Post-1945 international migration: New Zealand,Australia and Canada compared

"New Zealand's immigration policies and trends since 1945 are compared with those of Canada and Australia. For most of this period, Australia has pursued the more expansive immigration policy while Canada and New Zealand have tended to link immigration intakes to fluctuations in labor demand. All three countries initially discriminated against non-European immigrants but gradually moved towards nondiscriminatory policies based on similar selection criteria and means of assessment. New Zealand has traditionally been more cautious than both Canada and Australia in terms of how many immigrants it accepted and from what sources, but it has recently followed the other two in raising immigration targets encouraging migration from nontraditional sources, particularly Asian countries. Historical, global and national factors are drawn upon to explain the degree of convergence between these three societies."     

Migrants and asylum seekers: policy responses in the United States to immigrants and refugees from Central America and the Caribbean

This article analyzes the complex political environment of US immigration and refugee policies in which tensions exist, especially with regard to Central America and the Caribbean. Recommendations for managing it more effectively in the future are discussed. Several western countries, including the US, have implemented stricter restriction policies as a result of the perceived threats to their economies and cultural homogeneity. In general, US immigration policy has addressed both economic concerns and domestic pressures, whereas US refugee policy has reflected foreign policy concerns. As a result of these policies, there has been an increasing number of immigrants from Mexico, as well as huge numbers of refugees from Cuba and Nicaragua. Yet, there has been limited acceptance of asylum seekers from Haiti, El Salvador and Guatemala. Among the policies passed by the US Congress to reduce illegal immigration and limit assistance to legal immigrants were the Welfare Reform Act, Illegal Immigration Reform, Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996, and the Proposition 187 movement. Revisions in the procedures of the Immigration and Naturalization Service were also made.     

Policing immigrants or policing immigration? Understanding local law enforcement participation in immigration control

As the United States has expanded its immigration control strategies, police participation in immigration enforcement has increased in scope and intensity. Local law enforcement agencies contribute to immigration enforcement in three key ways: through the direct enforcement of immigration law, through cooperation with federal immigration authorities, and through the everyday policing of immigrant communities. These enforcement approaches have consequences for unauthorized immigrants, and for the agencies and officers tasked with providing them police services. This article reviews local law enforcement practices and argues that future research should move away from an exclusive examination of police policies towards immigrants, to consider how the policing of immigrants actually occurs on the ground. Moreover, we argue that as long as discretionary arrests funnel removable immigrants into the deportation system, some immigrant communities will perceive policing as fundamentally unfair and discriminatory.     

Interests Aren’t Everything: An Exploration of Economic Explanations of Immigration Policy in a New Destination

Current debates around US immigration policy are playing out against a backdrop that has changed significantly in the past 20 years: immigrants have increasingly gravitated towards “new destinations”; a large and growing portion of immigrants are undocumented; and the federal vacuum in responding to the promise and problems of these new immigration trends has devolved policy to the states. As a result, we have seen innovation on the state level as policymakers seek to accommodate, welcome or resist immigration, with varying degrees of success. In this paper, we explore the case of Utah as a new immigration destination, seeking to understand its transformation from a state with very inclusive immigrant policies as late as 1999 to one currently adopting highly restrictive immigrant policies. To explain this trajectory, we test three prominent materialist theories of public policy: instrumentalism, structuralism and strategic-relational approaches. We draw on a decade’s worth of primary data – including data on state-level legislation, key economic indicators, public statements concerning immigration from the private business sector and the LDS Church, and the editorial content of the state’s two major newspapers regarding immigration – to examine the policy explanations that grow out of interest-based theories of the state. Whereas these theories provide robust explanations for a large and diverse array of public policies, we find that they fall short in explaining immigration policy. While conventional wisdom – and extensive scholarly research – suggests that economic interests drive policy, we find that the policies around immigrants challenge this economic reductionism, suggesting the need for more complex and ideational accounts of this important phenomenon.     

Despite the crisis: The resilience of intercultural nationalism in Catalonia

Interculturalism provides the core framework for immigration‐related policies in Catalonia, while remaining deeply intertwined with Catalan nationalism. We first identify ‘intercultural nationalism’ as the core doctrine through which Catalan nationalist discourse has been articulated in relation to immigration. We trace interculturalism's origins to nationalism in Quebec and argue that, in Catalonia also, regional immigration policies have been constructed in opposition to those of the central state, while attempting to involve immigrants closely in subnational belonging and social cohesion. Second, we investigate whether interculturalism is durable during economic and political crises, arguing that intercultural policies did not change following the economic recession of the 2010s. This harmonises with broader interpretations that de‐emphasise the role of economic factors in ethnic conflicts. In conclusion we note how the continuing resilience of interculturalism in Catalan policies on immigration contrasts sharply with the rise of xenophobia elsewhere.     

