Abstract
How do political systems shape immigration policy-making? Explicitly or implicitly, comparative politics and migration policy theories suggest a ‘regime effect’ that links specific dynamics of immigration policy to liberal democracy. The literature’s dominant focus on so-called ‘Western liberal democracies’, however, has left the ‘regime effect’ largely untested and research on variations and similarities in immigration policymaking across political systems strikingly undertheorized. This paper challenges the theoretical usefulness of essentialist, dichotomous categories such as Western/non-Western or democratic/autocratic and calls for a more nuanced theorizing of immigration policy-making. It proposes a two-dimensional classification of immigration policy theories, distinguishing between ‘issue-specific’ theories that capture immigration policy processes regardless of the political system in place and ‘regime-specific’ theories whose insights are tied to the characteristics of a political system. The paper also advances the ‘illiberal paradox’ hypothesis to explain why illiberal, autocratic states may enact liberal immigration policies. This theoretical expansion beyond the ‘Western’ and ‘liberal’ bubble is illustrated by an analysis of immigration policy-making in 21st century Morocco and Tunisia. Showing how domestic and international institutions, interests, and ideas shape immigration policy-making in Morocco’s monarchy and Tunisia’s democratic transition, the paper investigates the broader role of political systems in immigration politics and herewith seeks to contribute to a more general and global theorization of immigration policies.
Highlights
Setting the scene Over the past three decades, research on immigration policy-making has flourished
Freeman (1995) argued that immigration policy-making in democracies follows the pattern of ‘client politics’ because the costs of immigration are diffused among the entire electorate, while benefits are concentrated within a small pool of entrepreneurs
Rather than focusing on binary regime types, this paper looks at the structure, functioning and practices of a country’s political system and asks: How do political systems shape immigration policy-making? It proposes a two-fold classification of immigration policy theories, distinguishing between features of immigration policy-making that are intrinsic to the issue of immigration and valid regardless of the political system in place, as well as those that seem to portray a ‘regime effect’
Summary
Setting the scene Over the past three decades, research on immigration policy-making has flourished. Hollifield (1992a, 1992b), in turn, showed how the political logic of democratic nationstates pushes towards restrictiveness, while the economic logic of global market liberalization pushes for openness towards immigration. Freeman (1995) argued that immigration policy-making in democracies follows the pattern of ‘client politics’ because the costs of immigration are diffused among the entire electorate, while benefits are concentrated within a small pool of entrepreneurs. This ‘liberal paradox’ or ‘embedded liberalism’ would explain why politicians’ discourses about immigration tend to be Natter Comparative Migration Studies (2018) 6:4 more restrictive than implemented policies. Sassen (1996) and Joppke (1998) argued that the rise of an international human rights regime and the activism of national courts, characteristic of liberal democracies, have limited the power of states to curtail migrants’ rights
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