics and policy, and by problematizing not only closures and exclusions, but selective openings in the U.S. immigration regime. Despite conventional claims that immigration is and has been a matter of “domestic” politics, in fact, U.S. immigration policy has long been self-consciously engaged with transnational realities. Indeed, as the essay argues, while serving as a way that Americans could define the nation against an “outside,” U.S. immigration policy has simultaneously been instrumentalized to project U.S. national-imperial power out into the world. This geopolitics of mobility has taken wide-ranging, overlapping, and often contradictory forms: the pursuit of labor power, the management of overseas colonies, the diffusion of U.S. goods, practices, and values, the building of legitimacy, the containment of enemies, and the rescue of friends. An imperial history of U.S. immigration control has the capacity both to frame new historical inquiries and to draw attention to the crucial ways that many migrants to the United States have already been enmeshed in U.S.-centered fields of power long before they approach the recognized boundaries of the U.S. state.

In the United States the baby boom generation will officially enter into retirement in 2010 as massive numbers of retirees will leave the labor force for the next twenty years until 2040. Europe and Japan's baby boomers will retire about ten years later. As a consequence, massive labor needs will make immigration an issue of intense political scrutiny and debate in the first half of the twenty first century. Even before these demographic shifts, immigration has proven to be an explosive issue, with antiimmigrant parties and attacks on foreigners in Europe and the withdrawal of welfare benefits and new forms of human smuggling in the United States. Whether shielded or exacerbated by the business cycle, the politics of immigration will be a cauldron of emotions and wills for the next half century. But sociological theories explaining the politics of immigration and naturalization are not well-developed. Kingsley Davis calls explanations of international migration “opaque to theoretical reasoning in general” (1988:245) and Barbara Heisler states that “we still lack a formal theory of immigration and immigrant incorporation” (1992:638). Randall Hansen says that the “study of Commonwealth immigration and UK migration policy has been theory poor; many if not most accounts are descriptive” (2000:10). And in a recent review of theories of immigration policy, Eytan Meyers says that immigration policy “lacks … attempts to debate the relative merits of various schools of thought” (2000:1246).

Why do legislators in Congress do what they do when it comes to voting on immigration policy? The Politics of Comprehensive Immigration Reform in the United States argues that contemporary immigration politics is defined by three core features: the entrenchment of partisan divides over the issue of immigration, demographic changes that are reshaping the electorate, and how these changes are creating new opportunities to define what it means to be an American in a period of unprecedented national origins, racial and ethnic, and cultural diversity. It analyzes more than 30,000 votes in the House and in the Senate since H.R. 4437, which was a restrictive immigration bill that, after passing in the House in late 2005, led to nationwide marches in 2006 that crystallized the contemporary immigrant-rights movement. The book provides readers with a primer on United States immigration policy, offering detailed discussions on legal admissions policies, border security polices, interior immigration enforcement policies, and policies related to the legal status of undocumented immigrants. After laying out the current policy landscape, legislative proposals to reform the United States immigration system are also discussed. The book also uses the analysis of voting on immigration policy to forecast the future of comprehensive immigration reform in the United States.