Colonial legacy of ethno-racial inequality in Japan

This essay challenges anti-historicist accounts that sever the link between the colonial past and present, replacing them with a more historically nuanced understanding of Japan’s immigration policies and their relation to ethno-racial inequality. Contrary to the dominant view that transnational immigration is new to Japan, this article shows that Japan already had a history of immigration in the early twentieth century, and this history generated a lasting impact on postwar immigration policies and their integration. While recognizing the impact of structural and individual factors, this essay underscores a path-dependent approach that demonstrates how colonial exclusion led to the formation of a durable structure of inequality against low skilled labor immigrants, and thus how such a colonial legacy has continued to limit the life chances and integration of subsequent immigrants in Japan since the 1980s.     

Turning the Immigration Policy Paradox Upside Down? Populist Liberalism and Discursive Gaps in South America

A paradox of officially rejecting but covertly accepting irregular migrants has long been identified in the immigration policies of Western immigrant receiving states. In South America, on the other hand, a liberal discourse of universally welcoming all immigrants, irrespective of their origin and migratory status, has replaced the formally restrictive, securitized and not seldomly ethnically selective immigration rhetoric. This discursive liberalization has found partial translation into immigration laws and policies, but contrary to the universality of rights claimed in their discourses, governments reject recently increasing irregular south–south migration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to varying degrees. This paper applies a mixed methodological approach of discourse and legal analysis and process tracing to explore in how far recent immigration policies in South America constitute a liberal turn, or rather a reverse immigration policy paradox of officially welcoming but covertly rejecting irregular migrants. Based on the comparative analysis of Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador, the study identifies and explains South American “populist liberalism” in the sphere of migration. We highlight important implications for migration theory, thereby opening up new avenues of research on immigration policy making outside Western liberal democracies, and particularly in predominantly migrant sending countries.     

Framing and immigration through the trump era

For the last decade, undocumented or illegal immigration has been one of the most contested policy issues in the United States, with significant news attention on policies affecting the undocumented population, ranging from deportations to comprehensive immigration reform, the DREAM Act, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Despite these prominent and multifaceted policy debates, scholarship on media framing and public opinion remain more focused on the portrayal of immigrants rather than policies affecting them. In general, scholars find that policy frames are far more consequential to public opinion than equivalency frames (variations in how news media describe unauthorized immigrants, either as “illegal” or “undocumented”) or episodic frames (whether news articles are heavy on human‐interest stories rather than policy facts and statistics). Also, negative frames generally have stronger effects than positive frames, and these effects sometimes vary by partisanship and family migration history. Finally, the relative infrequency of powerful frames in news stories, like a life spent in the United States, provides opportunities for advocates to move public opinion on immigration policy. These findings have important implications for future battles over immigration policy in the United States, which show no signs of abating.     

American Attitudes toward Guest Worker Policies

In this study we use data from a 2004 New York Times/CBS News national survey to analyze public opinion toward a guest worker program and to compare predictors of support for guest worker and general immigration policies. In general, Americans tend to be divided in their attitudes toward a guest worker program, although support for temporary worker policies is stronger when legalization for unauthorized immigrants is conditioned on certain requirements, and when the program is coupled with enhanced border security. The results of the bivariate probit analysis indicate that individuals who favor reducing the immigration level also tend to oppose instituting a guest worker program. Perceptions of the “costs” of immigration emerged as the most important determinant of individuals’ attitudes toward immigration policies; such beliefs contributed to opposition to a guest worker policy and support for reducing the immigration level. We also found that residents of high‐immigration states and Latinos were more likely to support a temporary worker program. However, these characteristics do not appear to influence individuals’ judgments about the number of immigrants who should be admitted to the United States. Findings regarding the impact of political partisanship and ideology on attitudes toward the two policies were more ambiguous.     

