Immigration Policy and Security

U.S., European, and Commonwealth Perspectives

Terri Givens, Gary P. Freeman, David L. Leal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781135853389
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Immigration policy in the United States, Europe, and the Commonwealth went under the microscope after the terror attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent events in London, Madrid, and elsewhere. We have since seen major changes in the bureaucracies that regulate immigration—but have those institutional dynamics led to significant changes in the way borders are controlled, the numbers of immigrants allowed to enter, or national asylum policies? This book examines a broad range of issues and cases in order to better understand if, how, and why immigration policies and practices have changed in these countries in response to the threat of terrorism. In a thorough analysis of border policies, the authors also address how an intensification of immigration politics can have severe consequences for the social and economic circumstances of national minorities of immigrant origin.

Part I
United States

1
Immigration and U.S. National Interests

Historical Cases and the Contemporary Debate

Marc R. Rosenblum

Introduction

In the half-decade since nineteen foreign-born men executed the dramatic and deadly terror attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. immigration policy mainly has been debated in terms of national security and controlling the U.S.–Mexican border. While the House and Senate took broadly different approaches to immigration reform during the 109th Congress, both chambers agreed on the need to increase border enforcement, with the House voting to add 700 miles of new U.S.–Mexico border fencing, and the Senate voting to add 370 miles of fencing and to construct a high-tech “virtual fence” along longer stretches of the border. President Bush’s May 2006 call to place National Guard troops on the border was also embraced by all sides in the debate, and an amendment endorsing their deployment was passed by unanimous consent on the Senate floor. Ultimately, when House and Senate members were unable to agree on anything else as the 109th Congress drew to a close, they still managed to pass the Secure Fence Act, authorizing 700 miles of fencing and other border infrastructure.

Yet a single-minded focus on the U.S.–Mexican border is a misguided approach to immigration policymaking. In short, migration control requires policies that extend beyond the border, both within the United States and abroad. More importantly, migration control is only one aspect of the national interest in U.S. immigration policy. The post-9/11 focus on “getting control of the border” distracts many policymakers from the broader set of costs and benefits associated with immigration.

This chapter explores the relationship between immigration and the national interest. The following section defines the U.S. national interest in immigration policy in terms of U.S. security, prosperity, and diplomacy. These encompassing interests often conflict with particularistic group pressures, so that immigration policy does not reliably reflect the national interest—a pattern confirmed by a historical review of U.S. immigration policy in the next section. The remainder of the chapter explores immigration and the national interest in the contemporary period: how has the national interest in immigration policy been shaped by the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks, and why did Congress fail to pass comprehensive immigration reform consistent with these goals during the 2005–6 and 2007 debates? I conclude by evaluating future prospects for reform.

Immigration and the National Interest

What is the U.S. national interest in migration and immigration policy? Immigration affects vital U.S. interests in three distinct areas. First, immigration control—maintaining authority over a state’s territory—is a basic element of national sovereignty. Yet immigration only threatens security in three circumstances. In the most extreme case, immigration may represent a form of low-intensity conquest, changing the demographic facts on the ground and potentially contributing to a broader assault on a host state’s territory. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has relied on immigrant settlements in the disputed region, for example, as did Morocco’s 1975 occupation of the Spanish Sahara (Teitelbaum 1984).

Immigration may also threaten security when the pace or specific circumstances of immigration destabilize or weaken the host state. Spillover conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the African Great Lakes region are important examples. A final security issue associated with immigration comes in the form of intentional threats by individual migrants or groups of migrants. Examples include imported revolutionary movements, such as the Cuba-led guerrilla campaigns in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, and “fifth-column” threats arising from first- or second-generation immigrants operating within host states, including the Spanish and British railway bombings in 2004 and 2005. Thus, while most migratory flows are not threatening to security, migration control becomes a legitimate security concern when unwanted immigration overlaps with or reinforces other security threats.

A second set of national interest considerations concerns the effect of migration on economic growth and prosperity. Any new labor inflow increases returns to capital investments, and liberal migration policies thus tend to promote growth, although they also exacerbate inequality (i.e., by shifting resources from owners of labor to owners of land and capital). Here, too, context matters. On the one hand, the overall economic benefits of immigration are a function of the scarcity of native labor, and thus the dependence of the host state on immigrant labor. In extreme cases, where immigration is the only possible source of needed economic inputs, immigration becomes a matter of basic economic security, an eventuality potentially looming for many industrialized states with aging populations and shrinking labor forces (McDonald and Kippen 2001).

