Migration,Internal Security and the UK's EU Membership

A key part of the debate about the UK's membership of the EU is concern about levels of migration and the impact upon security. This paper assesses how much impact EU membership has on each of these issues, and examines the likely impact of leaving the EU in each of these areas.     

The European refugee crisis,party competition,and voters’ responses in Germany

Studies show that globalisation creates political potentials that can transform electoral competition in Western societies. The specific process of how these potentials become effective is not completely understood. It is argued in the article that attention-grabbing events can trigger the transformation of electoral competition as they force actors to take clear positions and thereby allow citizens to align their partisan preferences and policy attitudes. The article analyses the case of German parties’ reaction to the arrival of large numbers of refugees at Europe’s borders in 2015/16. Using panel data that bracket this event, it is shown how German citizens responded to party behaviour by changing partisan preferences on the basis of prior immigration attitudes. The so-called refugee crisis may thus have been a critical juncture transforming party competition in Germany. As such, the crisis represents a striking example of how events may focus attention on a new policy dimension and catalyse the evolution of new cleavages.     

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.     

Perceptions and Reality: Ten Things We Should Know About Attitudes to Immigration in the UK

Immigration is one of the most frequently covered issues in opinion surveys—but the volume and type of questions asked has actually obscured many of the key facts about our attitudes. This article summarises a year‐long project to draw together as much of the published polling as possible in one place, in as neutral a way as possible. The overall picture is one of genuine concern about immigration among a large proportion of the population—but more nuance on specific aspects, and a number of important gaps between perceptions and reality. Also highlighted are the increasingly polarised views on immigration between generations and different class and education groupings. The lower level of concern among younger generations and the growing graduate class suggests that immigration may be less of a concern in the future—but that the electoral weight of the more concerned older generations means that restrictive rhetoric and policy on immigration will be a key feature of the 2015 general election.     

Intergroup Prejudice in Multiethnic Settings

This article examines how out-group perceptions among Asian Americans, blacks, Latinos, and whites vary with the racial composition of their surroundings. Previous research on the contextual determinants of racial attitudes offers mixed expectations: some studies indicate that larger percentages of proximate out-groups generate intergroup conflict and hostility while others suggest that such environments promote interracial contact and understanding. As most of this research has been directed at black-white relations, the applicability of these theories to a multiethnic context remains unclear. Using data that merge the 1992–1994 Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality and 1990 Census, we find that in neighborhood contexts, interethnic propinquity corresponds with lower levels of out-group prejudice and competition, although intergroup hostility is higher in metropolitan areas with greater minority populations. Further tests suggest that these results do not occur from individual self-selection; rather ethnic spatial and social isolation bolster negative out-group perceptions. These findings suggest the value of residential integration for alleviating ethnic antagonism .     

Race,Islamophobia and the politics of citizenship in post-unification Germany

ABSTRACT

In the immediate aftermath of German reunification, as in the wake of the recent humanitarian crisis, Germany experienced notable ‘peaks’ of racist agitation and violence. In the 1990s, as today, the post-Communist eastern regions of Germany tend to be perceived as the hub of such racism. In this article, Lewicki revisits both ‘peaks’ via an examination of numerical evidence for verbal and physical racist violence in the former East and West of Germany. Rather than conceiving of racism as ‘cyclical’ or a specific legacy of the Communist dictatorship, her analysis suggests that political projects in Germany’s past and present have retained distinct structural incarnations of race. Far-right activists could thus successfully channel animosities resulting from the terms of unification into nationalist and racist resentment: momentarily more so in the East, but increasingly also in the West. The politics of citizenship, Lewicki argues, has provided a key means of perpetuating, reaffirming and cementing racialized hierarchies in the two post-war German states, but also in reunified Germany.     

What drives the polarisation and moderation of opinions? Evidence from a Finnish citizen deliberation experiment on immigration

In the study of deliberation, a largely under‐explored area is why some participants polarise their opinion after deliberation and why others moderate them. Opinion polarisation is usually considered a suspicious outcome of deliberation, while moderation is seen as a desirable one. This article takes issue with this view. Results from a Finnish deliberative experiment on immigration show that polarisers and moderators were not different in socioeconomic, cognitive or affective profiles. Moreover, both polarisation and moderation can entail deliberatively desired pathways: in the experiment, both polarisers and moderators learned during deliberation, levels of empathy were fairly high on both sides, and group pressures barely mattered. Finally, the low physical presence of immigrants in some discussion groups was associated with polarisation in the anti‐immigrant direction, bolstering longstanding claims regarding the importance of presence for democratic politics.     

