ADMINISTRATIVE POLICY MAKING: ADJUDICATION BY THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS IN ASYLUM-RELATED APPEALS 1980–1987

This analysis examines the extent to which the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), from 1980 to 1987, complied with a new policy of Congress, set forth in the Refugee Act of 1980, which called for an elimination of bias in favor of aliens from hostile countries. Statistical analysis reveals that the BIA did not enforce the Refugee Act of 1980. I argue that Congress never intended to eliminate this bias since doing so would bring it into conflict with actors within the executive branch (including the President and the State Department) that have traditionally dominated policy-making relating to refugees and asylees. Instead, in the Refugee Act of 1980, Congress allowed these actors to retain control through a broad definition of "refugee" and by failing to clearly specify standards for political asylum and withholding of deportation. Simultaneously, Congress temporarily placated private and public "refugee rights" interest groups with statutory provisions that (presumably) eliminated the hostile country bias in U.S. refugee and asylum admis- sions, and granted increased federal aid to private organizations and units of state and local governments.     

The (im)plausibility of racism in Europe: policy frameworks on discrimination and integration

ABSTRACT

Rodríguez Maeso and Araújo analyse the reproduction of a dominant understanding of racism in policy discourses of integration and discrimination used by monitoring agencies in Portuguese and European Union (EU) institutional contexts. More specifically, they question the political concern over racism and discrimination vis-à-vis the idea of Europe ‘becoming increasingly diverse’ and the need to gather ‘evidence’ of discrimination. To that end, they examine periodic reports issued by EU monitoring agencies since the 1990s—paying specific attention to reporting on school segregation of Roma pupils in Portugal—and national integration policies and initiatives that, since the 2000s, have targeted mainly Roma and black families and youth. They argue that the dominant discourse of integration and cultural diversity conceives of racism as external to European political culture, and as a ‘factor’ of the ‘conflictive nature’ of social interactions in ethnoracially heterogeneous settings. This paves the way for calls for the ‘strengthening of social cohesion’—on the assumption that policy initiatives need to act on the ‘characteristics’ of so-called ‘vulnerable’ populations—whereas institutional arrangements and everyday practices remain unchallenged.     

No room at the inn: American responses to Australian immigration policies, 1946–54

ABSTRACT

After the Second World War, Australia introduced a new immigration policy based on the concept of ‘populate or perish’. Through the International Refugee Organization (IRO), 170,000 DPs migrated to Australia between 1947 and 1950, funded by the United Nations and the Australian government. Jews were largely excluded from this programme and the Minister for Immigration even prohibited the IRO from continuing to support the migration to Australia, based on family reunion, of individual Jewish survivors. In addition, the Australian government introduced other discriminatory policies that ensured that Jews remained only 0.5 per cent of the overall population. Based on archival research in the files of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society and the American Joint Distribution Committee, Rutland and Encel analyse the entrenched racism in Australian society that contributed to these policies, and the reactions of the American Jewish leadership to them.     

Resettling Refugees in Rural and Regional Australia: Learning from Recent Policy and Program Initiatives

Conscious policy and program support for the resettlement of refugees in regional and rural areas is a relatively recent trend in Australia. Resettlement is a complex process that hinges on the establishment of viable communities. This review suggests that its outcomes, especially for refugee communities, are potentially mixed. However, an appropriately resourced, well managed and well planned refugee resettlement program can potentially provide beneficial outcomes for refugees and host communities. This article draws on existing empirical data and contributions made at a VicHealth Roundtable in late 2007 to thematically explore the challenges facing rural and regional resettlement programs. Given that settlement is a dynamic process and the approaches to rural and regional settlement are evolving, this article provides 12 propositions for a more effective and integrated approach to policy and practice.     

