Immigration policies and their potential effects can be considered at the global, national, and individual levels, and arguably all these lenses are needed to capture these complex social, economic, and political phenomena. In this review, I consider two seminal new books that provide insights on immigration policies and their effects during our current turbulent global times.
An impressive first book examined for this review, Gallya Lahav and Anthony Messina’s Immigration, Security, and the Liberal State, provides compelling evidence of the demise of the liberal migration state. Contra the liberal state thesis that is said to restrict the capacity of the immigration state’s coercive functions, Lahav and Messina argue that “[b]y forging bilateral and human mobility policy to non-central state actors… contemporary liberal states exercise considerable control over immigration and human mobility flows in the new security era” (p. 5). They focus on the ways in which securitization and other factors control immigration, especially at borders, and in concert with third-party actors, such as corporations and assessors. September 11 is viewed as a pivotal policy moment for this development, although the authors also note prior developments. They argue that since 1989 there has been a move toward an exclusionary immigration model with a focus on national security protection and central actors being enforcement, intelligence, and the bureaucracy. The thesis that they convincingly evince in the book directly challenges the notion of a liberal and expansionary immigration system, as most famously developed by Gary Freeman (Gary Freeman “Modes of Immigration Politics in Liberal Democratic States,” International Migration Review, 29(4), 1995). Freeman argued that strong vested interests created the conditions for such a state and that this was common within democracies.
However, as Lahav and Messina demonstrate, in many immigration countries, high levels of migration are increasingly viewed as a security threat. The authors position September 11 as a core temporal cross-point in this regard. In addition to these trends, there has been a trend toward contracting out immigration series and processes. This comprises both civil society and forms of security governance, including public–private partnerships (p. 9). These relevant bodies include “airlines and transport companies, travel agencies, hospitals, universities, employer groups, local governments and foreign states” (p. 9) taking on the traditional roles of the state. In short, the authors see an interaction among both the political left and right between rights, security, and markets—they refer to this as the “migration trilemma,” and this is the core argument evinced in their book.
This trilemma in turn creates more and different challenges for the political left than the political right—the political left sees a tension between conditional support for the free market and greater defense of the civil liberties of citizens and the rights of migrants (p. 12). As for the right, they have a strong defense of free markets, but this can “conflict with … commitment to public safety and national security and aversion to cultural pluralism” (p. 12). Along both partisan positions, there is a “freedom versus order” cleavage that emerges (Ariel Malka, Christopher J. Soto, Michael Inzlicht, and Yphtach Leilkes, 2014, “Do Needs for Security and Certainty Predict Cultural and Economic Conservative? A Cross-National Analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(6), 13).
In subsequent chapters, Lahav and Messina consider this issue and its likely effects upon both the political left and right and the tension between the free market and a greater defense of civil liberties for citizens on the one hand and the rights of migrants on the other. Chapters include the re(framing) of immigration into a focus on insecurity (Chapter 2), the expansion of third-party actors into the migration sphere (Chapter 3), attitudes toward immigration regulation (Chapter 4), immigration and perceived political threats (before and after pivotal moments such as September 11), and the relationship between securitization and politicization of immigrants (Chapter 6).
The book adopts a neo-institutional framework and therefore prioritizes a focus on the role of institutions in shaping various phenomena. It ends with an examination of the COVID-19 crisis and its effects on immigration flows and the legal rights of asylum seekers, in particular, found to be violating the principles of international law. The authors presented the Covid-19 period as a potential “focusing event” for migration, much as September 11 was. The book is encyclopedic in the evidence it presents and would be extremely useful for teaching in a generalist unit on migration studies or migration and security politics. It would also be useful to policymakers interested in furnishing cross-national comparative evidence in making strong policy recommendations to their governments.
