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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Immigration is one of the most contested issues on the political agenda of liberal states across Europe and North America. While these states can be open and inclusive to newcomers, they are also often restrictive and exclusionary. The Politics of Immigration examines the sources of these apparently contradictory stances, locating answers in the nature of the liberal state itself. The book shows how four defining facets of the liberal state - representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism, and nationhood - generate conflicting imperatives for immigration policymaking, which in turn gives rise to paradoxical, even contradictory, policies. The first few chapters of the book outline this framework, setting out the various actors, institutions and ideas associated with each facet. Subsequent chapters consider its implications for different elements of the immigration policy field, including policies towards economic and humanitarian immigration, as well as citizenship and integration. Throughout, the argument is illustrated with data and examples from the major immigrant-receiving countries of Europe and North America. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in migration studies, politics and international relations, and all those interested in understanding why immigration remains one of the most controversial and intractable policy issues in the Western world.
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Seitenzahl: 399
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE: Immigration and the Liberal State
International Migration and the Modern State
Four Facets of the Liberal State
Liberal Paradoxes
Plan of the Book
CHAPTER TWO: The Politics of Closure
Race, Nation and the Immigrant Threat
Public Opinion and its Causes
The Party Politics of Immigration
The Immigrant Threat Revisited
Conclusion
CHAPTER THREE: The Politics of Openness
Losing Control?
Demand for Labour Migration
Mobilizing Labour Demand
Liberal Norms and the Limits of Control
Mobilizing Liberal Norms
Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR: The Sisyphean Task of Migration Governance
Governing Immigration
The Rise of Managed Labour Migration
Excluding Irregular Immigrants
The Paradoxes of Asylum Policy
The Turn against Family Migration
Conclusion
CHAPTER FIVE: Migration Governance beyond the State
Sovereignty, State Interests and Power
Why Cooperate?
The Shape of Global Migration Governance
Formal Multilateralism: The International Refugee System
Informal Multilateralism: The Migration–Development Nexus
Regionalism and Bilateralism: RCPs and Migration Partnerships
Supranational Regional Governance: The European Union
Conclusion
CHAPTER SIX: The Janus Face of Liberal Citizenship
What Is Citizenship?
Citizenship Matters
From National Idioms to Contested Politics
The Liberalization of Access to Citizenship
Reasserting Exclusionary Citizenship?
Conclusion
CHAPTER SEVEN: Integration in the Liberal State
The Problem of Unity in Liberal States
The Multidimensionality of Immigrant Integration
In Search of Integration Models
A Question of Employment?
The Politics of Cultural Integration
Conclusion
CHAPTER EIGHT: Conclusion: Living with Contradictions
References and Bibliography
Index
Copyright © James Hampshire 2013
The right of James Hampshire to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2013 by Polity Press
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Tables and Figures
Table 2.1 Far-right parties in selected European countries
Table 3.1 Comparing the four facets across liberal states
Table 6.1 Citizenship policies index in the EU15 countries
Table 7.1 Unemployment rates for native- and foreign-born workers and relative unemployment rates, selected OECD countries, 2008–10
Figure 4.1 Number of asylum-seekers in OECD countries, 2000–10
Acknowledgements
The ideas in this book have evolved through discussions with many colleagues. I can't mention here all those whose work has shaped my thoughts on this subject, but I would like to thank a few people in particular. Randall Hansen has gone from being an excellent postdoctoral mentor to an even better colleague and friend. Few people combine iconoclasm with intellectual generosity in such equal measure. Others who have shaped my ideas through conversations and comments in formal or informal contexts, often both, include Erik Bleich, Christina Boswell, Michael Collyer, Terri Givens, Simon Green, Christian Joppke, Desmond King and Paul Statham. Thanks to them all. My friend and fellow researcher, Pontus Odmalm, has leavened our conversations about migration with a lot of good humour (as well as giving the wittiest best man's speech I've ever heard). I'd also like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Politics at Sussex and the Sussex Centre for Migration Research for providing a most collegial and stimulating working environment. And I'd like to thank my PhD students, in particular Erica Consterdine, who read most of the chapters of this book as they were drafted and provided very helpful comments.
An awful lot of things have happened while writing this book (which I like to think is why it took me so long). Above all, I have been fortunate to marry Pauline and to become the father of Clara and Otto. Pauline deserves a world of thanks for her tolerance and myriad kindnesses, not to mention her intellectual curiosity and originality. I'd like to thank Clara and Otto for sometimes sleeping through the night but more importantly for always being a source of joy and wonderment. This book is dedicated to all of them and to the memory of little Constantin, who came and went in 2009.