Liberal Nationalism,Imagined Immigration and the Progressive Dilemma

The article critically evaluates liberal nationalist perspectives on immigration by drawing on findings from a qualitative research project undertaken in 2014 among White British interviewees in England. From one perspective the study's participants' attitudes seem to support arguments made by David Goodhart and other liberal nationalists regarding immigration, social trust and integration. However, further analysis suggests that these attitudes are to a very significant extent drawn first from partially imagined ideas surrounding immigration and second from potentially unreliable sources. These findings thus provoke the question of whether social trust and notions of a national community are actually being disrupted by immigration, or whether they are being disrupted by prejudiced nationalist and xenophobic perceptions about immigration and immigrants. The article will conclude by arguing for more nuanced research into attitudes towards immigration and in favour of a sceptical approach to nationalist frameworks for interpreting society and politics in Britain today.     

Invisible capitalism: political economy and the regulation of undocumented ­immigration in France

What explains the French government’s unwillingness to accept more legal immigrants or at least ignore those who enter or over-stay clandestinely? This paper answers this question by exploring the political economy and regulation of undocumented immigration in France during the 1990s. In light of a broad liberal and Marxist literature on the political economy of immigration, I argue that three ‘proximate determinants’ shape the regulation of undocumented immigration in France (a ‘Europeanized’ security agenda, ‘self-limited sovereignty’ and control of the labour market, especially informal employment). However, these proximate determinants do not necessarily excavate the social relations of power (that is political economy) which constitute the basis for policy making. I argue then that a return to the importance of the labour market (and thus the class and racial constitution of French society) is essential, but without a simple return to Marxist political economy. Instead, I suggest the value of ‘virtualism’ for carving out a new post-structuralist/‘postmodern’ political economy of immigration.     

Yes we can! Valence politics and electoral choice in America, 2008

The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the conventional wisdom of American politics. Despite the election’s undoubted significance, this paper argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections. Using data from the CCAP six-wave national election survey, we demonstrate that a valence politics model provides a powerful, parsimonious explanation of the ballot decisions Americans made in 2008. As is typical in presidential elections, candidate images had major effects on electoral choice. Controlling for several other relevant factors, racial attitudes were strongly associated with how voters reacted to the candidates. Other models of electoral choice, such as a Downsian issue-proximity model, are also relevant, but their explanatory power is considerably less than that provided by the valence politics model.     

International migration and liberal democracies: the challenge of integration

Migration theories that build on economic incentives and social network effects will generally predict much more international migration than we observe. We have to 'bring the state back in' to explain why so few potential migrations lead to actual flows, and why these flows are highly selective. Immigration policies have been strongly shaped by particular nation-building projects but the increasing diversity of origins in contemporary migrations has also challenged and transformed perceptions of national identity at the receiving end. Bauböck discusses the need for studying integration regimes from a comparative and normative perspective. He examines characteristic features of four regimes - the United States, Canada, Israel and the European Union - and defends a conception of integration that embraces the ambiguities of the term: it should be understood as referring to the inclusion of newcomers as well as to the internal cohesion of the societies and political communities that are transformed by immigration. These two meanings are combined in a third one of integration as federation: the process of forming larger political unions from distinct societies. Particularly in the context of the European Union integration policies for immigrants should live up to the same democratic principles that are invoked for the political integration of the EU. This suggests a European agenda for harmonizing the legal status of third country residents and their access to citizenship. Bringing the state back in makes us also aware that the transnational communities of migrants are no substitute for access, status and rights within territorially bounded polities. Instead of portraying migrants as harbingers of the end of the nation-state, we should rather think how to transform nation-states so that increasingly mobile populations can still share in political authority, a bounded territory and a common historical horizon. This perspective of integration is 'transnational' rather than 'postnational'. A transnational perspective does not envisage the dissolution of nation-states, but emphasizes instead that societies and cultures increasingly overlap both in space and time.     

Mainstreaming populist discourse: the race-conscious legacy of neo-populist parties in Australia and Italy

Curran examines the political legacy of far-right neo-populist parties in Australia and Italy. She argues that assessments of their ‘success’ need to extend beyond the electoral decline or organizational implosion of the parties themselves. An important measure of their impact is the influence they have exerted on mainstream political discourse and styles of communication. That they have been successful in having such an impact is well illustrated in the politically expedient adoption of race-conscious, anti-immigration and anti-asylum policies in Australia and Italy. Curran examines the influence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord (Northern League) on the mainstreaming of populist discourse in these two countries. She focuses on some of the populist themes and styles embraced by the Australian political leader John Howard and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi, and she concludes that, regardless of their political fragility or outright demise, these far-right neo-populist parties have been successful in injecting populist themes and prejudices into the mainstream political discourse in their respective countries.