‘Forever Temporary’: Migrants in Calais,Then and Now

This article examines two recent refugee crises in Calais: the debate around the Sangatte refugee camp, which was resolved in 2002, and the ongoing problems in Calais, which have been escalating since autumn 2014. It asks: why are these events repeating? What, if anything, has changed between 2002 and now? It points to a number of new developments since 2002, such as growing numbers of migrants worldwide, and a changing European political and legal landscape. But it also argues that a number of the same factors that led to the Sangatte crisis are still shaping events and responses in Calais today. They concern the persistent shortcomings of European states’ immigration controls, the failures to reach Europe‐wide and international agreements on migration, and the inadequacies of international bodies such as the UNHCR and the 1951 Refugee Convention which it upholds.     

Contending Tradeoffs: IRCA, Immigrants, and the Southern California Restaurant Industry

The impact of immigrant labor in the Service sector is best understood by focusing on the organization of production within firms and its effect on employer demand for labor. This analysis of the San Diego restaurant industry identifies a two tier occupational structure, where employers have selectively recruited undocumented immigrants to fill back-house positions. Conversely, the target hiring of the U.S.-born for visible front-house positions completes the cost-effective symmetry which has allowed this industry to flourish. Although the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) threatens this arrangement, its policy effectiveness remains extremely problematic.     

Immigration and the sociocultural divide in Central and Eastern Europe: Stasis or evolution?

Immigration has historically been of low salience in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, the region has consistently higher levels of ethnocentrism than the rest of Europe. Scholars argue that the East's limited politicization of immigration is due to its status as a region of emigration and the presence of ethnic minority ‘others’. I argue that this is changing. The politicization of the European refugee crisis by domestic elites has begun to refocus the sociocultural dimension on the immigration issue. Using structural equation models, I compare European Values Study data from 2008 and 2017 across 10 East European EU member states. I find evidence that traditionalist attitudes are more strongly related to anti-immigration attitudes since the crisis, particularly for those who are interested in politics. Further, immigration attitudes are polarizing across the GAL-TAN dimension and by education. Hence, immigration is bolstering a pre-existing, socially structured divide around both nationalist and traditionalist values.     

THE EXCLUSION OF ILLEGAL HISPANICS IN AGENDA-SETTING: THE IMMIGRATION REFORM AND CONTROL ACT OF 1986

In November of 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, designed primarily to control illegal Hispanic residents was signed into law. The new policy as implemented failed to remove, via legalization, illegal residents residing within the United States. The perspectives of Hispanic organiza- tions and 594 illegal residents were collected and evaluated to ascertain those variables that may have served to negate this public policy. The utilization of a subsequent qualitative and discriminant analysis indicated that the exclusion and/or lack of consideration given the perspectives of policy targeted groups and individuals in agenda setting, adversely affected the efficacy of the policy-making process, and thus, the laws it creates.     

Fighting Housing Discrimination in Europe

ABSTRACT

There is no exact European equivalent to the U.S. Fair Housing Act. The member states of the European Union (EU) have transposed into law the EU Racial Equality Directive of 2000 that prohibits discrimination in, among other things, access to the supply of goods and services, including housing, on the basis of race. Most housing discrimination case law so far comes from nonbinding decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and European Committee of Social Rights under the revised European Social Charter of the Council of Europe. This article explains how the European context of discrimination and segregation differs from the American, reviews the major legal conventions establishing equal rights in housing, protected classes, and key precedents. It discusses how mixing policies in social housing are the primary mechanism to reduce residential segregation in Europe. The special case of extreme discrimination against the Roma is presented, before concluding with some comparative observations.     

Climate change refugees

Under the UNHCR definition of a refugee, set out in the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, people fleeing their homes because of natural disasters or other environmental problems do not qualify for refugee status and the protection that come from such status. In a recent paper, I defended the essentials of the UNHCR definition on the grounds that refugee status and protection is best reserved for people who can only be helped by granting them refuge in a safe state for an indefinite period of time, and argued that this does not include most people fleeing from natural disasters. This claim is most strongly challenged by the possibility of displacement from climate change. In this paper, I will explore to what degree the logic of the refugee convention, as set out in my earlier paper, can and should be extended to those fleeing the results of climate change.     

