Reconsidering the Domestic Causes of Immigration and Citizenship Policies

Is national control over immigration diminishing? Are domestic determinants or transnational influences propelling contemporary change in immigration and citizenship policies? Two central debates in immigration studies today revolve around the changing nature of national immigration and citizenship policies. The first focuses on the extent and causes of cross-national policy convergence in immigration and citizenship practices. Scholars debate whether domestic or transnational factors best explain the contemporary patterns of increasing convergence across states. The new trends have displaced the traditional landscape of national policy divergence. The second addresses the changed capacity of state sovereignty over issues of immigration flows, immigrant incorporation, and membership practices. Scholars debate whether national control over immigration has diminished in recent decades, or to the contrary, been reinforced. Two recent books, Fences and Neighbors by Jeannette Money and Immigration and the Nation-State by Christian Joppke, are very useful comparative studies and ultimately provocative contributions to these debates.

Money and Joppke both firmly stress the determinative importance of domestic factors in shaping national immigration policy. They each contend that national control over immigration is undiminished, and that transnational influences are overestimated. From this shared point of departure, both authors strive to identify domestic determinants that are comparable across dissimilar national contexts in order to illuminate the causes as well as the limits of cross-national convergence. Each author has chosen a set of three case studies that mix traditional settler countries with less traditional immigration countries, including examples where post-colonial immigration has been significant. Money’s case studies are Great Britain, France, and Australia, whereas Joppke examines the recent history of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.

Indeed, both scholars take Gary Freeman’s insight that the concentrated benefits and diffuse costs of immigration in liberal polities generally lead to client-based politics and liberal policies as an important point of departure, before proceeding to offer substantive corrections to his arguments. ¹ For her part, Money reconsiders the costs and benefits of immigration from a spatial perspective to demonstrate that the costs as well as benefits of immigration may be concentrated, leading to more restrictive policy outcomes. Joppke focuses on the applicability of a client-based model to European polities in order to highlight other domestic factors that may also explain expansive policy outcomes. Each of these approaches stands in sharp contrast to many recent immigration studies, which emphasize transnational influences and global economic determinants on the one hand, or particularistic national immigration histories and membership model cultures on the other. But there the similarities of the two studies end, and the authors’ respective agendas and frameworks diverge considerably.

Jeanette Money contends that geographically concentrated electoral pressures propel change in the measures determining immigration entry. In this narrowly focused study, she concentrates on only one strand of immigration control policy, namely, “state policies that define the permissible level of resident alien admissions.” The question driving the analysis in Fences and Neighbors appears straightforward: why, Money asks, do some countries with advanced market economies accept large numbers of foreigners while others are “less hospitable,” and what accounts for change in policies over time within countries? The book actually explains less the liberal immigration flow policies than the shift to more restrictive policies in each of the country case studies: Britain, France, and Australia. Choosing countries with very different immigration histories and policy institutions, Money seeks to identify common determinants found across these distinctive national contexts.

Her central insight rests on a reconsideration of the benefits and costs of immigration. While Freeman argued that immigration benefits generally are concentrated (in specific groups and sectors) and immigration costs usually are more diffuse, Money persuasively contends that we need to situate both the benefits and costs of immigration geographically. The key, according to Money, is to account for the differential effects of immigration on various regions...