CHAPTER ONE
Immigration and the Liberal State
For anyone who pays the slightest attention to politics in the liberal democratic world it won't come as a surprise to hear that immigration is controversial. What was once viewed as a technocratic policy problem has morphed into one of the most contested issues on the public agenda. In Europe, loud and contradictory claims are made for and against immigration: according to some, immigrants are rejuvenators of ageing populations, motors of economic growth, and saviours of the European welfare state; to others they are to blame for native unemployment, wage depression and welfare costs, not to mention social and cultural disintegration. The debate is barely less polarized in North America and Oceania, despite their longer historical experience of large-scale immigration and their self-identification as nations of immigrants. In the United States, the largest destination country in the world, attempts to pass much needed immigration reform have foundered amid heated congressional debates and public protests. And even such measures as have been agreed, such as the construction of a 600-mile fence along the southern border with Mexico, are deeply controversial. It is clear that, across the rich liberal democracies, immigration is an issue freighted with a lot of political baggage.
About the only thing that is not in dispute is that immigration is ever more significant and complex. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there were approximately 214 million international migrants in the world in 2010. This represented an increase of almost 40 million during the first decade of the twenty-first century and a doubling since 1980. While the rate of migration flows slowed in 2007–8 as the economic crisis took hold, migrant stocks have not been significantly reduced, and preliminary data for 2011 suggest a return to greater flows (OECD 2012a: 3). While international migration is now a global phenomenon, affecting Southern as well as Northern regions, the majority of international migrants, 57 per cent, live in high-income countries. Europe is home to some 72.6 million migrants, North America (Canada and the USA) accounts for 50 million, while Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, plus several small islands of Polynesia and Micronesia) accounts for 6 million (IOM 2010). As mentioned above, the United States remains the top migrant destination in the world, with a migrant stock of 42.8 million, and four European Union countries (Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Spain) appear in the top ten, as does Canada.
These numbers tell only a fraction of the story, however, as international migration is not only increasing in scale but also becoming more variegated and complex. Today, people migrate to and from an ever wider range of countries, for diverse reasons, with diverse implications for both sending and receiving states. The catch-all term ‘international migrant’ encompasses inter alia high-flying executives transferring between the offices of multinational companies, students travelling abroad to study at universities and colleges, seasonal workers recruited to pick crops, husbands, wives and children joining overseas relatives, people fleeing persecution and seeking asylum, undocumented migrants looking for a better life, and so on. Migration patterns have also changed, becoming more fluid and circular compared with traditional patterns of long-term immigrant settlement. For receiving countries, the scale and complexity of international mobility means that immigration is one of the most difficult policy issues to address, as well as one of the most politically charged.
This book provides an analysis of the politics of immigration in the rich liberal democracies, primarily the countries of Europe, North America and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand). It is therefore necessarily wide-ranging and cannot do justice to the complexities of individual countries. But, by taking a panoramic view, it aims to provide a comparative introduction to this thorny topic and, at the same time, advance an argument about immigration and the liberal state. The point of departure for this argument is the claim that the state ‘matters’ when it comes to understanding immigration – indeed, that immigration cannot be understood without probing into the complexities and contradictions of modern liberal statehood. From this starting point, the book aims to show that the contested nature of immigration has its roots in the institutions of the liberal state, an understanding of which is essential to explain why effective and coherent immigration policies are so elusive. Contrary to claims often heard in popular debate, the intractable nature of immigration policy is not a failure of governance but rather a reflection of contradictory imperatives of the liberal state. This, at least, is the claim I seek to justify throughout the rest of the book.
The claim that the state matters for understanding immigration is on one level virtually tautological because the state system is constitutive of international migration, and therefore of immigration and emigration. On another level, states matter because they seek to intervene in and influence migration flows using a range of policy instruments. Although migration may be driven by economic, demographic and environmental factors, the actions of states affect migration in myriad ways, including the decision to migrate in the first place, where to migrate, how to migrate, what routes to follow and, later, the trajectories of integration. Hence this book heeds the now familiar (but still sometimes inadequately realized) injunction to ‘bring the state back in’ to migration research (Hollifield 2007). Bringing the state back in requires more than the insertion of an abstract and monolithic entity – ‘the state’ – into existing migration debates. Rather, we must unpack and deconstruct the actors and institutions that constitute the state. When we do so, we discover that different actors and institutions have conflicting agendas on migration and are, to varying degrees, able to mobilize support behind these agendas. Policies reflect these conflicts.
When contemporary liberal states meet the fact of immigration, four constitutive features of liberal statehood shape their response: representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism and nationhood. As will be seen, each of these features is an abstraction or shorthand that captures a distinct constellation of actors, institutions and ideas which combine to produce dynamics of openness and closure across immigration, citizenship and integration policymaking. While this approach implies certain commonalities in the politics of immigration across liberal states, it is important to stress that it does not preclude cross-national variation between them. On the contrary, it provides a way to make sense of similarities and differences in the patterns of political contestation that shape policy outcomes.