The relationship of stigma to immigration processes, policies, and outcomes has been insufficiently considered in the literature. A thought-provoking second book reviewed, Lawrence Yang, Maureen Eger, and Bruce Link’s edited volume Migration Stigma: Understanding Prejudice, Discrimination, and Exclusion scrutinizes how immigration amplifies stigma processes and whether, if at all, such processes can be ameliorated. Some chapters focus on the theoretical components of stigma and its application to immigration and migrants (Chapters 1–4). There are practical examples of migrant-focused stigma and how it plays out in different country contexts, including in Germany (Chapter 6), Mexico (Chapter 7), and the United States (Chapter 9). Two chapters consider the adverse effects of stigma on migrant health (Chapters 8 and 9) and possible ways to reduce such stigmatization over time (Chapters 10–11).
While stigma is a well-established sociological and psychological phenomenon related to group theory threat in social relations between different racial groups (Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociology Review, 1(1), 1958), it has not been applied significantly to migrants before. Yet, citing Link and Phelan’s work (Bruce G. Link and Jo Phelan. “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” Journal of Health and Social Behaviour, 1995), the authors note that classic concepts of stigma can influence migrants in particular ways. For instance, there may be fear and anger toward migrants that manifests as stigma. This can arise due to a perception of potential economic or cultural loss experienced by existing natives. Second, migrant minorities can experience prejudice and stigma if their skin color or religious practices are overt, and in turn, they may be singled out in discriminatory ways. Migrants may seek to hide their identity, their visa or arrival, or their integration approaches to avoid stigma.
Finally, prejudice and stigma can vary over time depending upon the perceived “threat” in society—if the level of “threat” dissipates, so too does the level of prejudice. These contributions are important because they show that elements of the migratory experience can contribute to and lead to an escalation of stigma—the time of arrival of migrants, the underlying social and economic conditions at that point of admission, the overall scale of migration, media cycles and broader social cohesion, physical settlement patterns, and the origins of migrants. In a time where migrants are experiencing xenophobic backlash in both democracies and non-democracies and these trends are reverberating across society (including influencing party cleavages and electoral outcomes), this careful analysis of stigma is particularly salient.
Importantly, the book asks what can ameliorate stigma. It interrogates whether targeted policies are ideal, noting that in some instances they raise stigma as they can be perceived as based on special interest. Universal policies might be better, but they can fail to identify those most at risk of stigmatization. Policies can be important, and the volume pays much attention to how policy processes influence stigma at the various stages of implementation.
Perhaps the most compelling issue raised in this book is a careful analysis of the deleterious ways in which stigma affects migrant health. The book notes that “stigmatized individuals use and deplete executive resources to manage their socially devalued identities, leaving them less able than their non-stigmatized counterparts to monitor and regulate their emotions effectively” (64). Studies of migrants experiencing stigma show it can have negative physical effects, including premature infants and lower-functioning immune systems. In summarizing the literature on the relationship between stigma and negative health effects, contributing author Mark Hatzenbuehler writes “that a broad set of policies across multiple sectors (including transportation, education, labor, health, and social services) appear to be consequential for the mental health of Latinx populations in the US.”
One tragic example comes from the Muslim-majority country bans during the first Trump Presidency. In this study, Hatzenbuehler notes (171) that scholars compared “the monthly odds of preterm births to women from travel ban countries (Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen after the January 2017 ban) to the number expected,” identifying a “6.8% increase in the odds of delivering a preterm birth … among women from travel ban countries” (Goleen Samari, Ralph Catalano, Héctor E. Alacalá, and Alison Gemmill, “The Muslim Ban and Preterm Brith: Analysis of US Vital Statistics Data from 2009 to 2018,” Social Science Medicine, 265(113544), 2020). Such studies challenge the notion that discriminatory speech and policies have only legalistic and not psycho-social or medical effects on migrants, demonstrating causal relationships between policies and physical outcomes.
The two books reviewed reveal important insights on immigration trends and their effects on individual migrants through state, security, and societal processes. They demonstrate how more stringent and securitized immigration policies, as considered in Immigration, Security and the Liberal State, can influence and amplify migrant experiences of stigma, as considered in Understanding Prejudice, Discrimination and Exclusion.
