Antje Ellermann’s The Comparative Politics of Immigration: Policy Choices in Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States is a consolidative, cross-national study with two main objectives: to develop a theoretical framework to investigate comparatively the politics of immigration policy making; and to offer a nuanced understanding of the political dynamics that influence the direction of immigration policy over time. In pursuit of these goals, it raises two questions that have engaged scholars of immigration policy making since Tomas Hammar’s edited volume, European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, appeared in 1985. First, why do liberal states confronting similar political and practical immigration-related challenges adopt dissimilar policy solutions? Second, why does state immigration policy suddenly change course at some junctures while remaining relatively constant during others?
The Comparative Politics of Immigration pursues answers to these questions by scrutinizing the post-1950s immigrant admission policies of four major receiving countries. Its selection of cases is driven by two criteria: reputed migration regime type and institutional variation. Testing the conventional scholarly wisdom that the ideational and political contours of contemporary immigration policy are significantly influenced, if not determined, by a country’s early experience with immigration, Germany and Switzerland represent the category of states that adopted guestworker immigration regimes, while Canada and United States are often identified by immigration scholars as classic settler colonial states. A second criterion selects upon the observed variation of governmental systems among liberal states, with Canada an example of a Westminster parliamentary, Germany a coalition parliamentary, the United States a presidential, and Switzerland a semi-presidential system. Ellermann argues that both types of comparison are necessary to understand the dynamics driving policy choice across countries and over time.
The central insight of The Comparative Politics of Immigration is that the direction (restrictive or expansive) and magnitude (incremental or paradigmatic) of policy change will vary depending on the degree to which domestic policy makers are politically insulated from the preferences and demands of the unorganized public, organized interest groups, and foreign states. Moreover, their degree of insulation from these pressure sources is predicated on whether the politics of immigration is dominated by either the executive, legislative, electoral, or judicial arena. According to Ellermann’s theoretical framework, the executive arena permits policy makers the greatest political insulation from popular and interest group pressures, the legislative arena an intermediate measure of insulation from these two sources, and the electoral arena the least insulation from popular pressure. Whether the judicial arena is pertinent for policy making depends on the prevailing constitutional arrangements of judicial review. In systems where “judges adjudicate cases brought by claimants adversely affected by the implementation of a statute” interest groups can influence the judicial agenda and the substance of court rulings (p. 22). Conversely, where politicians can refer legislation to courts directly, parliamentary opposition political parties and, often, subnational governments have access to a policy veto point. This framework assumes that publics within the receiving countries are reflexively hostile to more immigration, while organized interest groups and the immigration-sending states are invested in, and thus lobby for, expansive immigration policy outcomes.
If Ellermann’s framework, which expands upon Ellen Immergut’s work (“Institutions, Veto Points and Policy Results: A Comparative Analysis of Health Care,” Journal of Public Policy 10[4] 1990), seems complex, it is because it is. It is also highly original, thought-provoking, and elegant. Although The Comparative Politics of Immigration is informed by numerous good works about its subject—including, among others, Martin A. Schain’s The Politics of Immigration in France, Britain, and the United States (2012) and Daniel Tichenor’s Dividing Lines: The Politics of Interest Control in America (2002)—it is nevertheless more empirically rich and analytically sophisticated. Indeed, Ellermann’s claim that “despite the proliferation of migration scholarship … we have yet to understand the diversity of policy choices adopted by governments across the Global North” (p. 4), is a valid one. Consequently, this perceived lacuna motivates her comparative investigation of immigration policy making across space and time.
That The Comparative Politics of Immigration exceeds the scope of previously published scholarship on its subject is indisputable. No book on the politics of immigration policy making hitherto has been more theory driven. The book’s exhaustive attention to historical detail favorably compares with all previously published volumes. Moreover, on both scores The Comparative Politics of Immigration successfully acts upon Gary P. Freeman’s exhortation (“Immigrant Incorporation in Western Democracies, International Migration Review 38[3] 2004) to political scientists that they should generalize and identify unifying trends in investigating the politics of immigration without neglecting individual case specificity and idiosyncrasy.
This said, The Comparative Politics of Immigration is not above criticism. As elegant as it is, Ellermann’s theoretical framework will undoubtedly be judged by many experienced scholars of immigration as excessively deterministic as well as ill-fitting for some country cases. For example, the extreme zig zagging of UK immigration policy since the early 2000s—a country not included among Ellermann’s cases—does not neatly conform to the framework’s expectations. In this instance, intra-political party politics, an underprivileged variable in The Comparative Politics of Immigration, have played an outsized role in determining the medium term direction of state immigration policy.
A second problem concerns the book’s assumptions about the motivations and preferences of the main actors involved in immigration policy making. Although the comparative empirical evidence in this and other studies generally (but not always) supports the view that organized groups and foreign states prefer expansive immigration policies, it does not validate Ellermann’s supposition that the public consistently prefers restrictive immigration outcomes. Rather, even a cursory dive into the opinion survey record in the United States and other liberal democracies reveals that the public is often relaxed about the prospect of new immigration. Longitudinal survey data gathered by Gallup, for example, reveal that in only one month between April 2006 and July 2022 did most Americans prefer that migration to the United States decrease. Indeed, according to several measures across different surveys, public opinion is currently more favorable than not to new immigration in a number of democracies, despite the recent rise in the electoral fortunes of anti-immigration parties and politicians.
A related problem is the book’s rigid assumption that public opinion exclusively acts as an independent variable, that is, as a source of political pressure circumscribing elite decision making. While it is undoubtedly true that elites cannot indefinitely ignore the policy preferences of most of the electorate, it is nevertheless the case that, following the work of John Zaller (The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, 1992) and other public opinion scholars, the latter is largely influenced by its exposure to elite discourse via the media. Indeed, my own comparative research concludes that political elite discourse, media attention, and public opinion are dynamically linked in a reinforcing feedback loop, thus suggesting that public opinion simultaneously acts as both an independent and a dependent variable regarding immigration policy making.
These minor criticisms aside, The Comparative Politics of Immigration is the best book published on the politics of immigration across the liberal democracies since the research stream to which it directly contributes began to flow during the 1970s. Moreover, it is a seminal work about the politics of policy making more broadly.
