This chapter sums up the book’s key theoretical claims and empirical findings and then explores the extension of its argument beyond the cases examined in the empirical chapters. It first applies the argument to additional migration-related policy areas, including asylum, refugee resettlement, migration control, immigrant integration, and citizenship policy. The chapter then ventures beyond the national level of policy making by using the insulation framework to shed light on the logic of immigration policy making in the European Union, followed by subnational policy making. The chapter concludes with an appraisal of the future politics of immigration policy.

Chapter 4 situates changing immigration and citizenship policies within a larger crisis of liberalism. I defend Francis Fukuyama`s (1989) much-ridiculed claim that the “liberal idea” (yet not practice) is without competitor today. However, internal deficiencies of “liberal meritocratic capitalism” (Milanovic 2019), most importantly the elite-generating and -insulating principle of meritocracy itself, will continue to feed a populist challenge. This challenge, paradoxically, is fought more on the cultural than the economic terrain, and liberals are well-advised not to follow the populists into it too quickly. I close with the question what a “liberal” immigration and citizenship policy, unimpeded by the “nexus”, might look like, and the answer is: not much different from the policies that are in place today.