At the same time, the book does argue that there are common patterns of conflict arising from these generic features of liberal statehood. Representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism and nationhood each generate distinct imperatives for government action on immigration. And none of these imperatives can be ignored because each is rooted in the legitimation of the liberal state. To put it very simply, mobilization through majoritarian democratic institutions, often based on claims about the protection of national identity and values, generates pressure for more restrictive immigration and integration policies; whereas employer demand for migrant labour and appeals to universal rights both generate pressure for more open, inclusive policies. Thus the governments of liberal states are pulled in different directions because core activities that they are expected to undertake to secure their legitimacy generate contradictory imperatives for immigration policy.
International Migration and the Modern State
If migration is as old as human history, international migration is a product of the modern world order and its defining political institution, the nation-state. As Aristide Zolberg has written, ‘it is the political organization of world space into mutually exclusive sovereignties that delineates the specificity of international migration’ (Zolberg 1994). The modern state is at once a territorial and a membership unit. It is partly defined by its claim to sovereignty over a specific expanse of physical territory, within which it claims the exclusive right to make laws backed up with what Max Weber famously described as a ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ (Weber 1991 [1919]: 78). One of the key aspects of sovereignty is the right to decide who is allowed to enter that territory. At the same time, states are also membership institutions, comprised of a demos or people who share a common identity as citizens (or, in earlier times, as subjects) and who enjoy certain rights and obligations as a result of this status. Today, citizenship is typically acquired at birth according to place or parentage or some combination of the two, and one of the core rights of citizenship is a right to reside in the state of which one is a member.
It is the combination of these two aspects of modern statehood – the carving up of physical space into sovereign jurisdictions combined with the ascription of politico-legal identities to persons depending on their place of birth and/or parentage – that structures the two sides of the international migration coin. Immigration consists of persons without membership of state a entering and residing within the territory of a; emigration occurs when a person with membership of state a leaves its territory to reside in the territory of state b, c, d, and so on.1 Therefore, without the dual territorial and membership aspects of modern statehood neither immigration nor emigration would exist. To see the significance of this, imagine a world without defined state territories or membership statuses. In such a world, moving from the city of Lahore (Pakistan) to London (UK) would in principle be like moving from Leicester to London (both in the UK). The latter journey would be quicker and cheaper, but absent state boundaries neither would require a visa application, a valid passport, entry checks, and so on. And that is just the journey itself. In reality the status of being a legal immigrant, as opposed to a citizen, affects a person's access to rights (see chapter 6). But, in our fictional example, the impact on rights for the migrant from Lahore to London would have no more significance than today's migrant from Leicester to London. Moreover, in our fictional world there would be no such thing as an ‘illegal’ immigrant, just as today there is no such thing as illegal-citizens-of-Leicester-residing-in-London. That this world is so far-fetched only goes to show just how fundamental territoriality and citizenship are to the contemporary world order.
This simple thought experiment also points to the depth of the challenges that international migration poses to the modern state system. For many of the state's day-to-day operations, as well as its bases of legitimacy, rest on an assumption that most people will spend their lives in the territory of the state of which they are a citizen. Voting systems, tax regimes and welfare systems all have what might be called a sedentary bias, insofar as they are ill-suited to cope with mass migratory movements. Though the majority of humanity (approximately 97 per cent) do live within their country of origin, the 3 per cent who are international migrants have increasingly led states to adapt their practices to accommodate immigrants (and also emigrants, though this is beyond the scope of this book). Practically, immigration requires states to adapt to the presence of newcomers in their political systems, societies and economies. Normatively, immigration raises profound questions about how to legitimate state power, not least since in liberal democracies the coercive power of the state is legitimated principally through the election of governments, but in almost all such countries the right to vote in national elections is based on citizenship, not residence.
Four Facets of the Liberal State
Thus international migration is at once a product of the modern state and a challenge to many of its underlying assumptions. While true, this observation does not begin to explain the complex processes that shape immigration policies in the contemporary world. To do this, we must move beyond the assertion that ‘the state matters’ and seek to identify and unpack the constituent parts of liberal states that are most relevant for understanding immigration policy. While liberal states undoubtedly vary in terms of their histories, economies, cultures, and so on, they nevertheless share certain features which enable their common labelling and moreover create similar political and policymaking dynamics in the field of immigration. This book argues that four facets of contemporary liberal statehood are crucial to understanding the politics of immigration: representative democracy, constitutionalism, nationhood and capitalism. These facets combine to generate often conflicting demands for immigration policies. They are introduced briefly here before being considered in more detail in chapters 2 and 3.
