Crime Story: The role of crime and immigration in the anti-immigration vote

Some scholars have found that mass immigration fuels the success of anti-immigration parties, whereas others have found that it does not. In this paper, we propose a reason for these contradictory results. We advance a set of hypotheses that revolves around a commonly ignored factor, crime. To test these hypotheses, we examine a setting where an anti-immigration party, the LPF, participated in simultaneous elections in all Dutch municipalities, which form a single constituency. According to our results, the impact of immigration rates on the individual vote for the LPF only manifests itself among those voters who are very ‘tough on crime’. In addition, we demonstrate that high local crime rates make an anti-immigration vote more likely, but only among voters who are very ‘tough on immigration’. This suggests that immigration and crime rates do not make all citizens more likely to cast an anti-immigration vote, but only those who perceive a link between the two issues. Thus, if one wishes to reduce anti-immigration leaders’ electoral support, countering their criminalization of immigrants may be a more fruitful strategy than trying to stop immigration – if at all possible.     

赖昌星“难民”案的法律分析

赖昌星携家人潜逃加拿大后,向加拿大移民部提出了"难民"申请,由于加拿大难民制度完善而复杂,该案也一波三折。本文就赖昌星"难民"案所涉及的加拿大难民法律制度、该案争讼的焦点和该案目前的进展与前景做了简要介绍和分析。     

Falling from the sky

Back examines the human costs of immigration policy through recovering the stories of the desperate stowaways who are literally falling out of the skies over London. Some 3,000 people have died trying to gain entry to Europe. These are the human costs of contemporary forms of immigration policy. Back attempts to problematize the ways in which the global movement of people is understood within an immigrant/host framework. He argues for an alternative way of thinking about the movement of people, culture and imagination in the context of globalization.     

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.     

Long- and short-term determinants of party preferences: Inter-generational differences in Western and East Central Europe

In this paper we study differences between generations in the degree to which long-term and short-term factors affect party preferences in established and consolidating European democracies. Scholarly literature has shown that younger cohorts in Western Europe are less likely to be guided by social class, religion and left/right than older cohorts. Little is known, however, about the extent to which such differences exist for the effects of short-term factors. Similarly, inter-generational differences in the effects of long- and short-term factors in post-communist countries have remained largely unexplored. Based on the European Election Study 2009, we show differences between generations that are compatible with de-alignment of younger generations along traditional cleavages. Yet, we also see an increased importance of attitudes towards immigration among the younger generations, which could signal a form of re-alignment.     

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.     

ISFG: Recommendations on biostatistics in paternity testing

The Paternity Testing Commission (PTC) of the International Society for Forensic Genetics has taken up the task of establishing the biostatistical recommendations in accordance with the ISO 17025 standards and a previous set of ISFG recommendations specific to the genetic investigations in paternity cases. In the initial set, the PTC recommended that biostatistical evaluations of paternity are based on a likelihood ratio principle – yielding the paternity index, PI. Here, we have made five supplementary biostatistical recommendations. The first recommendation clarifies and defines basic concepts of genetic hypotheses and calculation concerns needed to produce valid PIs. The second and third recommendations address issues associated with population genetics (allele probabilities, Y-chromosome markers, mtDNA, and population substructuring) and special circumstances (deficiency/reconstruction and immigration cases), respectively. The fourth recommendation considers strategies regarding genetic evidence against paternity. The fifth recommendation covers necessary documentation, reporting details and assumptions underlying calculations. The PTC strongly suggests that these recommendations should be adopted by all laboratories involved in paternity testing as the basis for their biostatistical analysis.     

Economic conditions and populist radical right voting: The role of issue salience

In this article, we show with the European Election Study from nine Western European countries that issue salience of the economy and immigration contributes to our understanding of the puzzling relation between economic conditions and populist radical right support. In countries with relatively weak or worsening economic conditions, the economy is considered more salient, whereas immigration loses salience – also compared to other issues. Voters who perceive the economy as most important problem are less likely to opt for the populist radical right than people who perceive immigration or even other issues as most important. Populist radical right parties appear to not only win votes on the immigration issue, they also lose votes on the economic issue. Finally, in contrast to actual economic conditions, negative perceptions of the economy increases populist radical right voting, despite stronger salience of the economy and partly due to stronger salience of immigration compared to other issues.     

The Moral Community and Immigration

In “Which American Dream Do You Mean?” David Stoll never justified his assumption that Guatemalans who want to immigrate to America have a moral claim on our attention. The “conversation” he describes really involves only Americans as only they are held responsible for immigration. Some advocates justify immigration on the basis of rights while others appeal to compassion, but both assign all responsibility to rich Americans and none to the sending societies. A huge moral asymmetry separates the West, which is assumed capable of achieving civic values from the non-West, which is not. Americans hunger for a more candid conversation about how to distribute the responsibility for immigration. That is essential to legitimizing immigration policy and preserving the civic character of American society.     

Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in Asia and the Pacific: a quantitative assessment of current theoretical models beyond western countries

This article empirically assesses the validity of current theoretical models of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper takes representative data from the World Values Survey and implements a multilevel model to test five of the main theories in the literature: the human capital theory, the social capital theory, the political orientation theory, the contact/group threat theory and the economic competition theory. The results from the analysis lend credence to the important effects of human capital, social capital and political-ideological variables on respondents’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy. However, the results provide mixed and weak evidence for the contact/group threat theory and the role of economic determinants. Importantly, economic determinants tend to be more powerful in shaping people's attitudes toward immigration policy than shaping attitudes toward immigrants as people. Altogether, this article sheds new light on the validity of current theoretical models based on western countries for other areas of the world. Finally, the results from the paper also support the usefulness of non-economic, as opposed to purely economic, models in the understanding of individuals’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the Asia-Pacific region.