Gender as catalyst for violence against Roma in contemporary Italy

ABSTRACT

Silvio Berlusconi's use of ethnicity and immigration as national security issues in his successful campaign for election to the Italian presidency in 2008 was by no means unique in contemporary Europe. What was surprising was the speed of his right-wing government's legislative restriction of migrants in the form of the so-called ‘security package’, first introduced just five weeks after the election. Woodcock explores the striking fact that this ‘security package’, and the intense wave of racist violence by Italians against Roma that it legitimized and encouraged, was proposed and justified in response to media reports of Italian babies being stolen by ‘Zingari’ from the ‘nomad camps’ and of Italian women being raped and beaten by Romanian men of ‘Zingari’ ethnicity. Gender and ethnicity are the twin constitutive discourses of modern European society, and racialized subjects are necessarily gendered. The stereotype of ‘dangerous black men sexually threatening white women’ has been mobilized in a vast range of European and colonial nationalist projects in order to justify the policing of both racialized masculine subjects and women as objects of the patriarchy. Similarly, the depiction of women as hysterical, sexually vulnerable objects in need of (white) masculine protection is an old story that the Italian media recognize as a fairy tale even as they reproduce the discourse. Woodcock explores what has not been mentioned thus far, namely, that gender stereotypes are vital to the mobilization of violent racism against the Roma in contemporary Italy, and how conservative gender binaries are strengthened and policed in a time of social crisis through the stereotyping of Roma as racial threat.     

The Externalities of Civil Strife: Refugees as a Source of International Conflict

Domestic strife and civil war frequently produce large population dislocations and refugee flows across national boundaries. Mass refugee flows often entail negative consequences for receiving states, particularly in developing countries. Moreover, civil violence frequently extends across national boundaries as “internal” conflicts are not constrained by borders. This article argues that refugee flows between states significantly increase the likelihood of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) in that dyad. Refugee‐receiving states are more likely to initiate MIDs as they intervene to prevent further externalities, and refugee‐sending states initiate MIDs as they violate borders in pursuit of dissidents. Moreover, this research challenges conventional theories of international conflict that focus exclusively on distributional bargains between states. These propositions are tested in a quantitative analysis of the relationship between refugees and MID initiation, 1955–2000. Results confirm that refugees significantly increase the probability of international conflict.     

Cross-national convergence in times of crisis? Integration policies before,during and after the refugee crisis

This article analyses if, how and why Scandinavian integration policies converged as a result of the refugee crisis in 2015, studying policies of permanent residence, citizenship, family reunification and access to social benefits. The analysis of policy processes finds that a logic of regulatory competition led to goal convergence, as all three countries explicitly adapted their policies relative to other countries’ policies. Nonetheless, when comparing the configuration of policy instruments and their settings, the cross-national gap persists as all three countries took restrictive steps, thus showing traits of path dependency. The conclusion discusses a severe challenge in the current policy convergence debate in the integration literature: how an insufficient level of precision (1) concerning different dimensions of the policies and (2) concerning how to assess convergence could lead to inaccurate and even opposite conclusions when interpreting empirical analyses.     

What does Brexit Mean for the UK's Climate Change Act?

This article examines the potential implications of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union (so‐called ‘Brexit’) for the success and survival of the country's flagship climate policy, the Climate Change Act 2008. The impact of a ‘soft’ and a ‘hard’ Brexit for the main features of the Climate Change Act are assessed, building on documentary evidence and elite interviews with key policy‐makers and policy‐shapers. The article argues that the long‐term viability of the Climate Change Act was being threatened even before the EU referendum, and that Brexit will do little to improve this situation. Even though the existence of the Climate Change Act is not under immediate threat, a range of issues presented by Brexit risk undermining its successful implementation.     

The European Union and Greece: Political Acceptability and Financial Transfers

In this paper a conceptual model is developed that relates loyalty to a community of countries to the material benefits derived from it, measured by the transfer of extra income. We argue that the extent of a country's welfare, and consequently its acceptance to participate in a community increase together with the latter's scope for influence on the former. We use the paradigm of Greece, which is one of the main recipient countries in the EU. It was found that financial transfers concerning regional policy affect in the long-run 'the acceptance of European integration' by the public in Greece while social policy funds appear to have short-run positive effects on public opinion.     