The liberal state as a democratic state
One of the defining characteristics of contemporary liberal states is their democratic character. All of the immigrant-receiving countries discussed in this book are representative democracies, which is to say that their citizens elect political representatives through multi-party elections. Numerous different electoral systems, party systems and forms of government (e.g., presidential or parliamentary) are compatible with this broad definition, all of which are relevant to understanding exactly how representative politics influences immigration policymaking in any specific case. But even at this level of generality it is possible to spell out some of the implications that the institutions of representative democracy have for understanding how immigration is governed in liberal states.
First, in representative democracies, public opinion matters. What the voters of a given country think about immigration influences the kinds of policies candidates for office will propose, as well as the tone of discourse and atmosphere in which immigration is debated. Though political parties do not simply ape public opinion – since they try to shape it to some extent as well – they certainly cannot ignore it. This is true of most issues but especially so of sensitive and salient ones, which immigration has certainly become in recent years. In less politicized or technocratic policy areas, public opinion is less important. But when an issue such as immigration rises on the public agenda, becoming a matter of regular media coverage and popular debate, the importance of public opinion increases. Elected politicians cannot afford to be seen as ‘out of touch’ with public opinion on these issues.
Yet publics rarely think with one mind, especially on issues as controversial as immigration. Therefore it matters which parts of the public are able to get their voices heard and organize themselves to influence government. In representative democracies the chief mechanism for linking the government and public is political parties. It is parties that compete for electoral support from voters, parties that form governments, and governments which make immigration policies. Thus the ideologies and policy platforms of political parties, and how these are shaped through electoral competition, require consideration. In addition to political parties, any plausible account of immigration politics in democratic countries must include the myriad interest groups, ranging from employers’ organizations to human rights groups, who seek to influence individual policies as well as the wider political agenda.
Finally, any understanding of democratic politics today requires consideration of the role of political communication. The mass media – television, newspapers, radio and, increasingly, the internet – act as a forum in which the political agenda is set and policy issues are framed. The media do not form a neutral channel through which pre-formed opinions are communicated back and forth between politicians and voters. Even when not explicitly partisan, the media have their own values, styles and formats, which affect how and indeed what issues are presented. An important power of the mass media, if one that is hard to measure, lies in their ability to politicize certain issues while depoliticizing others, and to frame them in ways that make some positions appear more legitimate or feasible than others. This is especially relevant for debates about immigration, which are often characterized by uncertainty about the actual impacts of migration flows and are therefore particularly susceptible to claims and counter-claims that are not easily verified or refuted. Moreover, certain ‘impacts’ are on intangibles such as national identity and culture, where it is difficult to identify objective evidence to support or refute different positions.
In summary, it is through the cut and thrust of democratic politics that public perceptions of immigration are shaped, party strategies forged and government policies made. Thus immigration policies cannot plausibly be understood as functional outcomes of economic or demographic facts; they are rather the products of sometimes intense political conflict in which numerous interested parties attempt to shape the agenda and influence public perceptions. To say that ‘politics matters’ (Bale 2008) for immigration policymaking means that public attitudes towards immigration and immigrants matter, how those attitudes are or are not mobilized matters, and how immigration is depicted in and through the mass media matters.
The liberal state as a constitutional state
A constitutional state is a ‘state of laws’ or Rechtsstaat, in which the authority of government is derived from and limited by law. A constitutional state has at least three distinctive features (Rawls 2007: 85). First, a constitution defines the institutional architecture of the system of government. As the word suggests, this constitutes government by setting out the roles and powers of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary and defining the limits of those powers. These rules are usually written down in a single document or code, such as the United States Constitution or the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz), and even in a country such as the United Kingdom, which famously lacks a codified constitution, there is still a body of statutes, court rulings and customs which can be referred to as its constitution. Second, a constitution typically spells out the basic rights of citizens, including rights to due process, habeas corpus, and freedoms of speech, religion and assembly. Third, since constitutions require interpretation and application to specific cases (to adjudicate whether a given law or government action violates a constitutional rule or right), some form of judicial review is central to constitutional states. This implies a system of courts empowered to strike down laws or actions that are incompatible with the constitution.
These three features – a codified constitution, rights and judicial review – limit the powers of government and ground government legitimacy in the observation of those limits. As John Rawls, the leading liberal philosopher of the twentieth century, put it, in a constitutional state ‘political power is legitimate only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution’ (Rawls 2001: 41). It is important to recognize that this constitutional foundation of the liberal state can, and often does, come into conflict with majoritarian decision-making. Indeed, one of the main points of constitutionalism is to limit the permissible outcomes of majoritarian processes. As Rawls puts it, a ‘constitution should put certain fundamental rights and liberties beyond the reach of the legislative majorities of ordinary … politics’ (Rawls 2007: 4–5). Constitutions are not beyond the reach of democratic politics – since they can typically be amended through special procedures involving referendums, super-majorities or consensus across the various branches and levels of government – but they set the parameters of everyday politics.
