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.