Aspects Of Immigration Policy Research Articles

Indonesia as a Transit State in Handling Overseas Refugees from the Aspect of Immigration Policy

Indonesia is a key transit country for refugees in Southeast Asia, particularly for those aiming to reach Australia. Despite not having ratified the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, Indonesia continues to see an increasing number of refugees due to global geopolitical conditions. This increase is not matched by a corresponding increase in refugee absorption quotas by Convention countries. Consequently, Indonesia faces a significant challenge as the number of incoming and transiting refugees exceeds those leaving. The successful handling of Vietnamese refugees over a period of almost 25 years now seems difficult to replicate, with only 13% of foreign refugees and asylum seekers resolving their cases through resettlement or repatriation since 2004. This study aims to analyze Indonesia's immigration policies and their effectiveness in managing the current and uncertain future of foreign refugees. By examining these policies, the study seeks to understand the measures taken by the Indonesian government to address the challenges posed by its position as a transit country.

Immigration and Asylum Policy after Brexit: An Introduction

AbstractThis special collection examines how immigration and asylum policies have evolved since Britain left the European Union. The referendum was won on the promise of ‘taking back control’, yet, since Brexit, immigration has increased to record levels and the nationalities of people coming to the UK have become more diverse. The increase in immigration was driven by a liberalisation of work and study visas and the creation of new humanitarian schemes. Although some aspects of immigration policy have evolved in a liberal direction, others have become increasingly restrictive. The Conservative government has pursued a draconian agenda on asylum, borders and irregular migration, including a scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, and legislation that effectively abolishes the right to seek asylum in the UK. This introduction argues that recent immigration and asylum policies reflect the ambivalent, unstable and unresolved meanings of Brexit itself.

Broad and Detailed Agreement: Public Preferences for German Immigration Policy

Immigration policy is often considered one of the most divisive issues in Western Europe and North America. We explore whether that debate has been oversimplified. We start from the position that immigration is a complex issue comprising many specific policy choices. We then investigate whether preferences are consistently open or closed across a range of immigration policy criteria. We analyze an original survey with a nationally representative sample of Germans. Our results suggest that preferences are not consistently open or closed on immigration, integration, and naturalization regulations. Overall, the German public would prefer to be open on some aspects of immigration policy and closed on others. In addition, population subsets who are either “pro-” or “anti-” immigration in general have the same preferences for whether to be open or closed on specific immigration policies. Our findings promote a more detailed approach to studying immigration preferences, which adds nuance to the idea of immigration as a grand societal conflict. In doing so, we highlight how future studies can refine expectations about when policy preferences are more permissive or restrictive.

The complex process of implementation of migratory policies in Italy

ABSTRACTThis study aims to investigate the main factors affecting management of the reception of migrants in Italy. In particular, it focuses on a number of the technical-organizational aspects of the procedures for the granting of international protection. This is a complex process involving a plurality of public and private actors – actors who in fact represent the real implementation structures of reception. The observation of what happens in sub-national contexts such as Sicily, demonstrates the lack of coherence or systematic organization of the interventions. As a result, various critical aspects of immigration policy, as they emerge during the implementation phase, demonstrate that there is a tendency to manage contingent emergencies by framing intervention exclusively as a matter of security rather than of integration.

Congressional Politics of U.S. Immigration Reforms

How are legislative outcomes shaped by multidimensional negotiations? Examining the legislative politics of U.S. immigration reforms, I show how alternating coalitions in multidimensional negotiations produce centrist legislative outcomes. In doing so, this article sheds light on a puzzling aspect of immigration policy—namely, the gap that exists between public opinion and legislative outcomes. My investigation of major immigration bills in 1986, 1996, and 2006 shows that the multidimensional nature of immigration debates contributed to the lack of dramatic reforms, by allowing legislative minorities to form alternating coalitions to block any dramatic changes.

Immigration and the transnational European centre-right: a common programmatic response?

As aspects of immigration policy are brought into the competence of the EU, the role of transnational parties in co-ordinating policy choices across national boundaries grows in importance. Yet immigration is often seen as a cross-cutting issue and transnational parties have limited capacity to enforce programmatic uniformity across national member parties. We explore both of these issues by mapping the stances of transnational and national party manifestos on immigration policy at EP elections. We argue that ideology does structure party positions on immigration but that separating immigration control from migrant integration is essential to understanding partisan differences. While Christian Democrat and Conservative parties do not differ significantly from their Socialist equivalents on control issues, Liberal parties are less restrictionist. On integration, both Christian Democrats/Conservatives and Liberals are less multicultural than Socialist and Green parties.