These constitutional protections are founded upon core liberal principles, including individual freedom, equal treatment and human rights. These are universalistic principles in that they are intended to apply to all persons, not just to persons belonging to this or that group. This is most clear in the case of human rights, which by definition are rights universally held by humans qua humans. Likewise, a liberal state should uphold the principles of individual freedom and equal treatment of all persons within its jurisdiction – certainly of all citizens and, crucially for the subject of this book, also in most respects of immigrants and legal aliens. A state cannot be considered liberal if it systematically discriminates between persons on the basis of sex, ethnicity or sexuality; nor is it a liberal state if it seeks to prevent the practice of some religions or belief systems (what liberal philosophers call ‘conceptions of the good’). These norms are the essence of liberalism and they act as a kind of moral baseline: equal treatment is the default setting, and divergence requires special justification, otherwise a state loses its liberal credentials.
Universalistic discourses of human rights and the legal process are sources of expansion and inclusion in liberal states’ immigration policies: expansionary in the sense that government attempts to restrict so-called unwanted migration flows have been constrained through legal advocacy in the courts; inclusionary in the sense that the rights of immigrants have been promoted through appeal to universalistic principles of equality and non-discrimination (Guiraudon 2000; Gurowitz 1999; Joppke 1998). As one of the leading proponents of this view, Christian Joppke, puts it, liberal state sovereignty is ‘self-limited’ (Joppke 1998: 271–2), and these limits become especially visible when the state attempts to deploy its coercive powers, as is often the case in immigration control. This is not to say that coercion is absent from liberal states – far from it – but rather that the institutions and ideals of liberal constitutionalism provide a resource with which coercive practices can be contested and sometimes delimited.
The liberal state as a nation-state
The third facet of contemporary liberal statehood that is fundamental to understanding immigration is the idea of nationhood. According to the political theorist David Miller, nationhood has five key aspects:
Nations are, to use Benedict Anderson's (1991) famous phrase, ‘imagined communities’ – groups of people who recognize one another and believe that they share a common history, culture and territory. In a nation-state, this imagined community is the foundation of the apparatus of government: the state is seen as a political expression of the nation, which confers authority upon it. As Miller puts it, nations are regarded as ‘active political agents, the bearers of the ultimate powers of sovereignty’, and the state's ‘institutions and policies could be seen as somehow expressing a popular or national will’ (Miller 1997: 31).
A profound tension exists between the liberal universalism discussed in the previous section and the nationalist commitment to the construction and maintenance of a particular national identity. Nations cannot be distinguished from one another by universal principles, as by definition these principles refuse distinctions based on culture, ethnicity, and so on. Yet the construction and maintenance of national identity require that distinctions are made between human beings on the basis of particular attributes, such as place of birth, ancestry, language, and so on. Thus liberal nation-states are committed to universalism and at the same time dependent upon particularistic ideas of community and belonging. Moreover, the governments of liberal states are not – indeed, they arguably cannot be – impartial bystanders in the emergence and maintenance of national identity. As the political philosopher Will Kymlicka has argued, in liberal and non-liberal nation-states alike, ‘government decisions on languages, internal boundaries, public holidays, and state symbols unavoidably involve recognizing, accommodating, and supporting the needs and identities of particular ethnic and national groups. The state unavoidably promotes certain cultural identities, and thereby disadvantages others’ (Kymlicka 1995: 46).
This has a number of implications for the politics of immigration. Historically, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, immigration was central to nation-building in many of the states that are today regarded as liberal, such as the settler states of North America and Oceania. During the first half of the twentieth century in particular, these states used immigration policy as a tool to populate their nations by selecting newcomers on the basis of national or ethnic origin. In 1924, for example, the United States established the National Origins Quota system, which restricted ‘undesirable’ immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and prohibited Asian immigrants altogether (King 2000; Zolberg 2006: 243–92); while from 1901 to 1973 the Australian government privileged white European settlement through its White Australia policy (Jupp 2007: 6–13). Over the course of the twentieth century the ability of states to ‘select by origin’ (Joppke 2005) came under increasing pressure, and since the 1960s the selection of immigrants on the basis of ascriptive criteria such as nationality or ethnicity has given way to selection according to other criteria, especially human capital. Nevertheless, several liberal states continue with ‘ethnic migration policies’ in one form or another, and, for those that do not, the history of nation-building through ethnically selective immigration policies still shapes the cultural and ethnic make-up of their societies today.
Moreover, it would be a serious mistake to think that the importance of nationhood for immigration is consigned to the past. Current debates about the impact of immigration on the societies and cultures of receiving countries, as well as the appropriate policy responses to these impacts, are profoundly shaped by ideas about national identity. This is especially true in the case of immigrant cultural integration, an issue that unavoidably invokes ideas about national culture – what it is that immigrants are supposed to integrate into. In Europe, this can be seen in controversies surrounding multiculturalism, debates about cultural integration tests, the prohibition of the Muslim veil (in France), bans on the construction of minarets (in Switzerland), and debates about free speech in multicultural societies (most famously, the Danish cartoon controversy) – all issues where national identity lies just beneath the surface, and sometimes becomes quite explicit, as for example when integration tests are designed to assess knowledge of national culture or values.
