Immigration Phobia and the Security Dilemma: Russia, Europe, and the United States and National Security and Immigration: Policy Development in the United States and Western Europe Since 1945

Extract

Immigration Phobia and the Security Dilemma: Russia, Europe, and the United States. By Mikhail A. Alexseev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 294p. $70.00.

National Security and Immigration: Policy Development in the United States and Western Europe Since 1945. By Christopher Rudolph. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 288p. $55.00.

Analyses of immigration from the perspective of national security are often greeted with skepticism. In the early nineties I mentioned the work of Myron Weiner, a pioneer in thinking about the security implications of migration, to a scholar who later held a high immigration policy position in Washington, D.C. “A waste of time,” came the reply, “worse than that, positively damaging, because immigration has no important security implications and such talk only provides ammunition to anti-immigration activists.” In the wake of 9/11, that complacency has been shaken amid a groundswell of interest in security and migration, but there is in some quarters more resistance than ever to linking the two concepts. The recent literature is sharply divided over the legitimacy and necessity of policies that “securitize” migration policy and over the appropriateness of academic analysis set within a security framework. A major theme in the literature is the claim that the securitization of immigration policy is a repressive state strategy designed to capitalize on public fears in the post–Cold War era and to give security forces something to do now that keeping track of communist subversives is no longer on the table.