Immigration Reconfigured

Why Inclusive Democracies Do Not Need Closed Borders

Extending my PhD thesis entitled "Do Inclusive Societies Need Closed Borders?", this book presents the first comprehensive analysis of the association between the openness of immigration policies and the inclusiveness of citizenship policies. One of the innovations is to show how nativist politicization does not automatically lead to consistently restrictive trajectories towards simultaneously closed and exclusive boundary regimes. Instead, politicization links immigration and citizenship politics so that they start correlating positively, and the effect of politicization on boundary regime configurations depends further on nativist party power.

Another innovation is that even when nativists have held significant legilsative power in politicized settings they cannot fully suppress the liberalizing tendencies in immigration policies, leading to boundary regime configurations that are exclusive but semi-open. The flipside of this nativist type of boundary politics is cosmpolitan boundary politics: when immigration is politicized but nativist parties are weak, both immigration and citizenship policy are or become more liberal. By contrast, in the absence of boundary politics - when immigration is not politicized and thus immigration-related politics is not only about boundary-making and the expression of national identity in relation to immigration - immigration and citizenship regimes are unrelated. These findings contradict the often-assumed trade-off and alleged negative correlation between immigration openness and citizenship inclusiveness.

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Besides sweeping quantitatitive models covering 23 democracies from 1980-2018, the book also presents in-depth process tracing case studies followed by targeted comparitive case studies to further test the hypotheses and mechanisms I propose. Some of these cases are not the usual suspects in the literature but they are key for testing the boundary politics framework given their trajectories in the central variables over time. For instance, I feature New Zealand as a case that is not only key to test the argument but is also illuminating because of the moments in which it combined very open borders with very inclusive citizenship, thus further defying the often-invoked trade-off assumption.

On its deepest level, the book is motivated by this empirical trade-off puzzle, which has its roots in a long-standing normative debate and its implicit assumptions about the relationship between immigrant admission, migrant rights, and the access to citizenship. I use a typology of boundary regimes that bridges normative to empirical analysis, and the findings further inform the normative discourse from an empirical perspective. In doing so, I hope to show how we comparative political science can advance the dialogue between empirical and normative scholarship without sacrificing the scientific rigor of either.