Chinese Exclusion, Photography, and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy

This article argues that photographic identity documentation was central to the implementation of Chinese exclusion and to the development of U.S. immigration policy in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Starting in 1875, as restrictionists implemented and expanded exclusion policies, they developed an extensive system of photographic identity documentation to attempt to control Chinese immigrants. The Immigration Bureau used this system as a model for the expansion of photographic identity documentation to other racialized immigrant groups and, in 1924, to all immigrants. This aspect of immigration policy has been overlooked by most historians both because of their focus on written records and because of their attention to European immigrants, who remained largely untouched by official photographic practices until they were restricted as part of the racially based National Origins Act of 1924. However, the history of Chinese immigration identity documentation shows both that exclusion was central to the development of U.S. immigration policy and that visual regulation was a key component of immigration restriction. Chinese immigrants fought against their exclusion, representation, and regulation by the United States through three key strategies. First, elite Chinese community leaders launched diplomatic, legal, and political challenges to the implementation of new photographic documentation policies. When these challenges were unsuccessful, documented Chinese took control over their own photographic images, presenting themselves as respectable individuals in their identity documentation. Finally, excluded Chinese resisted their rejection under the exclusion laws by manipulating photographs and photographic documentation in order to enter the United States. In contrast to legal efforts to resist photographic immigration regulation, these extra-legal strategies successfully undermined the discriminatory exclusion policies, challenged the purposes of documentation, and questioned the photograph's emerging authority as evidence.

The Debate on Family Reunification and Canada's Immigration Act of 1976

On April 10, 1978, a new Immigration Act came into force in Canada after a lengthy legislative reform process initiated in September 1973 aimed at clarifying and modernizing the immigration legislation. The Act's introductory clause spelled out the objectives of the nation's immigration policy, among which were welcoming refugees, fulfilling the country's economic, social, and demographic needs, and guaranteeing family reunification. While few people disputed these objectives, the relative importance attributed to each, and especially the number of visas allocated annually to the various immigrant categories, was more controversial. It was one of the issues at the center of the protracted debates that had taken place both within political circles in Ottawa and the Canadian public in the preceding years. Throughout its history, Canadian immigration policy has been influenced by demographic and economic considerations: the young nation needed to import hands and brains. Until at least the middle of the 1960s, the immigration program was regulated by what some have called the tap-on and tap-off system, submitting the immigrant intake to short-term economic fluctuations, namely real or perceived labor market needs and constraints. (2) At the same time, explicit and indirect devices ensured the stability of the nation's racial and ethnic makeup. The dialectics of racial and economic factors in the history of Canada's immigration policy have been well documented. (3) Less well known, however, are other aspects of immigration policy such as family reunification, which has at various periods achieved significant political visibility in Canada. This paper analyzes the political debate concerning the role and significance of family reunification in the context of the 1970s, when the nation examined its immigration policy objectives and admission categories or types of immigrant visa--family, economic, and humanitarian--were more precisely delineated. Indeed, the increasingly sophisticated admission paths reflected the state's growing concern for the creation of relevant and efficient bureaucratic means to achieve its policy objectives. Yet the persistent gap between the lawmakers' intention and the actual process of immigrant admissions, which remained largely determined by administrative discretion, led to further political debates as well as legislative and administrative reforms. The dynamics at work in such debates and reforms, including organized interests competing for the lawmakers' attention, an institutional framework favoring Cabinet discretion and strong ideological currents pitting the supposed national interest against policies, made long-term planning and consistency difficult for Canada's successive governments. In such a context the issue of family reunification partook of a struggle between two conceptions of immigration policy objectives: one that saw such objectives as complementary, and another that put them in competition with one another. The origins and development of family reunification in Canada Family reunification has always had special significance for Canada. Even during the period of strict immigration restrictions corresponding to the Great Depression, foreign relatives of Canadian citizens or residents were accepted. With the displaced persons crisis in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Canadian government cautiously opened up the categories for the admission of relatives in spite of the country's restrictive immigration program and deliberately positioned Canada on the international stage as the champion of separated families. (4) Since then Canadian government officials have proclaimed their country's deep attachment to family reunification--a principle which, along with the integration of refugees, has come to be associated in official discourse with the so-called humanitarian aspect of the country's immigration policy and is presented as the hallmark of the nation's compassion. …