Cities and Immigrants Nelson Wiseman Erin Tolley and Robert Young, eds. Immigrant Settlement Policy in Canadian Municipalities. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. 331 pp. Notes. Index. $29.95 sc. Kristin R. Good. Municipalities and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Immigration in Toronto and Vancouver. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 363 pp. Notes. References. Index. $32.95 sc. Reza Hasmath, ed. Managing Ethnic Diversity: Meanings and Practices from an International Perspective. Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2011. 258 pp. Index. £54.00 hc. A century ago, in 1913, over 400,000 immigrants arrived in Canada—one immigrant for every sixteen residents in the country. In 2012, as in the other years in the past decade, the immigrant influx will be about 250,000 or approximately two-thirds of one percent of the national population. Recent immigrants attract attention because they are overwhelmingly “visible” and officialdom defines them as such. In their own way, the immigrants of a century ago were “visible” as well—foreign dress, customs, languages, and diets communicated their visibility. During the Depression, some cities had immigrants who were receiving welfare payments deported. Today’s immigrants arrive in a context of public policies designed to aid them. The policy motive for the massive inflow in the early part of the last century was rural settlement in the West; well into the 1920s, the Canadian Pacific Railway aggressively lobbied Ottawa to admit more immigrants from the “non-preferred” countries of central and eastern Europe because over thirty million acres of vacant land were within fifteen miles of the CPR’s rail network, making the railway less viable than it might otherwise have been. Some immigrants in this turn-of-the twentieth century wave also headed for eastern Canadian cities to labour in their then-burgeoning manufacturing sector. [End Page 261] Since then, rural agricultural Canada has steadily declined and manufacturing has been on a downward slope for decades. Today’s immigrants settle overwhelmingly in cities and their suburbs. These newcomers labour disproportionately in the economy’s service, or tertiary, sector, while there are few in the primary sector—farming, fishing, logging, and mining. The visible minorities on Canada’s farms tend to be temporary, seasonally-employed foreigners. The principle motive driving immigration policy today continues to be economic, but the rationale is different: a younger cohort of Canadians is now required to pay the taxes sustaining social programs for an aging population in its retirement and declining health. Immigrants gravitate to the largest conurbations—greater Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal are now home to one of every three Canadians—because they have existing ethnic and family networks for many of the recently arrived. Most immigrants also perceive large cities as offering the best prospects for employment and for escalation on the socio-economic ladder. A challenge for smaller centres is recruiting and retaining immigrants, something to which senior levels of government have become more responsive in the past decade. The technical and educational backgrounds of immigrants have also changed over the past century. Immigration policy now rewards literacy, skills qualifications, and proficiency in one of two official languages. Once, these mattered much less or not at all. And, where Britons and Americans and then Europeans were once given preference in admission policy, they must now get in the queue with the others. The three books reviewed here juxtapose urban and immigrant policy considerations in the context of Canada’s ethnocultural and ethno-racial diversity. All three books address the management of the social changes wrought by multiculturalism. As a monograph, Kristin Good’s Municipalities and Multiculturalism offers one big story; the other two books, as edited collections, tell smaller stories that revolve around two related themes: one book dissects sub-national, primarily provincial and municipal immigrant settlement policies in Canada; the other explores the management of ethno-cultural diversity in a broader international and cross-disciplinary context. The first of the edited books is in a Fields of Governance Series and is the product of a project entitled Multilevel Governance and Public Policy in Canadian Municipalities. The second, whose series editor is at Utrecht University, appears under the aegis of the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations. Robert...

This chapter explores the role of research in immigration politics and policy-making. It starts by distinguishing between three different functions of research: as instrumental to adjusting policy interventions, as a means of substantiating preferences, and to legitimize decision-makers. It then explores the conditions influencing which of these functions prevails, notably (a) the level of contestation and political salience over the issue; (b) the ‘mode of settlement’ (democratic or technocratic) that is seen as appropriate in political deliberation; and (c) the mode through which policy-makers derive legitimacy (whether through symbolic gestures or outcomes). The chapter argues that these three factors help explain cross-national variations in patterns of knowledge utilization on immigration policy, as well as fluctuation over time and across sub-areas of immigration policy. The chapter goes on to explore how this account can help make sense of the current scepticism about expertise in debates on immigration.