In the self-defined ‘nations of immigrants’, similar heated debates have occurred, especially since the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s diversified the national, ethnic and cultural background of immigrants. In the United States, conservatives have alleged that Latino immigration is dividing the American nation into two cultures, creating a ‘crisis of national identity’ (Huntington 2004: 3), while in Australia nationalist opposition to Asian immigration and multiculturalism developed during the 1980s and 1990s. These and other examples of the nativist backlash are not new, as throughout history immigration has been depicted by opponents as a threat to the national culture. What contemporary nativism does show is that claims about how the nation-state is in supposed decline in the face of post- or transnational identities are at best premature. From the ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995) of flag-waving and support for national sports teams to the mobilization of national symbols for explicitly xenophobic ends, the power of national identity remains potent. Nationality is an important part of many citizens’ identity, and one that bears directly on their attitudes towards immigration.
The liberal state as a capitalist state
Contemporary liberal states are capitalist states, and they are part of regional and global capitalist formations.2 Liberal states are all mixed economies, in which private ownership and market exchange co-exist with government regulation and the public provision of some infrastructure and services. There is of course considerable variation in the institutions of capitalism in different countries, as analysed in the literature on ‘varieties of capitalism’ (see, e.g., Hall and Soskice 2001). For example, while the United States and Germany are both capitalist economies, there is substantial variation between them in terms of their institutions and regulatory regimes; the former is a typical ‘liberal market economy’, the latter a typical ‘coordinated market economy’ (see ibid.: 19–20). The different varieties of capitalism found across liberal states are highly consequential for the kinds of immigration regimes they adopt. As we will see, variation in immigration policies can partly be explained by differences in systems of political economy, especially industrial relations and labour market structures, and the different constellations of interests that are associated with these systems. Certainly, cross-national variation in the role of business and organized labour, and the interaction of these actors with state institutions, is crucial to understanding variation in immigration policies. This notwithstanding, across all liberal states the importance of a capitalist political economy for immigration policies is clear.
Indeed, immigration has become integral to advanced capitalist economies. Over thirty years ago, Gary Freeman observed that migrant labour was ‘not merely a temporary convenience or necessity, but a structural requirement of advanced capitalism’ (Freeman 1979: 3). At this time, interest in labour migrants was concentrated mainly in unskilled Fordist manufacturing positions and some primary sectors. Today, Freeman's claim is even truer than it was thirty years ago, but with the major difference that today's migrant workers fill skills gaps and address labour shortages across the labour market. At the top end of the labour market, there is growing competition between liberal states to attract highly skilled mobile labour in sectors such as IT and financial services, while, in lower-wage sectors, migrant workers often fill jobs that the relatively affluent and educated indigenous populations are reluctant to do, the so-called 3D jobs that are dirty, dangerous or degrading. According to the dual labour market hypothesis (Piore 1979: 35–43), the organization of capitalist economies creates a permanent low-skill, low-pay secondary tier that requires migrant labour.
Given that this demand for migrant labour is endemic to advanced capitalist economies, it is not surprising that ‘migration management’ has become an increasingly explicit part of liberal states’ accumulation strategies. As Georg Menz describes it, ‘an economistic fixation with migration as a constituent factor in ensuring continued patterns in accumulation and surplus extraction has spawned an obsession with managing migration’ (Menz 2009: 30). This obsession is to a large extent acceptance of an unavoidable reality. Governments have little choice but to accept greater flows of people across their borders on account of the way in which the regional and global integration of markets for goods, services and capital often go hand in hand with increased flows of people (Hollifield 2004). To give just one example, foreign direct investment in the form of large multinational firms siting offices and factories in a given country inevitably generates flows of intra-corporate transferees. Thus, if states want to promote trade and investment, they must accept more migration. Advanced capitalist states cannot afford – literally as well as metaphorically – not to solicit immigrants. The problem here, hinted at above and explored more fully in chapter 2, is that, while it may be unavoidable for advanced capitalist economies, immigration is not popular with voters. This creates a dilemma for governments. On the one hand, they must respond to the demands of employers for migrant labour; on the other, they must address popular scepticism towards immigration, mobilized in some countries by anti-immigrant parties. This is just one of the cross-cutting pressures that lead governments to welcome some immigrants with open arms while shunning others.
