Political scientist Antje Ellermann presented a theoretical framework for comparing how immigration policy is made in different countries.
by Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications
UCLA International Institute, December 4, 2014 — Antje Ellermann, an associate professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, spoke about the politics of immigration policy at UCLA in mid-November. Her lecture was organized by the
UCLA Program on International Migration.
The comparative politics of policy making
Ellermann presented a work in progress, the goal of which is to develop a theoretical framework for comparing immigration policy making across countries and over time. Her research is based on four qualitative case studies of major post-World War II immigration initiatives in Germany, Switzerland, Canada and the United States, respectively. To date, she has completed two of the four case studies.
Her analytical framework addresses economic and family migration policy only, excluding asylum/refugee immigration, illegal immigration and citizenship policy. Its specific focus is immigration control policy — that is, the rights and status of legal immigrants.
Ellermann purposely chose two guest-worker countries (Germany and Switzerland) and two “settler” countries (Canada and the United States) for the case studies. “I wanted to get at the potential significance of these very different stories and legacies in explaining today's policy choices,” she remarked. The four cases offer examples of immigration policy via legislation and via regulation, as well as of immigration reform failures and reform successes.
Defining the framework
Ellermann’s analytical framework makes the outcome of policy making (defined as either policy stasis or policy change) the dependent variable; and institutional, strategic and ideational factors, the independent variables. “Process tracing,” she said, “is a very self-conscious exercise of saying these are the processes causing change – linking my independent variables – and this is what I would expect to see if I’m right about how the variables operate.”
Institutional variables. Drawing on the work of Ellen Immergut of Humboldt University in Berlin, Ellermann defined her institutional variables as the
“policy arenas” through which immigration policy making must pass. Those arenas may be executive, legislative and/or judicial institutions and, in Switzerland, the electoral arena.
Of note, the judicial arena exists primarily in European countries whose constitutions permit parliaments to submit legislation for constitutional review (“concrete review”) without the need to initiate a court case.
The importance of an arena lies in its ability to function as a veto point in the policy-making process, which Ellermann traced to its degree of societal insulation. That is, the degree to which policy makers in a given policy arena are insulated from popular and/or interest group pressure determines whether or not the arena can be used to inhibit a proposed policy or policy reform.
Citing the work of Gary Freeman, the speaker noted that public opinion is generally “restrictionist” (i.e., national populations seek to limit immigration). Public opinion data consistently indicate that popular pressure to restrict immigration is greater during times of economic downturn, when reforms promote low-skilled immigration and, in Europe at least, when immigration concerns non-white, non-Christian immigrants.
The speaker stressed that cultural differences — the perceived distance between a host society and an immigrant (potential or already present) — represented a significant non-material factor that affects public opinion. In fact, European data indicate that cultural factors are more powerful in predicting popular attitudes toward immigration than are economic factors, with popular hostility to immigration rising as perceived cultural differences widen.
Ellermann also referred to Freeman’s cost-benefit analysis, which concludes that actors who favor immigration (particularly employers) are more likely to mobilize to influence immigration policy because immigration imposes concentrated benefits, but diffuse costs.
Interest group pressure in immigration policy making is thus expected to be “expansionist” (i.e., seeks to open up immigration to select groups). In European corporatist systems that give labor unions a guaranteed role in the policy-making process, however, that expansionism will be somewhat restrained.
Strategic variable. Arena shopping, the attempt by political actors to move policy making into the arena where they have the greatest chance of achieving their goals, is the strategic variable in Ellermann’s framework.
Here the assumptions are that populist groups will try to shift policy making into the electoral arena; organized business, into the executive or legislative arenas; state actors (defined as policy makers who seek to restrict immigration or block liberalizing reform), to the electoral arena. In political systems that permit concrete constitutional review, political opposition parties may opt to shift policy to the judicial arena.
Ideational variable. Ellermann argued that a country’s past choices in immigration policy, or “immigration paradigm,” creates an ideational legacy that has a lasting impact on immigration policy because it creates the boundaries within which policy choices are judged viable or non-viable.
