Politics of Immigration Policy
Title
Politics of Immigration Policy
Author
Money, Jeannette
Research Area
Social Processes
Topic
Immigration
Abstract
In this essay, I first describe the foundational research that focuses on host or receiving states and the policies that determine states' openness to immigration and to immigrant integration. This research privileges domestic actors and institutions in the choice of immigration policy. In the following section, I outline the research that disaggregates both dimensions of immigration policy into component parts. For immigration control, these include skilled migration, unskilled migration, undocumented migration, and border control. For immigrant integration, this includes labor market integration, family reunification, and access to citizenship, among other policies. The focus on receiving states remains strong but is now complemented by research on sending states' policies toward emigrants. I also outline significant efforts by scholars to construct datasets that would allow researchers to evaluate the hypotheses generated by case studies. In the final section, I argue that, despite advances in the research agenda, there is a continuing paucity of quantitative data that would allow researchers to adjudicate among plausible hypotheses. Moreover, even where data are available, the data are generated by wealthy Western democracies about Western democracies. We have little systematic, cross‐national time series data on the rest of the world. I offer a generic concept, “politicians' incentives,” that provides one way of bridging the gap between our understanding of the politics of immigration policy in wealthy Western democracies and other states in the international system that are implicated in global migration patterns and policies.