Abstract
With The Comparative Politics of Immigration: Policy Choices in Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States, Antje Ellermann has written a masterful account of immigration policy-making in advanced democracies. The book will be required reading for scholars across the social sciences who are keen to understand the intricate puzzle of when and why some countries move toward more restrictive immigration policies, while in other times and places immigration policy is liberalized. The book is theoretically rich and provides a framework that extends well beyond the four (albeit very important) case countries Ellermann studies. But it provides a no less rich empirical account of the politics of immigration policy-making in each of the case countries, across a number of pivotal moments in the last 75 years; and it will for this reason also serve as a useful reference, even as a set of standalone chapters, to anyone interested in how the immigration policy landscape has unfolded in these specific times and places.
Ellermann’s theoretical account begins with a relatively straightforward premise: that in different immigrant receiving countries and at different historical moments, immigration policy-makers experience widely varying degrees of insulation from external pressures, including most notably pressures from voters, from interest groups of various kinds, and internationally from sending and receiving states. Whereas public pressure generally tends to steer immigration policy reforms in a restrictionist direction, pressure from interest groups tends, on balance, in a liberalizing direction, as does pressure from sending states. Pressure from other receiving states, though important in debates about border control, figures less prominently in the account in this book, which focuses on the relative balance of temporary versus permanent migration (in Germany and Switzerland) and economic versus family migration (in Canada and the United States).
Ellermann’s theoretical model posits that the level of insulation from a given source of pressure varies across different policy arenas, even within a single case, such that the direction of immigration reform hinges on the locus of policy-making. For instance, in countries with a high degree of direct democracy (among Ellermann’s case countries, Switzerland stands alone here), public opinion finds voice in referendums and immigration policy reforms are more likely to move in a restrictionist direction. On the opposite end of the spectrum are countries in which immigration reform is likely to take shape in the executive branch (and here, Canada serves as a useful illustration), where public opinion has less sway and reforms are therefore more likely to move in a liberalizing direction. Interest groups, on the other hand, wield the most influence over the direction of reforms in the legislative arena, where they find many points of access. International pressures are most acute in the executive arena, where policy-makers must balance domestic affairs with concerns about “the big picture,” including a country’s international reputation.
The book’s argument about different kinds of political insulation is a useful complement to important existing accounts of how countries decide which immigrants to welcome. I felt especially compelled to consider Ellerman’s account alongside David FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín’s Culling the Masses, where the primary distinction is between democratic regimes (which are subject to the public’s racist and restrictionist tendencies) and undemocratic regimes (which are less so). Like Ellermann, FitzGerald and Cook-Martín examine the restrictive (and racist) tendencies of the voting public alongside diplomatic pressures toward immigration expansion (and less racial selection). Ellermann’s argument, based on a comparison across advanced democracies, devotes greater attention to how these kinds of pressures play out within specific political institutions and therefore how they have widely varying influence over the eventual outcome.
Though the complexity of the book’s theoretical framework is already high, I might have liked to see interest group insulation articulated in greater detail. Across different kinds of interest groups, actual interests vary dramatically, to the point that I am not convinced that it is useful to think of these groups as a single source of pressure in the theoretical account. Ellermann is obviously well aware of heterogeneity across interest groups and carefully considers the ways in which the institutional landscape, especially a corporatist institutional structure, affects the relative influence of labor and non-economic interest groups vis-à-vis employers. But unlike with the three other types of pressure and insulation (popular, from sending states, and from receiving states), interest group pressures would tend less obviously in a single direction. If on the whole they tend toward immigration policy liberalization, this underscores the dominance of business among interest groups. Formally disaggregating different kinds of interest groups in the model would provide a more satisfying account.
In addition to providing a framework for understanding the direction of immigration policy reform, the book also tackles the question of whether a given reform will be incremental or paradigmatic. In other words, will the country’s immigration policies move in a fundamentally different direction—as happened, for instance, with the 1973 recruitment stop in Germany or the 1965 Hart-Celler Act in the United States? Here, Ellermann draws our attention again to different policy arenas that can function as veto points and block paradigmatic reform. Major change is unlikely to go unnoticed, and it is difficult for an insulated executive branch to shepherd it through without fairly widespread political debate. Therefore, the book’s argument goes, success of major reform will depend on reform opponents having less veto power.
This part of the book’s argument, about the conditions for incremental versus paradigmatic reform, is perhaps the most unsatisfactory to me; it seems a truism that reform is blocked when groups opposed to it have the power to stop it. The reasons why reform opponents have access to more and less veto power in different historical moments within the same country context seem idiosyncratic, or at least, require taking into account so many additional factors that the explanation no longer remains usefully parsimonious. Paradigmatic reform happens “at moments when the stars align, so to speak” (p. 83). Of course, rare events like paradigmatic reform are just that: rare—and perhaps ultimately more difficult to predict. The methods of comparative politics or comparative-historical sociology are obviously well-suited to understanding rare events like paradigmatic immigration reform, but the empirical cases presented in this book, especially cases that compare different historical moments within the same political system, fail to fully crystalize a complex political reality into generalizable takeaways.
In sum, though there are parts of Ellermann’s account that I found more compelling than others, the book as a whole provides an extremely carefully crafted and broad sweeping explanation for variation in immigration policies across advanced democracies. The theoretical account is thorough and intriguing, and the empirical research is informative and meticulous. I recommend this book to immigration scholars across the social sciences in the highest possible terms.