This ideational variable operates through cognitive and political mechanisms. The first consists of the mental maps of policy makers — the lens through which they look at immigration issues. The second concerns whether or not policy choices are considered legitimate in a given national context. The self-reinforcing logic of both mechanisms over time explains why radical immigration policy change is relatively rare, said the speaker.
Ellermann’s model expects a country’s immigration paradigm to change as the result of either failure-induced policy learning or a changed external environment. The latter, she explained, creates an unmistakable gap between a country’s policy paradigm and the external environment. This circumstance typically results in a radical paradigm shift that alters the principal assumptions of the previous immigration policy, but only after long and broad-based policy debate or in the case of elite consensus.
Applying the framework: Case study of Switzerland
Ellermann used two snapshots of immigration policy making in modern Switzerland to illustrate her framework.
In the first case, Switzerland’s executive arm, the Federal Council, instituted a guest worker system in 1948 via bilateral treaties with 16 European countries (the legislature was not involved in the negotiations). The country was experiencing significant worker shortages and Swiss employer associations were extremely influential in lobbying for worker recruitment, indicating that the executive arena had low insulation from interest group pressure.
Unlike other countries that adopted guest worker policies after the war, Switzerland strictly controlled guest worker settlement by permitting only seasonal worker rotation and prohibiting family reunification. This policy choice was the result of “failure-induced policy learning” on the part of Swiss policy makers, who sought to avoid the large-scale settlement of foreign workers produced by the country’s open border policy in the second half of the 19th century.
In the period between the 1860s and 1914, foreign workers and their families were permitted freedom of movement in Switzerland. The resulting influx of permanent foreign residents sparked popular fears of “over-foreignization” of the country. Consequently, the country’s immigration paradigm after World War II shifted from open-door liberalism to a strict seasonal rotation regime.
By the early 1960s, Swiss employers were pushing for more guest worker recruitment to meet the demands of a booming economy. Italian workers were at the time the most popular across Europe and in order to compete for them, the Swiss government needed to adjust its anti-settlement policy.
After contentious negotiations with the Italian government over the course of three years, the Swiss Federal Council sought to amend the country’s existing treaty with Italy (without legislative participation) to permit a graduated pathway toward permanent residence for foreign workers. This change would, Ellermann pointed out, undermine the ideational paradigm on which the original treaty was based.
The government’s strategy of arena shopping, with the Council attempting to keep immigration policy making in the executive arena, failed. The parliament, in its first-ever debate on immigration, put conditions on the proposed treaty modifications — agreeing to ratify the latter in return for numerical ceilings on immigrant workers at the firm level.
Popular pressure on the government grew throughout the 1960s, as a series of popular initiatives forced the government more than once to implement higher ceilings on immigrant workers. At the end of the decade, the Schwarzenbach Initiative (the "National Action against Over-Foreignization of Nation and Home”) mobilized the populace around an electoral initiative to limit foreign workers to 10 percent or less of the national population. (A case of arena shopping by the opposition, which moved policy making into the electoral arena.)
If passed, the electoral initiative would have drastically reduced the foreign work force and exacted serious economic consequences. So the Federal Council opted to change Swiss immigration policy via regulation. The Global Ceiling System of 1970 imposed a nationwide quota on the number of immigrant workers admitted each year. When the government committed to upholding the system regardless of whether or not the initiative passed, the latter was rejected by 54 percent of the vote.
In the question-and-answer period, the speaker was several times pressed to more precisely define the terms “immigration policy” and “immigration paradigm,” as well as to consider whether her framework could be disproved. It was also pointed out that the Italian government and Italian workers themselves — variables external to her model — had played an important role in changing Swiss immigration policy in the 1960s.
Ellermann agreed that these external variables were important, saying she had been unable to define them methodologically in a way that would permit their application across countries. She said the discussion and feedback sparked by her provisional findings would inform her continued work, noting, “That’s the point of talking about a work in progress— I will think on this.”
Antje Ellermann has published two articles on her current research: “Do Policy Legacies Matter?”(Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, forthcoming) and “When Can Liberal States Avoid Unwanted Immigration?” (World Politics 6, no. 3 (2013): 491–538).
Published: Thursday, December 4, 2014