Liberal Paradoxes
The different imperatives associated with representative democracy, constitutionalism, nationhood and capitalist accumulation are all essential to understanding how immigration is governed in contemporary liberal states. The existing literature tends to focus on how one of these aspects impacts on immigration policy, often on a particular sub-field, without considering their interactions across the wider field. Thus political economists have made important contributions to our understanding of labour migration (e.g., Caviedes 2010; Cerna 2009; Freeman 1995, 2006; Hollifield 1992; Menz 2009); institutionalist scholars have shown how liberal norms, courts and judiciaries facilitate asylum and family migration in the face of executive opposition (e.g., Guiraudon 2000; Guiraudon and Joppke 2001; Guiraudon and Lahav 2000; Joppke 1998) and how norms are mobilized to constrain coercive policies (e.g., Ellermann 2005, 2009; Gibney and Hansen 2003); party politics scholars have analysed how both mainstream and extreme parties mobilize on the immigration issue (e.g., Bale 2003, 2008; Bale et al. 2010; Carter 2005; Mudde 2007; Norris 2005; Schain 2006; Van der Brug et al. 2005); public opinion researchers have examined the drivers of anti-immigrant sentiment (e.g., Citrin et al. 1997; Ivarsflaten 2005; McLaren and Johnson 2007; Sides and Citrin 2007); and researchers of national identity have explored the interaction of immigration and nation-building (e.g., Fitzgerald 1996; King 2000; Zolberg 2006). Yet few studies have sought to examine how these factors interact to produce conflicting policy outputs.
The interaction of the four facets of liberal statehood will be explored further in the chapters to come, but for now it is already possible to observe that they pull in different directions. Two of them (representative politics and nationhood) tend towards a restrictive dynamic, whereas the other two (constitutionalism and capitalism) are associated with openness towards immigration. This gives an initial view of why there are both inclusionary and exclusionary aspects to immigration policies in liberal states. The fact that liberal states are neither entirely open nor entirely closed to immigration reflects these contrasting pressures and the conflicting interests – electoral, rights-based, economic and cultural – that influence who is admitted and who excluded, and on what terms.
It is these conflicting dynamics that lie behind the ‘liberal paradox’ of immigration (Hollifield 1992: 3ff). For, while some defining institutions and ideas of liberal states generate demands for restrictions on immigration, leading to practices that may even be deemed illiberal, others generate pressures to admit and recruit immigrants. Thus the liberal state's Janus face towards immigration is not something that can be wished away, as both anti-immigrant populists and pro-immigrant campaigners are wont to do. Liberal states are unavoidably characterized by degrees of openness towards some kinds of immigration and degrees of closure towards others. The question then becomes one of explaining the dynamics that shape these apparently paradoxical tendencies.
It is important to note that the fourfold framework outlined above is intended neither as a definition of the liberal state nor as a fully fledged theory of immigration politics. A definition of the liberal state is beyond the scope of this book. The four facets are proposed not as an exhaustive definition but rather as empirically observable commonalities of the major immigrant destination states that are widely labelled as liberal. The fourfold framework also does not provide a theory that could predict outcomes in specific cases. By setting out four facets of the liberal state, the aim is rather to provide a framework for analysis, which can be used to examine both similarities and differences between liberal states. Yet while these facets cannot explain outcomes in particular cases, insofar as they are common to liberal states the dynamics that they generate should be present to some degree in most cases. The significance of each facet for immigration policy will depend both on the type of immigration in question and on the particular form of a given state's representative institutions, its constitution, conception of national identity and economic structures.
It is also important to distinguish between different types of immigration – some of which are ‘wanted’, others ‘unwanted’. Labour, family, humanitarian and irregular immigration are all associated with distinct patterns of policymaking in which different political dynamics are at play. For example, lobbying by business plays a more important role in labour migration policy than asylum policy. This can be further refined according to policy sub-type – for example, the politics of immigration policy vis-à-vis the highly skilled can be distinguished from that concerning temporary low-skilled workers. On the other hand, it is necessary to examine the specificity of each facet in a given country (for example, the type of government or the content of national identity) and the interrelations between these various elements (for example, to what extent the executive is subject to constitutional constraints). Thus the framework outlined in this chapter is entirely consistent with in-country variation between different immigration policy domains, as well as cross-national variation between liberal states; indeed, it is intended to help understand that variation.
Plan of the Book
The next two chapters of the book elaborate on the ideas sketched above to demonstrate how the four facets of the liberal state generate conflicting dynamics of openness and closure. Chapter 2 focuses on dynamics of closure. A consideration of public opinion, party politics and political discourse about immigration in the major destination countries of Europe, North America and Oceania shows that, with few exceptions, representative politics creates demands for restrictive policies. The restrictionist tenor of representative politics leaves us with a puzzle to be explained. Why does restrictionist public opinion and political rhetoric not translate into equally restrictionist policies? Why is there an apparent gap between what the public want and politicians promise, on the one hand, and what governments actually do, on the other?