After the ‘Great White Walls’ Came Down. Debating the Ethnicity of Immigrants in Australia and the USA, 1980–1990

In 1965 and 1973, the governments of the USA and Australia, respectively, abolished their racially discriminatory immigration policies. A line had seemingly been drawn in the sand in which one's race, nationality or ethnicity would no longer be grounds for exclusion. As a consequence of these reforms, the source countries of immigrants to Australia and the USA diversified. How did politicians react to this change? This article finds that although overtly racist immigration policies had become a relic of the past, a number of mainstream politicians in both countries did not welcome the outcomes of race-blind immigration policies.     

Migration Policies and Political Cultures in Europe: A Changing Trend

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of ‘communitarisation’ of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union.     

Does ethnic origin determine integration success? A comparison of immigration policies in Germany and Japan

The paper analyzes public policy and public opinion responses toward immigrants in Germany and Japan, two countries whose immigration policies have relied on blood purity (jus sanguinis). The paper retraces the rationale for jus sanguinis and contends that it was adopted at the turn of the century in both countries out of political convenience. The principles and goals of immigration policies are compared cautioning that better principles must not mean better outcomes.

It is reiterated that Germany has made a politically motivated move away from the ethnic monocultural concept, whereas Japan still hangs on more or less to the old model of silent and subtle assimilation. The more dissuasive Japanese model of tight immigration control, deportation and monocultural assimilation isthen compared to the more permissive German immigration model. A comparison of identity discourses in the form of Japanese Nihonjinron and German Leitkultur shows that both countries struggle with identifying and asserting their core values and that this has a negative impact on integration issues. The paper concludes that Germany has failed to bear the full consequences of its ambitious plans by taking into account the values, beliefs and worldviews of its immigrants, whereas Japan continues to treat immigrants as temporary guests denying any need for long-term integration.     

Whom Should We Serve? A Discourse Analysis of Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants

We present a discourse analysis of social work practitioners’ commentaries on undocumented immigrants that were collected from a survey of practicing social workers’ attitudes toward immigration and immigrants. Analyzing 198 open-ended comments, we explore the discursive mechanisms practitioners employ to construct undocumented immigrants, and their professional responsibilities toward them. These views are illustrative of the ways in which the profession determines inclusion and exclusion, writ large in national immigration policies and laws and played out in the arenas of social work and social services. Disparate views of practitioners highlight tensions in the profession's relationships to law and social policies as well as to its own ethics and identity.     

Immigration to Spain: implications for a unified European Union immigration policy

A unified immigration policy is one of the prerequisites for establishing the free movement of people within the European Union (EU). This paper considers the difficulties in establishing a joint policy on the free movement of people within the EU by focusing upon changing immigration policies in Spain. By comparing Spain, a country of only recent, small-scale immigration, to Germany, a country with a longer history of non-European immigration, obstacles to developing and effectively implementing coordinated immigration policies among EU members can be elucidated. The administrative control of entry, estimates of legal and illegal immigrants in the country, and the status of bilateral relations with Morocco are examined in order to highlight the political difficulties encountered in a unified immigration policy both within Spanish society and for the EU. Spain is both a threshold to the EU and a destination. Border control may be the easiest part of implementing a joint immigration policy in the EU. It is more difficult to control settlement. In addition, high rates of unemployment may result among the native host country populations as immigrants more readily accept low-skilled, low-paying jobs.     

Rural Residence as a Determinant of Attitudes Toward US Immigration Policy

Between 1990 and 2000, the foreign-born population in the United States increased by 57 per cent, compared to a 13 per cent increase in the native-born population. This growth has fueled considerable media attention and has fomented some anti-immigrant sentiments. Although a number of authors have charted changes in support for restrictionist immigration policies, few have examined their determinants. In this paper, we focus on region of residence and use data from a 2004 telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 1888 adults to test the hypothesis that rural Americans are more likely to support restrictive immigration policies than individuals in urban and suburban communities. In a series of regression analyses, this hypothesis is confirmed; rural residents hold the most restrictionist views. Additional analyses indicate that this effect of rural residence on policy attitudes is mediated by attitudes toward multiculturalism, the perceived traits of immigrants, and perceptions about the costs of immigration. Ultimately, the analyses indicate that the perceived cost of immigration is the single strongest predictor of support for restrictive immigration policies, and that it best accounts for rural residents'more restrictionist views.     

