Abstract
Controlling Immigration: A Comparative Perspective, edited by James Hollifield, Philip Martin, Pia Orrenius, and François Héran, is a remarkable resource for readers seeking to understand the politics of immigration in contemporary, rich, liberal democracies. This fourth edition of an anthology first published in 1994 has been fully updated since the 2014 edition and now includes studies of New Zealand, Greece, and Turkey, as well as chapters rewritten by new authors. Its 40 contributors would fill an international Rolodex of leading scholars in political science, demography, political sociology, and labor economics.
Three chapters treat “nations of immigrants”—settler colonial societies in which modern mass immigration is celebrated in the dominant political culture. The quintessential cases are the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “Countries of immigration” that have high levels of contemporary immigration, but which do not define themselves as foundationally immigrant, include France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Scandinavian countries. “Latecomers to immigration” have only received large numbers of immigrants since the 1980s. The chapters under this heading discuss Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, and Japan and South Korea. The European Union is wisely treated as a sui generis category and is the subject of its own chapter.
Each chapter has one or two commentaries, which vary in the extent to which they offer additional reflections on a case or sharply rebut the analysis in the preceding chapter. The inclusion of these critical commentaries is a hallmark of all four editions of the book and a model worthy of emulation in other anthologies. They clarify theoretical debates in a way that would make the text especially useful at the graduate level.
The 51-page introduction lays out the key theoretical concepts and offers a meaty overview. The formally enumerated explanations for immigration policies include four key factors of security, culture and ideology, economic interests, and rights. In practice, many of the chapters emphasize demographic factors as well. For purposes of course adoption, the introduction would pair nicely with any of the empirical chapters.
The main argument is that there is a “liberal paradox” that prevents liberal states from admitting fewer immigrants and more strictly controlling unauthorized migration, which is what most of the public prefers, according to surveys. As co-editor James Hollifield elaborates, “Economic pressures encourage governments to be open to migration, while political, legal, and security concerns argue for closure and control” (p. 3). On the other hand, rights-based laws and independent judiciaries at the national, supranational, and international levels constrain state efforts at closure in many contexts.
The “gap hypothesis” that has been the hallmark of Controlling Immigration since its first edition states that “the gap between the goals or outputs of immigration policy (laws, regulations, executive actions, and court rulings) and the results or outcomes of those policies in terms of unauthorized and unwanted migration is growing wider” (p. 3). The book states that the United States, with its large unauthorized immigrant population, is the leading example of the gap. Canada is a deviant case of a country with a relatively small gap that can be explained by its unusually friendly orientation toward immigration. This positive approach is explained by its sheltered geographic location, political institutions that encourage controlling immigration quietly through regulations, and a voting system that makes it risky for any party to alienate urban concentrations of immigrant constituents in single-member districts.
As Christian Joppke’s commentary points out, however, the gap between the stated intent of a policy and its implementation and outcomes is universal across domains. And it is difficult to establish that there is a gap between the actual intent of policymakers and outcomes once it is recognized that polices are usually negotiated bargains among many competing actors with different intentions.
The “convergence hypothesis” is that OECD member states are becoming more similar in their policies and public reactions. In my reading, there is more evidence of the convergence hypothesis than the gap hypothesis. Temporality is baked into the tripartite division of types of states. The examples of the latecomers are important for establishing the convergence thesis, in that older nations of immigrants and latecomers develop similar policies.
All the countries in the book are high-income democracies, except for upper-middle income and increasingly autocratic Turkey. The “comparative perspective” in the subtitle of Controlling Immigration does not include the countries that have the highest relative levels of foreign residents and extremely high levels of control over immigration, such as several of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. The scope conditions of the anthology are extraordinarily ambitious, but it is also important to recognize how case selection shapes the analysis. There is relatively little variation across the contemporary cases in their degree of wealth or liberalism, two factors that are causal drivers of the “liberal paradox.” This censoring makes it difficult to assess the relationship between liberalism and migration control politics and policies. There is some variation over time in transitioning to liberal democracy, a characteristic that is skillfully exploited by Erin Chung in her chapter on Japan and South Korea.
It is little wonder that parsimony eludes an effort to explain why, how, and with what consequences rich liberal democracies attempt to control immigration. This monumental work remains one of the best starting points to try to answer those vexing questions and to expand them to an even wider range of cases.