Managerialism, Politics and Legal Bureaucratic Rationality in Immigration Policy

Against claims that public sector reforms have made the functions of managers similar to those in private firms, critics of the managerialist model point to constraints on public sector managers that make their decisions on resource allocation and policy development different from those affecting corporations. Through an examination of policy formulation, program management and decision-making in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, this article demonstrates that managerialist program planning, outcome orientation and performance measurement have been introduced, but that this has not precluded an expansion in non-market oriented routine, non-discretionary decision-making involving bureaucratic legal rationality within a legislative and regulatory framework. While some clients have been defined and assessed in terms of economic criteria, they access departmental processing not in terms of market signals, but according to their compliance with the Migration Act and Migration Regulations. Managerialism has not occurred at the expense of classical administrative practices, rather managerialist and legal bureaucratic forms have both grown and influenced political calculations on policy-making.     

The scope of exclusionary public response to the European refugee crisis

We know from previous research that an exclusionary reaction in public opinion is likely following a sudden and large-scale influx of refugees of the sort experienced in many European countries in 2015. Yet, we know much less about the scope of these expected reactions. This article makes a conceptual and empirical contribution to the analysis of the scope of exclusionary reactions following a refugee crisis. Conceptually, we distinguish between three scope dimensions: substantive reach, duration and politicization. Empirically, we evaluate each of the scope dimensions using seven-wave panel-data collected before, during and after the large-scale influx of refugees to Norway. We find that the expected exclusionary reaction (a) spilled over to opinion about immigration broadly speaking; (b) endured in that it lasted long after the situation in Norway had been brought under control; (c) encompassed voters of all political stripes. Nevertheless, we also document an important limitation to the scope of the reaction: The sudden influx of refugees to Norway did not cause a permanent shift in public opinion. Approximately two years after the situation had been brought under control, opinion about both refugee rights and immigration generally had reverted back to pre-crisis baseline levels. Interestingly, the conceptual and empirical analysis suggests that public opinion dynamics following a sudden and large-scale influx of refugees is similar to that found in response to other forms of large national or international crises.     

Mexican migration policies after IRCA

The evolution since 1964 of Mexican government policy regarding migrant workers in the US is discussed. For a decade after the "bracero" program was terminated by the US, the Mexican government attempted to encourage creation of another legal framework for migration, regarded as inevitable whether legal or clandestine. Around 1974-75, a more distant attitude, termed the "policy of no policy," acquired considerable support in Mexican government and academic circles. The no-policy strategy allowed Mexico to achieve certain objectives regarding migration without prompting US intervention in its internal affairs, as for example by a linkage of US migration policy to specific Mexican government actions. The 1986 passage of the US Immigration Reform and Control Act effectively ended the no-policy strategy that had allowed the Mexican government to count on the continued emigration of Mexican workers without compromising its position of promoting respect for migrant rights. The unilateral change in the status quo by the US led to substitution of the "policy of dialogue," a clear signal of the Mexican government's search for a new migration agreement. The policy of dialogue has entailed greater discussion of the two traditional Mexican objectives regarding migration. Some progress has apparently been made concerning migrant rights, but the second and less explicit objective, that of preventing abrupt changes in US immigration policy and in migratory flows, is harder to judge. The atmosphere of freer public debate in Mexico is politicizing migratory policy.     

Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ Speech: Fifty Years On

Fifty years ago, Enoch Powell made what still is one of the most notorious speeches in postwar British politics. Its tone was shocking for its use of inflammatory references to ethnic minority immigrants. Immigration continues to be divisive and references to it by politicians inevitably lead to comparisons with Powell. The aim of the collection is to examine Powell's speech from a number of perspectives, exploring how it was viewed both by contemporaries and in the light of subsequent developments. The objective of this article is to examine Powell's motivations, impact and legacy.