Economic achievement of immigrants in Japan: Examining the role of country-of-origin and host-country-specific human capital in an inflexible labor market

The economic integration of immigrants is a salient social issue in Japan. Although the US immigration literature has stressed the importance of host-country-specific human capital over country-of-origin human capital for immigrants, previous studies in Japan have shown mixed results about the effects of these two types of human capital on the economic integration of immigrants. The mixed results might be because previous studies focused on only specific immigrant groups (with regard to nationalities, cities, and visa status), human capital variables, and dimensions of economic achievements in the Japanese labor market. The segmented nature of the Japanese labor market structure and immigration policies create different pathways to “economic achievements” of immigrants depending on the dimension of “economic achievements” studied. By conducting a nationally representative social survey of Japanese immigrants, we examined the association between the two types of human capital (i.e., country-of-origin and host-country-specific) and the three indicators of labor market success: employment status and firm size, occupational status, and income. Our results indicate that host-country-specific human capital in the form of higher education and language proficiency is important for all three indicators of economic achievement in Japan, while country-of-origin human capital in the form of higher education and vocational skills is transferable to some extent. Our results suggest that the significance of human capital in immigrants' economic success is determined not only by the structure of the labor market but also by immigration policies.     

Growing up Without Status: The Integration of Children in Mixed‐Status Families

Over the past three decades, a central new challenge confronting millions of children of immigrants has emerged: growing up in a mixed‐status family in which at least one member lacks legal authorization to live and work in the United States. A body of recent research argues that unauthorized immigrant status is the fundamental determinant of integration for unauthorized immigrants, with intergenerational consequences for their U.S.‐born children. We discuss the immigration and other policies that create the particular social context within which unauthorized immigration status becomes so detrimental for integration. Specifically, we focus on federal and state policies that undermine the very factors thought to protect children and support the integration of new generations of Americans: families and social networks, economic resources and opportunities, and health. We conclude with recommendations for future research.     

The unemployment insurance compensation. Usage of Canada's immigrants in selected provinces, 1981-1988

This paper explores the relationship between province of residence and the use of unemployment insurance (UI) among immigrants who landed in Canada during the period 1981-88.
Use of a new data set, the Longitudinal Immigration Data Base, overcomes the restriction that other data sets are cross-sectional only in nature or do not identify birthplace.
Our principal conclusion is that more generous UI benefits and poorer economic conditions than the Canadian average have a positive impact on the fraction of immigrants who receive UI. In addition, the province of residence has a separate effect on the likelihood of claiming UI, perhaps due to mobility costs.
Because national immigration policies have a differential impact across provinces, it is understandable that provincial policy makers wish to have greater influence over federal immigration policies.     

The evolution of French immigration policy after May 1981

Changes and continuities in French immigration policies, following the assumption of power by the socialist government in 1981, are described. Attention is focused on the political implications of immigration and on the role of immigrants in French politics. Efforts to restrict immigration to France were initiated in 1931, but clandestine immigration, especially from Portugal, remained largely unchecked for 4 decades. In the early 1970s, stricter enforcement measures were adopted, but these measures met with considerable international and national opposition. In 1977, the government altered its approach to immigration by offering financial aid to help illegal migrants return to their countries of origin. These efforts met with little success, and in 1980 the government initiated measures to promote the integration of immigrants into French society. The socialistic government basically adhered to the immigration policies of the preceding government. The current government seeks: 1) to stop further illegal immigration through the intensification of border controls, 2) to grant amnesty to illegal aliens who currently reside in the country and who meet certain employment requirements, 3) to penalize employers who hire illegal aliens or who contract to bring illegal aliens into the country, and 4) to improve living conditions for legal immigrants. The politicalization of immigration has increased in recent years. Current issues center on the human and political rights of migrants and on arbitary administrative efforts to control immigration. It was expected that migrants would acquire political rights after the 1981 election; however, this expectation was not realized, and the political status of immigrants remains an unsettled issue. Consequently migrants have become pawns in the political struggle between different groups in the population both at the national and the local level. Immigration threatens to become an explosive issue. At the same time, migrants themselves are playing an increasingly prominent role in political activities, such as rent strikes and protest movements.     

Health for immigrants and refugees in the 1990s. A comparative study in seven receiving countries

Health policies for immigrants implemented in seven receiving countries (France, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, United States, and Canada) have been comparatively reviewed, taking into account the structure of the health system as well as immigration policy. Countries where immigrant communities have access to political representation, and whose health systems are comprehensive in scope and coverage, tend to have adopted specific health policies for immigrants, which, in turn, led to better access to health services and more information for planning and evaluation.