Though Donald Trump popularized the phrase “Build the Wall” during the 2016 presidential election, Sarah R. Coleman's The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America reminds us that immigration has historically taken the forefront of political campaigns, especially during the second half of the twentieth century. Asserting that immigration scholars have primarily focused on external (international) borders, Coleman turns to internal domestic borders to examine federal, state, and local policies that sought to restrict non-citizen rights. Coleman argues, “With the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 and the corresponding shifts in immigration patterns, efforts to restrict immigrants’ access to social welfare programs began to solidify during the 1970s” (p. 106). In this vein, the author sets out to trace the “struggle of politicians, interest groups, courts, activists, and communities to define the rights of immigrants in the United States after the passage of the historic Hart-Celler Act of 1965” (p. 2). Coleman focuses on immigrants’ access to education, employment, and welfare to examine the nation's internal borders.This political history is organized into an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. The first chapter, “The Rose's Sharp Thorn: Texas and the Rise of Unauthorized Immigrant Education,” traces the 1982 landmark Supreme court case Plyler v. Doe, which decided that a Texas statute that charged tuition to non-citizen students violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Chapter 2, “‘A Subclass of Illiterates’: The Presidential Politics of Unauthorized Immigrant Education,” successfully demonstrates how pressures of an impending presidential election influenced the Carter administration's lack of response to Plyler v. Doe and Governor Ronald Reagan's pressure to woo Texas voters.Coleman then examines employment issues in the third chapter, “‘Heading into Uncharted Waters’: Congress, Employer Sanctions, and Labor Rights,” through which she explores how political alliances and parties became divided over employer sanctions. Chapter 4, “‘A Riverboat Gamble’: The Passage of Employer Sanctions,” relies on the passage of employer sanctions to emphasize one of Coleman's core arguments: “policies emerged not out of clear, ideologically coherent policy positions, but instead through tangled political compromises, sometimes crafted to address complex policy questions and, at other times, merely for the sake of incremental political gains” (p. 82).Following conservative fears that immigrants would soon have access to all civic liberties, Coleman examines welfare rights in the fifth chapter, “‘To Reward the Wrong Way Is Not the American Way’: Welfare and the Battle Over Immigrants’ Benefits.” This chapter effectively demonstrates another central premise of the book: “the removal of authorized immigrants from welfare is significant as it highlights the hardening of citizenship as the essential element in determining the relationship between the individual and the welfare state” (p. 108). In this chapter, Coleman most clearly outlines the origins of present-day local and state immigration policy. In regard to the monumental transfer of immigration authority from federal to state, Coleman argues, “Beyond the immediate restrictions, the changes made in the 1990s established a new policy framework that would ultimately reshape immigration policy over the next two decades,” (p. 141). Further illuminating the origins of today's immigration restrictions, Chapter 6, “From the Border to the Heartland: Local Immigration Enforcement and Immigrants’ Rights,” relies on an Iowa court case and the implementation of the 287(g) program to demonstrate how “federal inability to address some of the complicated issues of immigration control opened the window for state efforts at policymaking” (p. 142).The book's strengths lie in effectively detailing how political figures, institutions, grassroots organizations, and federal and state governments treated each court case as a high-stakes entryway into allowing non-citizens access to other civil liberties. Coleman convincingly traces and demonstrates how landmark immigration court cases are never treated as stand-alone issues; politicians are particularly concerned about how one policy could affect others or how their approval for a policy could alienate key constituencies. Sources are another strength, as Coleman balances materials from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, as well as immigration and civil rights organizations. Although the reliance on a wide array of polls is informative, Coleman does not address pollsters’ demographics. Details such as pollsters’ national origins and socio-economic statuses could strengthen Coleman's argument. The first and last chapters that rely primarily on one court case could be strengthened by further discussing other cases that are mentioned but not used to complicate the evidence.Coleman set out to accomplish the significant feat of detailing restrictions imposed on non-citizens in the United States. The book successfully contributes to the field of immigration studies through its focus on internal borders. Audiences that would benefit from The Walls Within include those seeking to learn about the legislative policy process through history. Coleman puts it best: “This study looks at the entire scale of policymaking that is pertinent to immigrants, showing how local, state, and federal actions shaped policy implementation and politics in distinct ways” (p. 5).

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