2 - Courting the Top, Fending-off the Bottom

Summary

Chapter 2 lays out the dual thrust of immigration policy in the neoliberal era, which is to “court” high-skilled immigrants and to “fend off” all sorts of presumably (but not legally) low-skilled migrants, including family migrants. But the heart of the chapter examines the role of immigration in the populist storm. While immigration has been central to both Brexit and Trump, it has been central in different ways. Brexit, though driven by hostility to large-scale intra-EU migration, does not challenge the structure of (neo)liberal immigration policy—it will even make British policy more universalistic because cleansed of favoritism for other Europeans. By contrast, Trump`s immigration policy breaks with the “antipopulist norm” that Gary Freeman, in a classic paper (1995), held constitutive of a liberal immigration policy. Germany during and after the 2015 Syrian Refugee Crisis is an interesting negative case of stubbornly holding liberal course, though inadvertently fueling populism at home and abroad.