Controlling Immigration

A Global Perspective, Third Edition

James Hollifield, Philip L. Martin, Pia Orrenius, James Hollifield, Philip L. Martin, Pia Orrenius

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780804787352
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The third edition of this major work provides a systematic, comparative assessment of the efforts of a selection of major countries, including the U.S., to deal with immigration and immigrant issues— paying particular attention to the ever-widening gap between their migration policy goals and outcomes.

Retaining its comprehensive coverage of nations built by immigrants and those with a more recent history of immigration, the new edition pays particular attention to the tensions created by post-colonial immigration, and explores how countries have attempted to control the entry and employment of legal and illegal Third World immigrants, how they cope with the social and economic integration of these new waves of immigrants, and how they deal with forced migration.

I

INTRODUCTION

1

THE DILEMMAS OF IMMIGRATION CONTROL

James F. Hollifield, Philip L. Martin, and Pia M. Orrenius

All countries in the world today face the reality of controlling or managing migration. The dilemmas of control are especially acute in the advanced industrial democracies, where economic pressures push for openness to migration while political, legal, and security concerns argue for greater control. How do the major immigrant-receiving countries cope with this dilemma?

This book is a systematic, comparative study of immigration policy in fifteen industrialized democracies and the European Union (EU): the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, three Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway), Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Korea. It has two central, interrelated theses. The first, which we call the “convergence hypothesis,” is that there is growing similarity among industrialized, labor-importing countries in terms of (1) the policy instruments chosen for controlling immigration, especially unauthorized immigration and refugee flows; (2) the results or efficacy of immigration control measures; (3) integration policies—that is, the measures adopted by labor-importing countries that affect the rate and extent of social, economic, and political integration among immigrants who become long-term residents; and (4) general-public reaction to current immigrant flows and assessment of government efforts to control or manage them.

Our second hypothesis is that the gap between the goals and results of national immigration policy (laws, regulations, executive actions, and court rulings, to name a few) is growing wider in the major industrial democracies, thus provoking greater public hostility toward immigrants in general (regardless of legal status) and putting pressure on political parties and government officials to adopt more restrictive policies. We refer to this as the “gap hypothesis” (see Hollifield 1986).

Beyond testing these two general hypotheses against the comparative evidence gathered in the fifteen countries and regions represented here, we seek to explain the efficacy of immigration control measures in today’s labor-importing countries in an era of globalization and unprecedented international labor mobility (Sassen 1988). In each of the in-depth country and regional profiles, the authors explain why certain immigration control measures were chosen (or not chosen) by that country or region and why these measures either succeeded or failed to achieve their stated objectives. Each chapter is followed by one or two commentaries that offer a critique of its principal findings, supplementing them and, in some cases, offering an alternative interpretation.

Our findings generally support the hypothesis of increased “convergence” among industrialized, labor-importing countries, along the lines described above, as well as the “gap hypothesis” emphasizing the divergence of immigration policy outputs and outcomes. Despite significant increases in immigration control efforts in most of the countries under study and the tightening of entry restrictions and monitoring of unauthorized immigrants already working in those countries, officials acknowledge that the challenge of managing migration is more difficult than ever and that they are less confident that governments can regulate immigration flows. In some countries and sectors, there is a structural element to employer demand for foreign workers, such as in agriculture, construction, health care, domestic help, and hospitality. That is, employers continue to hire foreign workers regardless of legal status and irrespective of the business cycle. If governments continue to find it hard to prevent the entry and employment of foreign labor from lower-wage countries, the gap between immigration policy goals and outcomes is likely to persist.

The country studies here highlight the administrative, political, legal, and economic difficulties of immigration enforcement in relatively open and pluralistic societies. Bureaucratic power in all of these countries is routinely open to contestation by a variety of social and economic groups, and reducing the “demand-pull” factors that attract migrants—shortages of manpower and human capital and demographic decline—is extremely difficult. Competing interests in pluralistic societies lead to policymaking gridlock that, in the face of ever-stronger economic incentives, permits immigration to continue in one form or another. Such policy paralysis sends mixed signals to prospective migrants in the labor-exporting countries, encouraging them to overcome additional obstacles placed in their path at borders (external controls) or in the workplace (internal controls). Moreover, amnesties for settled migrants create a potential moral hazard that makes prospective migrants more likely to risk crossing borders and working illegally.

