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297 chapter nineteen Understanding Immigrant Political Incorporation through Comparison Jennifer L. Hochschild and John H. Mollenkopf About 200 million individuals, approximately 3 percent of the world population , live outside the country where they were born. Over 100 million migrants live in the more developed regions of the world, including 9 million in Northern Europe , 22 million in Western Europe, 6 million in Canada, and 38 million in the United States. Proportionally, 9 percent of the residents of Northern Europe, 12 percent of those in Western Europe, 19 percent of those in Canada, and 13 percent of residents of the United States are immigrants (United Nations 2006). (These figures include refugees displaced by conflict as well as possibly short-term economic migrants.) If we include their children born in these host countries (the second generation), the figures are roughly twice as high. The global number of migrants more than doubled between 1970 and 2002 and continues to rise (United Nations 2002).As international migration flows increase, so do the benefits and complexities for governments, native populations, and migrants themselves. The political puzzles generated by high levels of immigration may be even more difficult to solve than the economic, cultural, and security puzzles. At any rate, they must take priority because economic, cultural, and security policies cannot be promulgated and implemented unless sufficient political forces are mustered. Immigrants should also make politics a priority (although they usually do not). After all, immigrants will be successfully incorporated into their host countries only after they have enough involvement and influence in decision making that they can help shape relevant policies and feel as though they are actors, not just acted upon. So politics matters—but, for reasons discussed in this book, even supporters of incorporation, in widely different countries, find it hard to bring outsiders in satisfactorily. Western liberal democracies enthusiastically promote the free or only slightly restrictedmovementof information,capital,andgoodsandservices—butnotof people. Membership is simply too important for any government to relinquish control over who leaves and (especially) enters its territory. Clearly, control is never perfect, the composition of the population of a country is never ideal, and any sort of immigrant 298 Jennifer L. Hochschild and John H. Mollenkopf population will bring both benefits and costs. But every competent and rational state will seek to control its borders, attain the right balance of residents’ skills and loyalties , and maximize the benefits of immigration while minimizing its costs. The systematic comparison of immigrants’ political incorporation is just beginning , in part because the direct involvement of recent immigrants in Western European and United States politics is itself just beginning. Nevertheless, we can integrate the chapters in this volume by comparing cases across several dimensions. We begin by focusing on the basic comparison between North America and Western Europe. Next we identify themes shared across the chapters as well as some deep disagreements among the authors. We conclude by identifying political and policy dilemmas, all of which need more attention from both scholars and activists. Historical Trajectories of Immigration on Both Sides of the Atlantic Despite variations among histories and political dynamics of host countries and despite differences among immigrants themselves, actors on both sides of the Atlantic will need to address similar political and policy dilemmas over the next few decades. Let us consider first the considerable differences between North American and European immigration and then the even more substantial similarities. Differences The two continents initially appear to be more unlike than like in their relationship to immigration. Canada and the United States both conceive of themselves as nations of immigrants. Although the United States was built partly by excluding some (Smith 1997), it was also built by including many others, particularly the descendents of white European immigrants. For example, immigrants made up about one-quarter of the Northern army in the Civil War, contributing vitally to its victory. Conversely, European nation-building has often focused on erecting a political boundary around a settled group defined as a nationality through historical, cultural, and geographical terms. In short, the United States and Canada are immigrant societies, whereas the Western European states are societies with immigrants (the analogy is to Ira Berlin’s (2000) distinction between “slave societies” and “societies with slaves”). Both self-images are too simple, of course. In the North American cases, the conception of a country of immigrants ignores the millions of Indians who already lived in what Europeans labeled America, the hundreds of thousands of Africans brought as slaves, the thousands...

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