South America's Tri-Borders Region

Among the more salient paradoxes that characterize the early 21st century is the tension between an overwhelming tendency toward strengthened economic ties, economic integration, and liberalizing cross-border flows of capital and labor—all of which are known to increase aggregate social welfare—and the intensifying socio-political pressure to restrict the ingress of foreign workers who are perceived publicly as threats to the livelihood of homeland workers, if not as nuisances to public order, vectors for crime, carriers of disease, and worse.

Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective broadens our understanding of this paradox by analyzing the policies—both failed and inspired—of a cross section of Western European, North American, and Pacific nations that have attempted to address the challenge of immigration. Building upon its critically acclaimed first edition (1994), the volume features new essays that emerged from a research conference held at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies in San Diego in May 2002. These contributions provide a critical appraisal of the evolving policy responses of governments in the face of dramatic upsurges in immigration. In doing so, the authors retain and refine the two hypotheses presented in the first edition: that real outcomes frequently differ from the intended outcomes of policy and that immigration policies and social attitudes towards immigration have converged worldwide toward a common set of goals and attitudes over the past decade.

The dynamic debate over immigration is shaped by the demands of local industries and manufacturing lobbies desperate for lower-cost labor, by a shrinking middle class that feels threatened by a supposedly burgeoning immigrant labor pool and by the political strength of new right-wing radical political parties and their frequently demagogic leaders, who have been able to gain support and exert pressure by capitalizing on local discontent with an easy scapegoat: foreign workers. Well-meaning governments often damage their own best interests by implementing vague, contradictory or toothless policies, causing crises to escalate. By weaving together a useful introduction and eleven well-crafted country studies, the editors make sense of the rhetoric and political grandstanding. The authors have sharp eyes for political paradoxes, from the Spanish and Italian aversions to immigration in spite of their shrinking native populations and rising demand for low-cost immigrant labor, to the Japanese effort to maintain "racial homogeneity" at all costs, even economic. The analyses cut through the doublespeak of politicians—Italy's come to mind—who call for reforms to stem the tide of illegal immigrants while quietly catering to the needs of labor-intensive industries whose demand for low-cost labor has been rising for decades.

On the whole, the book reads easily and manages to maintain an informative tone without being either preachy or arcane. The editors have obviously striven to ensure the text is accessible even to those who are not immigration scholars—no mean feat for a subject all too frequently mired in the complexities of statistics or economic policy. This is certainly a major selling point. The chapters are further bolstered by short scholarly commentaries—some complementary and some that illuminate research gaps—all of which shed additional light on the immigration controversy and expand on themes presented elsewhere in the book.

The articles and commentaries identify the major questions of the immigration debate in the 21st century: how do nations balance their industries' need for cheap labor against the need to provide jobs for their own people; what rights should illegal immigrants possess; should they have the right to become full-fledged citizens after a certain time period; is it better to provide education for one's own citizens or to attract well-educated immigrants from other countries; how should nations handle asylum-seekers who threaten to overwhelm their legal systems; and how can states best manage population size when their native populations are dwindling? Since trade in many goods and services is essentially trade in the skills that...