On the other hand, industrialized countries cannot, at least in the short term, realistically hope to reduce the “supply-push” pressures in the principal labor-exporting countries—rapid population growth combined with low rates of economic growth and high unemployment, especially among the young—to which they are increasingly linked by globalization (Joppke 1998; Hollifield 2004). And severing the family- and employer-based networks that link high-emigration and labor-importing nations is becoming harder rather than easier. If demand-pull and supply-push forces, together with networks that link sending and receiving societies, are the necessary conditions for migration to occur, the granting of some kind of legal status (rights) to foreigners is the sufficient condition. These rights most often derive from domestic sources of law, especially constitutions, but migrants are increasingly protected by international law and human rights conventions. This is especially true in Europe (Joppke 2001; see also Chapter 14). Despite the rise of rights-based politics (Hollifield 1992, Hollifield and Wilson 2011) and regimes that check the action of states trying to control migration, in recent decades policies have increasingly targeted migrant rights (civil, social, and political) as a way of controlling immigration.

Legal and constitutional constraints notwithstanding, “fixing” immigration control systems that are buckling under the pressure of new waves of refugees and economic migrants has become a political imperative in most of the countries we have studied. The principal exceptions are Japan and South Korea, where the numbers of new immigrants are still relatively small, and Canada, where general-public hostility to immigration remains relatively low. The severe recession that began in 2008 has led to a stabilization of flows, especially in the United States, and the politics of immigration has shifted somewhat from control to integration of a large illegal population (Hollifield 2010). Integration dilemmas also are acute in Western Europe and the United States, Canada, and Australia—nations of immigrants—where sources of immigration have become much more diverse (Favell 1998; Bloemraad 2006; Schain 2012).

However, even in the de facto countries of immigration—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain, and the Scandinavian countries—where immigration is not part of the founding ideal as it is in the nations of immigrants, general publics and the politicians and political parties that respond to them are increasingly uneasy about the long-term implications of current immigration flows for maintenance of national culture, language, and identity. Debates over the integration of Muslim immigrants in largely Christian societies have been especially vociferous and divisive in Europe (Kepel 2012). Even if foreign workers and their dependents living in industrialized democracies are not illegal aliens (there are millions of settled, legally admitted foreign “guest workers” in European countries), they are often unwanted as a permanent component of the population for noneconomic reasons—specifically, low tolerance for cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity; fear of crime and terrorism; and overcrowding in major urban areas (Fetzer 2000; Sides and Citrin 2007; Brader, Valentino, and Suhay 2008).

Public hostility generates strong incentives for officials in labor-importing industrial democracies to redouble their efforts toward immigration control, by fine-tuning existing control measures like employer sanctions (internal control), investing more heavily in border enforcement (external control), and pursuing new experiments to restore at least the appearance of control (so-called trainee programs in Japan and South Korea). For this reason, the politics of immigration in many receiving countries has a strong symbolic dimension (Rudolph 2006); in addition to the wide gap between policy outputs and outcomes, we observe a similarly puzzling gap between public opinion, which wants immigration reduced, and liberal admissions policies(Freeman 1995; Sides and Citrin 2007). The more advanced agenda of anti-immigration and anti-immigrant forces in these countries today is (1) to curtail the access of illegal immigrants to tax-supported public services, including education and nonemergency healthcare, and roll back social rights in general; (2) to block any policies and programs that would accelerate the socioeconomic and cultural integration of settled immigrants and their offspring, opposing legalization programs and denying voting or political rights; and (3) to take steps to discourage permanent settlement, such as tightening citizenship requirements for legal permanent residents, denying citizenship to the native-born children of illegal immigrants, and generally limiting civil rights. It remains to be seen how much of this anti-immigration agenda can be translated into law and public policy in the labor-importing countries and, if so, whether such measures can serve as an effective deterrent to future unwanted migration.

