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part iv IMMIGRANTS’ NATIONAL POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES We turn next to the national level. The interest groups, electoral system, political party incentives, statutory and constitutional structures, and cultural traditions of a country all emerge as critical influences on immigrants’ political incorporation. Both immigrants and native-born political actors have an array of choices to make and strategies to consider. Nevertheless, as at the local level, elites who support immigration and immigrants’ inclusion lack a free hand to foster their goals. They are constrained not only by deeply embedded laws and institutions but also by a fluctuating and occasionally uncontrollable hostility to immigrants that emerges from an interaction between an anxious or nativist public and political actors with their own agenda. Christian Joppke and Jan Willem Duyvendak, Trees Pels, and Rally Rijkschroeff present a paired set of chapters that examine, from contrasting vantage points, the relationship between the willingness of states to accommodate distinct immigrant cultures and immigrants’ socioeconomic success. Not surprisingly, given their topic, both chapters discuss symbolic or literal exclusion as well as integration. In chapter 8, Joppke shows how France and Germany have shied away from a formal embrace of multiculturalism, choosing instead state neutrality among cultural practices or a more assertive national particularism. Joppke argues that these states reject multiculturalism for two reasons: multicultural policies have demonstrably failed to bring about immigrants’ economic integration, and in a post–September 11 world, elites are more strongly asserting liberal values and seeking to imbue immigrants with them. On balance, Joppke endorses the rejection of state-sponsored multiculturalism . Nevertheless, he cautions that its abandonment risks promoting immigrant disincorporation , encouraging young Muslims to identify with a transnational Islamic movement at the expense of engagement with their country of residence. In chapter 9, Duyvendak, Pels, and Rijkschroeff take direct issue with Joppke’s claim that states determine their cultural accommodation policies in light of their success at achieving economic incorporation. They insist that immigrants were, 112 Immigrants’ National Political Opportunity Structures in fact, making economic and educational progress under the recently eliminated Dutch policy of at least partial multiculturalism. In these authors’ view, the Dutch abandoned the policy not because it ostensibly failed but mainly because their highly progressive monoculturalism was, in fact, intolerant of genuine cultural pluralism. Duyvendak, Pels, and Rijkschroeff share Joppke’s concern that, although the abandonment of multiculturalism might help integrate some immigrants, it is likely to push others even farther from the mainstream, with harmful impact on themselves and possibly on their state. In chapter 10, Michael Minkenberg examines political movements that genuinely do seek to push immigrants out of the mainstream (albeit not into religious or political radicalism). He shows that since the 1970s, politicians and state actors in several European countries have responded to the growing organizational strength of radical right-wing, anti-immigrant elements by adopting and legitimizing some of their demands. In turn, some parties of the new radical right have developed a much more sophisticated and appealing argument by “replacing attacks on the democratic order as a whole with a mobilization of populist and ethnocentric campaigns to foster a rightist, value-based, New Politics cleavage.” Minkenberg provides an elegant analysis of the nativist right in six European states by analyzing the recent history of each in terms of three elements:“the organizational strength and party and nonparty forms of the radical right, its ability to mobilize support, and its capacity to force a response from and recalibration of the larger political environment.” The result is a frightening portrayal of increasing xenophobic violence and political influence, with some movement into policy responsiveness. The United States and Canada, Joppke indicates, have done better than European states in keeping Muslim immigrants from being lured into radical movements by including them in higher education and the economy. Peter Schuck concurs. More than any other author in Bringing Outsiders In, Schuck offers, in chapter 11, a prescription for how states should incorporate their immigrants. He comes closer to Joppke than to Duyvendak, Pels, and Rijkschroeff in his attitude toward multiculturalism : a state has a legitimate interest in maintaining its national culture and thus cannot make ethnic and cultural difference a public goal. It should instead be “liberal” (in Tariq Modood’s sense of the term; see chap. 15 in this volume). That is, a state should protect privately expressed cultural diversities from discrimination and monopoly, and should import diversity through its immigration policy. But it should not take a more active role such as mandating, certifying, or...

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