Chapter 5 asks why the public continues to support restrictive policies given their considerable economic and rights costs. It identifies the predominant values informing and facilitating the liberal state’s governance of contemporary immigration and its implications for restricting human mobility by focusing on the effects of a threat environment in sustaining the onerous policies of the migration policy playing field. It argues that the persistence of these policies can largely be explained by the continued negative framing of these events by political elites and the mass media. In particular, their conflation of public safety and national security with immigration makes the issue more salient for the public, and the popular legitimacy of restrictive policies is sustained and endorsed by center and extreme Right politicians and political parties. The chapter concludes that the predominance of a security paradigm has shifted the baseline of values salience and realigned popular values and attitudes regarding immigration.

Chapter 6 investigates the manifestations of the politicization and securitization of immigration over time in Spain, the UK, and the US, each of which experienced acts of terrorism between 2001 and 2005. The chapter’s objectives are to illuminate the trajectory of inter-political party competition regarding immigration and the propensity of the major parties to securitize and politicize immigration. It plots the interaction of the key variables of our immigration threat politics paradigm as these are illuminated in each country’s political context. Among these are the predominant threat frames, attitudinal influences, popular policy preferences, and patterns of inter-party politics regarding immigration. The evidence reveals that the shift from a predominant economic and/or cultural threat frame to a public safety one precipitates depolitization and a popular and an inter- party consensus regarding immigration in the near term. However, once restrictive policies are embedded and the salience of immigration recedes, familiar patterns of inter-party competition resume.

The Conclusions summarize the book’s findings and revisits the question of whether contemporary liberal states can manage immigration and human mobility in a new security environment. Based on the evidence, we conclude that liberal states in the post-Cold War era are empowered to implement restrictive and illiberal policies by enlisting the cooperation of non-central state gatekeepers and the support of their publics. The chapter then considers the implications of the contemporary migration policy playing field for the civil liberties of citizens and migrants. It also surveys the effects of the 2019-22 Covid-19 pandemic on the course of human mobility worldwide and assesses whether they resonate with the assumptions of the book’s immigration threat politics paradigm. Several emergent inter-generational and values patterns around human mobility and immigration are then identified. We conclude with muted optimism about the liberal compromise elicited by the paradigm shift to embedded securitism. Despite its affront to the core values and principles upon which liberal democracies were founded, the expansion of the migration regulatory field reflects the consent of the governed.

Chapter 3 identifies the numerous strategies the contemporary liberal states have pursued to navigate the cross-pressures engendered by the migration trilemma during the post-Cold War period, and especially since September 11th. Contesting scholarly claims that the liberal states cannot avert unwanted immigration, its main argument is that they have considerably reconciled the tensions inherent in the trilemma by enlisting and coopting non-central state actors at the intersection of human mobility and security. Specifically, they have forged bilateral and multilateral policy agreements and devolved many of their responsibilities for implementing immigration and human mobility policy to international, subnational and private sector actors. In pursuing this multifaceted course, the immigration policies of states have converged, and their burdens in managing their immigration-related responsibilities have been partially alleviated. But in doing so, the liberal norms inspiring their once steadfast commitments to maintaining relatively open borders and safeguarding citizen and immigrant rights have been compromised.

Chapter 2 situates the migration trilemma within a dynamic, securitarian framework. Informed by evidence gathered from cross-national public opinion surveys, media content analyses, an experiment, and original surveys of Members of the European Parliament, it evaluates the ways in which frames have influenced the course of the politics of immigration and the content of immigration policy in post-WWII Europe and the US. It underscores the considerable influence media and political elite frames have on popular attitudes regarding immigration and, indirectly, immigration and human mobility policies. The chapter’s main insight is that the way immigration is primarily framed largely determines whether the subject is salient, and when so, how it influences human mobility considerations. Its central argument is that as the public safety and national security dimensions of immigration have become more salient, liberal states have adopted more expansive and restrictive policies.

This chapter introduces the puzzles, questions, and concepts permeating the book, and provides an organizational map of its causal logic. It delineates the major challenges to the liberal state’s capacity to regulate immigration in an insecure international and domestic security environment. First, it identifies the perceived threats posed by human mobility and immigration. Second, the chapter describes the migration trilemma confronting policymakers whenever market imperatives and liberal immigrant policies are perceived to be in tension with their responsibility to safeguard public safety. Third, it reconceptualizes the regulatory politics of immigration within a context of various issue paradigms and threat perceptions. It offers a neo-institutional analytical framework linking diverse policy-making logics, actors, and norms within which these empirical developments can be explained over time. It proposes these dynamics illuminate the relationship between threat context and immigration regulation, and delimits the normative parameters of policy whenever security concerns preoccupy the public’s thinking.

Chapter 4 investigates whether the public endorses the institutional and policy developments described in the previous chapter. It considers the ‘soft’ norms that legitimize the liberal state’s exclusionary immigration and human mobility policies. Utilizing public opinion data derived from the Gallup, Pew, European Social, Eurobarometer, European Value, and World Value Surveys, it finds that the expansive migration policy playing field and its restrictive immigration measures are endorsed by most Europeans and Americans, that is, the public prioritizes the strict regulation of immigration strictly even when, in the process, its civil liberties and those of migrants are contravened. It argues that the success of the liberal state’s immigration and human mobility policies not only depends upon the compliance and active cooperation of non-central state actors, but also derives from the public’s trust that the state and its surrogate immigration gatekeepers are acting on its behalf and in its interests.