On the other hand, the distributive effects of immigration are also sensitive to the skills of immigrants and natives. Where migrants possess similar skills as natives (i.e., migrants are “substitutes”), migration has a greater downward effect on wages. Where skill sets are complementary, as is typically the case with South–North flows, immigration has little or no depressive wage effect (Ottaviano and Peri 2005). Distributive effects also depend on migrants’ legal status: undocumented immigrants are more likely to be exploited and drive down wages, and they are less likely to pay their share of taxes.

Finally, while few question the right of sovereign states to set rules for entry, the subjects of immigration policy are inevitably the citizens of other states. Indeed, in many cases the stakes are highest for these countries of origin in two specific areas: economically, because these states have more at stake in gaining access to targeted labor markets, and socially, because immigration enforcement may involve the use of force against sending-state citizens. For these reasons, a third core interest in immigration policy is diplomatic.

In this case, it is important to distinguish between humanitarian (i.e., refugee and asylum) and non-humanitarian (i.e., family- and labor-based) immigration. With respect to the former, good diplomatic relations tend to discourage humanitarian admissions because the acknowledgment that individuals have legitimate humanitarian claims implicitly defines the country of origin as unable or unwilling to protect the human rights of its citizens. Conversely, accepting refugees and asylum applicants from a hostile regime may be an intentional diplomatic slap in the face, as well as an opportunity to import valuable human capital and country-specific knowledge about an adversary (Loescher and Scanlan 1986; Teitelbaum and Weiner 1995).¹ Non-humanitarian migration exhibits the opposite dynamic: diplomatic relations are enhanced by the family, commercial, and social linkages created by migration flows, but may be undermined by overly aggressive migration control efforts (Mitchell 1992; Rosenblum 2004a).

Thus, the United States has a national interest in controlling undocumented immigration, especially in the rare cases in which the specific conditions of undocumented migration threaten U.S. security. Immigration policy should also ensure that the number and type of immigrants entering the country promote economic growth without depressing wages. A final core interest in migration policy is the harmonization of migration and U.S. foreign policy goals—promoting legal migration from friendly regimes while remaining sensitive to the diplomatic costs and benefits of humanitarian admissions and migration enforcement strategies.

Yet even a cursory review of historical trends reveals that U.S. policy outcomes often fail to advance these goals. Rather, efforts to bend immigration policy to the national interest compete with particularistic policy demands originating at the party, sub-national (local and state), and sector- or class-specific levels. Moreover, economic, security, and diplomatic considerations may produce ambiguous policy demands as a function of the broader context in which policymaking occurs. Conversely, because immigrants congregate in geographically concentrated communities, and because interest groups directly impacted by the social and economic costs and benefits of immigration have intensely held preferences, particularistic group demands often overwhelm broader policy concerns.²

In addition, the national interest in migration policy also competes with normative and ideational policy demands centered on national identity and other cultural concerns. Whether or not “societal security” (Rudolph 2006) and cultural homogeneity (Huntington 2004) are legitimate policy goals, new migration inflows inevitably raise cultural anxiety within dominant ethnic groups. As a result, immigration has provoked populist backlashes within a wide range of host states during the last two decades (Kessler and Freeman 2005; Givens 2005; Reimers 1998).

Historical Review

The early American experience highlights the relationship among immigration, security, and prosperity. European settlers and their descendants clashed with Native Americans over scarce resources, and the colonists triumphed not simply through their superior force of arms, but also thanks to reinforcements in the form of additional migratory flows. Labor scarcity in the New World also placed an economic premium on additional migration—a fact that caused most settler states to promote immigration during the nineteenth century (Hatton & Williamson 1998). For these reasons, even though the earliest European Americans were xenophobic about “new” immigrants from Germany and Ireland (Fuchs 1990), the United States not only maintained a wide open federal immigration regime, but also organized a de facto immigrant integration system through the Homestead Act of 1862 and other policies to resettle immigrants in the U.S. interior.³

The closure of the American frontier in 1890, the emergence of labor-saving technology during the Industrial Revolution, and the economic disruption of World War One diminished the economic benefits of an easy labor policy. At the same time, the 1901 assassination of William McKinley by a second-generation Polish immigrant, along with foreign-led opposition to the U.S. entry into World War One, raised doubts about the loyalty of new immigrants and fears that the United States would fall victim to the violence erupting throughout Europe. Thus, while falling wages and cultural anxiety about the new immigrant demographics contributed to a wave of restrictionist legislation around the turn of the last century, the shifting national interest in immigration was also influential.⁴ Similarly, even as Congress overrode presidential vetoes to pass restrictionist legislation during the 1910s, diplomat...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I United States
• Part II Europe
• Part III The Commonwealth Perspective
• Notes on Contributors
• Index