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3 chapter one Setting the Context John H. Mollenkopf and Jennifer L. Hochschild Over the last six decades, millions of immigrants have arrived in the wealthy democracies of Western Europe and North America. Despite increasing restrictions, the volume of arrivals remained high as families reunite, asylum seekers find safe havens , undocumented workers cross borders, and residents of the new accession states of the European Union travel west. The current economic crisis may slow these flows, but they will resume with recovery. Immigrants come from many different countries and have diverse motives: finding economic opportunity, escaping political conflict , and following kinship networks. Groups concentrate in specific places: Mexicans in California, Cubans in Florida, Turks in Germany, South Asians in England, West Indians in Canada, and Moroccans in France. Although foreign nationals generally make up no more than one-eighth of the European populations, they and their children have a large presence in urban areas, sometimes a majority. According to a recent projection, immigrants and their children are expected to account for 82 percent of the population growth in the United States between 2005 and 2050 (Passell and Cohn 2008). Similarly, Eurostat reports that fertility rates are well below replacement levels in the European Union (Giannakouris 2008) so immigrants and their children will soon be a disproportionate share of young and working-age EU residents. Although the term assimilation has fallen further out of favor in Europe than in the United States, native-born elites and wider public opinion in both settings nonetheless want immigrants to become productive members of their societies.1 However, North America and Western Europe both face great challenges in achieving the cultural, economic, social, and political incorporation of the new populations. On the one side, they have afforded a mixed welcome to immigrants. Many Westerners appreciate immigrants’ hard work and contributions to the host country cultures, but many, perhaps more, also express great concern about how immigrants and native-born citizens will adjust to one another, what will happen as immigrants’ children grow to adulthood, and whether their country is changing too much or in the wrong direction (Fetzer 2000; Citrin and Sides 2006). On the other side, immigrants are also 4 John H. Mollenkopf and Jennifer L. Hochschild ambivalent; they remain attached to their home countries even as they form new lives and communities in host countries. They want their children to succeed in western jobs and cultures, but they are not at all sure that they want their children to become western. They want to influence host countries’ public policies, but they typically find host country political processes confusing, unappealing, and unwelcoming. The counterpoise between assimilation and exclusion deeply challenges liberal democracies (Hollifield, Hunt, and Tichenor 2008; Carens 2000). Their electoral systems deprive foreign-born noncitizen residents of the formal right to participate (although some allow voting in local elections), their cosmopolitan political cultures have difficulty dealing with illiberal beliefs, their national ideals and party systems may be predicated on refusing to recognize racial and ethnic differences, their avenues for economic mobility may be constrained by labor market regulations designed to protect native workers, and native-born citizens may not be happy about sustaining immigrants in generous social welfare systems. Immigrant political actors usually find local-level politics to be more vibrant, varied, and responsive—but that arena is contentious, often fractured, unable to deal with basic problems, and resourcepoor . In coming decades, North America and Western Europe will have to work out these tensions if they are to reach the goal consistent with their underlying political values—enabling new immigrants to become integral parts of their national political communities. This book seeks to make sense of these multiple and intersecting dimensions: assimilative and exclusionary trajectories, socioeconomic and political arenas, liberal democratic and nativist values, local and national venues, and immigrants’ agency and established structures. In this chapter, we first explicate the main reasons for and paths of immigration across Western Europe and North America and describe the current patterns of economic and social incorporation of immigrants and their children. We then turn to our chief concern—immigrants’ political incorporation in western liberal democracies. Pathways to Immigration After World War II, immigrants arrived in Western Europe and North America from nearby less-developed countries to perform jobs for which there were no ready takers among the native-born. Two patterns framed this migration: (1) the residents of former colonies moved to the metropoles of former colonizers and (2) temporary guest workers were recruited from poor...

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