IMMIGRATION CONTROL AND IMMIGRANT INTEGRATION

Immigration has become a central issue of politics and public policy in the advanced industrial democracies (Messina 2007). In Europe, immigration is already a driving factor in electoral politics (Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers 2002; Lahav 2004; Givens 2005), and it is becoming an increasingly potent electoral issue in the United States (at least in the five states with large immigrant populations; see Chapter 2). After decades of importing foreign labor as “guests,” many European nations are confronted with the challenge of assimilating large numbers of culturally different, permanent resident aliens and their offspring. In Japan and South Korea, the influx of foreign workers, eagerly sought by small and mediumsized labor-hungry employers, into racially and culturally homogeneous societies with large and growing demographic deficits looms as a volatile issue for national policy (see Chapter 13). In the United States, the fourth wave of largely Hispanic and Asian immigrants has provoked nativist reactions, especially at the state and local levels (Ramakrishnan 2005; Hollifield 2010), even though immigration does not have the political salience there that it does in other industrial democracies (Norris 2005).

In addition to its impact on domestic politics, the increasing international mobility of workers and their dependents has had a dramatic effect on international relations. The major labor-importing states have scrambled to find ways to consult with each other and coordinate policies for controlling migration, especially refugee flows (Betts 2011). This new dynamic is particularly evident in Europe, where the relaxation of internal borders (associated with the Dublin and Schengen processes and the drive for greater political and economic integration) is pushing states to seek common visa and asylum policies (Thielemann 2003; see also Chapter 14).

The end of the Cold War contributed to this sea change in international relations by increasing the movement of populations from east to west, without slowing or stopping south-to-north migration flows. As a policy issue, international migration has moved from the realm of “low politics” (i.e., problems of domestic governance, especially labor market and demographic policies) to the realm of “high politics” (i.e., problems affecting relations between states, including questions of war and peace). Haiti and the former Yugoslavia provide early examples of this phenomenon, and political instability—associated with war in South Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan) and upheavals in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, not to mention the so-called “Arab Spring” in the Middle East—has increased the propensity for migration from south to north. With the rise of terrorism in the first decade of the twenty-first century, many governments have recast migration as a problem of national security, and international organizations such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees have come under intense pressure to help states manage increasing flows (Greenhill 2010; Rudolph 2006; see also the commentary by Betts in Chapter 14).

Should we conclude that the increasing movement of people across national borders is primarily a function of changes in the international system? Clearly, there is a connection between structural changes in the international political economy and the increasing mobility of people (Sassen 1988; Hollifield 2000, 2004). However, we argue that endogenous factors are the key determinants. As much as the principal immigrant-receiving countries may wish to ignore or avoid dealing with the structural factors that drive the supply of and demand for foreign labor, they must eventually recognize that the “crisis of immigration control” that they are experiencing derives largely from changes occurring in the international political economy. For example, competition for the highly skilled (human capital) is increasingly fierce in a global labor market (Chiswick 2011), and the imbalance in global population growth, between the North and the South, is growing.

On the economic and demographic side of the equation, neoclassical “push-pull” arguments provide us with a simple and straightforward explanation for increases in immigration. Demand-pull in the US and European economies during the 1950s and 1960s was so great as to stimulate large-scale migrations from the poorer economies of the “periphery” (Mexico, Turkey, North Africa, etc.). These labor migrations were initiated and legitimized by the receiving states, in Western Europe through the so-called guest worker programs and in the United States through the Bracero Program of contract labor importation (1942–1964). But what started as an optimal movement of labor from south to north became, in the 1970s and 1980s, a sociopolitical liability as economic growth in Western Europe and North America slowed in the aftermath of the first big postwar recessions, which began with the first oil shock in 1973–1974 (Hollifield 1992).

Stopping immigration, however, even during a period of sharp economic contraction, proved exceedingly difficult, in part because of powerful underlying push-pull factors. Demand-pull migration had initiated processes that continued to have unanticipated consequences, from the micro level—employers wanting to retain their “guest workers” indefinitely—to the macro level—the expanding role of immigration in host-country population and labor force growth as well as the dependence of sending-country economies on multibillion-dollar migrant remittances (Hollifield, Orrenius, and Osang 2006). Moreover, supply-push migration reached new heights as the populations of peripheral countries like Turkey, Mexico, and Algeria grew at a very rapid pace even as their economies slowed as a result of the global recession. Migration networks developed during the years of expansionary immigration policies, helping to spread information about job opportunities, modes of entry, and residence in the receiving countries. These transnational social networ...