THE DILEMMAS OF IMMIGRATION CONTROL

James F. Hollifield, Philip L. Martin, and Pia M. Orrenius

All countries in the world today face the reality of controlling or managing migration. The dilemmas of control are especially acute in the advanced industrial democracies, where economic pressures push for openness to migration while political, legal, and security concerns argue for greater control. How do the major immigrant-receiving countries cope with this dilemma?

This book is a systematic, comparative study of immigration policy in fifteen industrialized democracies and the European Union (EU): the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, three Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway), Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Korea. It has two central, interrelated theses. The first, which we call the "convergence hypothesis," is that there is growing similarity among industrialized, labor-importing countries in terms of (1) the policy instruments chosen for controlling immigration, especially unauthorized immigration and refugee flows; (2) the results or efficacy of immigration control measures; (3) integration policies—that is, the measures adopted by labor-importing countries that affect the rate and extent of social, economic, and political integration among immigrants who become long-term residents; and (4) general-public reaction to current immigrant flows and assessment of government efforts to control or manage them.

Our second hypothesis is that the gap between the goals and results of national immigration policy (laws, regulations, executive actions, and court rulings, to name a few) is growing wider in the major industrial democracies, thus provoking greater public hostility toward immigrants in general (regardless of legal status) and putting pressure on political parties and government officials to adopt more restrictive policies. We refer to this as the "gap hypothesis" (see Hollifield 1986).

Beyond testing these two general hypotheses against the comparative evidence gathered in the fifteen countries and regions represented here, we seek to explain the efficacy of immigration control measures in today's labor-importing countries in an era of globalization and unprecedented international labor mobility (Sassen 1988). In each of the in-depth country and regional profiles, the authors explain why certain immigration control measures were chosen (or not chosen) by that country or region and why these measures either succeeded or failed to achieve their stated objectives. Each chapter is followed by one or two commentaries that offer a critique of its principal findings, supplementing them and, in some cases, offering an alternative interpretation.

Our findings generally support the hypothesis of increased "convergence" among industrialized, labor-importing countries, along the lines described above, as well as the "gap hypothesis" emphasizing the divergence of immigration policy outputs and outcomes. Despite significant increases in immigration control efforts in most of the countries under study and the tightening of entry restrictions and monitoring of unauthorized immigrants already working in those countries, officials acknowledge that the challenge of managing migration is more difficult than ever and that they are less confident that governments can regulate immigration flows. In some countries and sectors, there is a structural element to employer demand for foreign workers, such as in agriculture, construction, health care, domestic help, and hospitality. That is, employers continue to hire foreign workers regardless of legal status and irrespective of the business cycle. If governments continue to find it hard to prevent the entry and employment of foreign labor from lower-wage countries, the gap between immigration policy goals and outcomes is likely to persist.

The country studies here highlight the administrative, political, legal, and economic difficulties of immigration enforcement in relatively open and pluralistic societies. Bureaucratic power in all of these countries is routinely open to contestation by a variety of social and economic groups, and reducing the "demand-pull" factors that attract migrants—shortages of manpower and human capital and demographic decline—is extremely difficult. Competing interests in pluralistic societies lead to policymaking gridlock that, in the face of ever-stronger economic incentives, permits immigration to continue in one form or another. Such policy paralysis sends mixed signals to prospective migrants in the labor-exporting countries, encouraging them to overcome additional obstacles placed in their path at borders (external controls) or in the workplace (internal controls). Moreover, amnesties for settled migrants create a potential moral hazard that makes prospective migrants more likely to risk crossing borders and working illegally.

On the other hand, industrialized countries cannot, at least in the short term, realistically hope to reduce the "supply-push" pressures in the principal labor-exporting countries—rapid population growth combined with low rates of economic growth and high unemployment, especially among the young—to which they are increasingly linked by globalization (Joppke 1998; Hollifield 2004). And severing the family- and employer-based networks that link high-emigration and labor-importing nations is becoming harder rather than easier. If demand-pull and supply-push forces, together with networks that link sending and receiving societies, are the necessary conditions for migration to occur, the granting of some kind of legal status (rights) to foreigners is the sufficient condition. These rights most often derive from domestic sources of law, especially constitutions, but migrants are increasingly protected by international law and human rights conventions. This is especially true in Europe (Joppke 2001; see also Chapter 14). Despite the rise of rights-based politics (Hollifield 1992, Hollifield and Wilson 2011) and regimes that check the action of states trying to control migration, in recent decades policies have increasingly targeted migrant rights (civil, social, and political) as a way of controlling immigration.

Legal and constitutional...