Chapter 3 picks up this question by exploring how dynamics of openness are embedded in liberal states. It first considers arguments that seek to explain the gap in terms of a loss of state control over migration flows. These arguments are shown to be overstated. Rather, it is argued that dynamics internal to liberal states help to explain why restrictive policy inputs do not (always) translate into restrictive policy outputs. Two key sources of openness are examined: capitalist political economy and constitutionalism. A third factor, historical path dependence, is also shown to play a role. Again, these arguments are illustrated with reference to the major immigrant-receiving countries of Europe, North America and Oceania.
The rest of the chapters trace the implications of these conflicting dynamics of openness and closure for immigration, citizenship and integration policies. Chapter 4 outlines how contemporary states seek to manage migration – what policies and instruments they develop and why. The chapter maps out the main immigration sub-fields – labour migration, asylum, family migration and irregular migration – and compares policies in these areas across liberal states. While there is a generalized political demand for governments to adopt more restrictive approaches towards immigration, the chapter shows how this is more readily translated into policy in some areas than others.
Chapter 5 considers the international governance of migration. It reviews the range of institutions and processes that have been established on a bilateral, regional and international scale. While there is a growing amount of international cooperation on migration, there is a dearth of multilateral initiatives in comparison with other global issues such as trade or finance. States jealously guard their prerogative to set the number and type of immigrants that they admit to their territories. Compounding this, conflicts of interest between Northern and Southern countries make formal global agreements all but impossible. Instead the chapter shows how states have sought to develop a limited number of formal agreements on a largely bilateral basis, but have mostly pursued informal modes of cooperation on a regional basis. Even in the European Union, which has by far the most developed supranational migration policy regime, nation-states retain considerable powers to regulate immigration.
Chapters 6 and 7 consider citizenship and integration policies respectively. Chapter 6 shows that immigration to liberal states has created pressures to liberalize citizenship laws, while at the same time leading to a ‘revaluation’ of citizenship and naturalization procedures. Contra post-nationalists, the acquisition of national citizenship continues to matter, and citizenship policy has become increasingly contested in recent years. While liberal norms undoubtedly generate an inclusionary logic, when citizenship is politicized the effect is often to retard or even roll back liberalization. Similar dynamics can be identified in political debates about immigrant integration. Chapter 7 first considers the inherent complexity of integration in a liberal context, in terms of both the differentiated and self-limited nature of liberal societies and the diversity and multidimensionality of immigrant integration processes. The literature on immigrant integration has seldom paid sufficient attention to this complexity, while the political debate has increasingly fixated on cultural integration to the detriment of other arguably more important dimensions, especially economic integration. The chapter argues that anxieties about national identity in an era of globalization, compounded by concerns about Muslims since 9/11, underlie the focus on culture. In response, especially in Europe, governments have denounced multiculturalism and promoted new civic integration policies based on what the British prime minister called ‘muscular liberalism’. The chapter argues that these policies are latter-day nation-building instruments, albeit nation-building in a liberal register.
Chapter 8 revisits the four facets outlined above and, in light of the intervening chapters, considers why the conflicting imperatives they generate are difficult or even impossible for governments to reconcile. Immigration, it is argued, reveals deep contradictions at the heart of the liberal state.
Notes
1 Though note that migration is not the same as mobility. Entry or exit for the purposes of a short visit, say a business trip or tourism, is not normally classified as migration. The standard UN definition of an international migrant is someone who is outside their country of citizenship or birth for a year or more.
2 The relationship between liberalism and capitalism, unlike that between liberalism and democracy and constitutionalism, but like that between liberalism and nationhood, is contingent. On the one hand, some argue that liberalism does not necessitate capitalism (e.g., the later Rawls); on the other hand, it is clear that many countries with capitalist economic systems are not liberal. For the purposes of this book I make no theoretical claim about the nature of the relationship between liberalism and capitalism. Rather, the discussion is based on the empirical observation that all contemporary states commonly defined as liberal have some form of capitalist economic system.
CHAPTER TWO
The Politics of Closure
The politics of immigration in liberal states is characterized by both exclusionary and inclusionary dynamics. Governments must attempt to reconcile demands to control the number and rights of immigrants entering their territory, as well as demands for more open, inclusive policies. The following two chapters consider each side of this equation, starting with the politics of closure. Where do demands to restrict immigration come from? This chapter argues that democratic politics is the main source of these demands. It shows how popular (and populist) attitudes and party competition generate substantial pressure for governments to talk and act tough on immigration. These elements of representative democracy are intertwined with the nationhood of states because collective mobilization on immigration often appeals to national identity and presents immigration as a threat to that identity.
Race, Nation and the Immigrant Threat
The idea that immigration poses some kind of threat to the nation has a long history (Lucassen
