Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- The logics and politics of post-WWII migration to Western Europe
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Origins and Trajectory of Post-WWII Immigration
- 3 The Organized Nativist Backlash
- 4 Immigration and State Sovereignty
- 5 The Logics and Politics Of a European Immigration Policy Regime
- 6 The Domestic Legacies of Postwar Immigration
- 7 The Logics and Politics of Immigrant Political Incorporation
- 8 Conclusions
- References
- Index
4 - Immigration and State Sovereignty
Implications of the British and German Cases
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- The logics and politics of post-WWII migration to Western Europe
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Origins and Trajectory of Post-WWII Immigration
- 3 The Organized Nativist Backlash
- 4 Immigration and State Sovereignty
- 5 The Logics and Politics Of a European Immigration Policy Regime
- 6 The Domestic Legacies of Postwar Immigration
- 7 The Logics and Politics of Immigrant Political Incorporation
- 8 Conclusions
- References
- Index
Summary
As the pressures for international population movements increase, we can expect to live in a world in which … global forces … erode states and the communities that live in them.
(Myron Weiner 1995: 20)State-centric theories such as Realism and Neo-realism would suggest that states, as sovereign entities, should be able to decide on the control of their external borders.
(Mehmet Ugur, 1995: 409)As cited in the Introduction, one of the most intriguing puzzles of the post-WWII period is why Western European political elites seemingly lost control of immigration policy. As we have seen, this loss of control was unexpected. Few European policy makers expected foreign workers to settle permanently in their host country; fewer still were concerned with the long-term economic and political repercussions of the wave of labor migration when it commenced during the 1950s. Perhaps as a consequence, political elites also failed to anticipate the recent surge of popular support for anti-immigrant groups and parties across Western Europe, a surge that, as we stressed in Chapter 3, is inextricably linked to the politicization of immigration policy and domestic ethnic and race-related conflict.
How and why, then, did Western European political elites lose control of immigration policy? As we saw in the Introduction, five broad-based explanations – the liberal state, embedded realist, globalization, path-dependent, and political-institutional theses – offer different answers to this question.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007