How can public opinion change in a pro-immigration direction? Recent studies suggest that those who support immigration care less about it than those who oppose it, which may explain why lawmakers do not enact pro-immigration reforms even when voters are pro-immigration. To see if the personal issue importance of immigration can be changed, I conducted a probability-based, nationally representative US survey experiment (N = 3,450) exposing respondents to verifiable arguments about the broad national benefits of expanding legal immigration and the costs of not doing so. Using new measures of issue importance, my descriptive results show that only one-fifth of voters who prioritize the issue have a pro-immigration preference. Furthermore, while anti-immigration respondents prioritize policies regarding law enforcement and (reducing) future immigration, pro-immigration respondents prioritize (helping) immigrants already here. The experimental results confirm that the provided arguments raised immigration’s importance among pro-immigration voters but did not backfire by mobilizing anti-immigration voters. Contrary to expectations, the arguments increased pro-immigration policy preferences, but did not change voters’ subissue priorities within immigration or their willingness to sign a petition. Overall, the treatment was effective beyond changing minds by shifting stated issue positions and priorities in a pro-immigration direction. It can thus be used in a nontargeted information campaign to promote pro-immigration reforms.

We study the effect of an immigration ban on the self-selection of immigrants along cultural traits, and the transmission of these traits to the second generation. We show theoretically that restricting immigration incentivizes to settle abroad individuals with higher attachment to their origin culture, who, under free mobility, would rather choose circular migration. Once abroad, these individuals tend to convey their cultural traits to their children. As a consequence, restrictive immigration policies can foster the diffusion of cultural traits across boundaries and generations. We focus on religiosity, which is one of the most persistent and distinctive cultural traits, and exploit the 1973 immigration ban in West Germany (Anwerbestopp) as a natural experiment. Through a diff-in-diff analysis, we find that second generations born to parents treated by the Anwerbestopp show higher religiosity.

One of the most immediate effects of the Russian war against Ukraine was the unprecedented influx of Ukrainian refugees in some countries. This article analyzes temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees in two countries—the Czech Republic and Poland, which represent the countries most exposed to immigration from Ukraine. The authors compare the political and legal response of both countries to the institute of temporary protection to reveal similarities and differences in the scope, tools, and nature of temporary protection, including causes and consequences. Both countries go beyond the minimum standards set in the EU Temporary Protection Directive and differ in their approach to its implementation. The authors claim that although the concept of temporary protection has expanded with the current situation, it allows significant benefits in allowing fast-track integration into the labor market, which aligns with the concept of refugees’ “deservingness.” However, the duration of temporary protection is a major limitation to refugees’ integration due to the emphasis on voluntary return to the country of origin.

This article analyzes the so-called “humanitarian corridors” put in place by the Ecuadorian government as part of a domestic policy to move Venezuelan migrants out of Ecuador. Within this context, the author examines the concept of the humanitarian corridor from the perspective of international law, and demonstrates that Ecuador's corridors did not serve the purpose for which they were allegedly created.

Many countries use employer-sponsored visas to regulate migrant worker recruitment. By tying each sponsored migrant to a single employer, employer-sponsored visas have contributed to problems of workers being underpaid and mistreated. Through a critical assessment of temporary visas in Australia, particularly the Temporary Skill Shortage visa, and an analysis of relevant Australian and international literature, we argue that employer-sponsored visas are fundamentally flawed in their design and should be replaced. We consider various alternative options to employer sponsorship for regulating migrant worker recruitment before proposing the creation of a ‘mobility visa’, which would allow migrant workers to move freely between employers. We argue a mobility visa is a superior model for protecting worker equity and voice while also helping to address labour market needs.

In Western European welfare states, research shows that support for welfare chauvinism, or the notion that welfare benefits for immigrants should be restricted, is highest among white, blue-collar working-class voters. On the other hand, higher-educated, middle-class voters are more likely to reject welfare chauvinism and support the inclusion of immigrants into the welfare state. For social democratic parties, this might pose an electoral dilemma between generous welfare states and open borders: They rely on both middle- and working-class constituencies and are ideologically tied both to a universal welfare state and the protection of (national) workers. To what extent does such an electoral dilemma between classes exist for social democratic parties? How do social democratic parties solve this dilemma when in government? In this paper, we postulate that a class divide around welfare chauvinism exists within the electorate for social democratic parties and that these parties’ policies in government reflect these divides: If the social democratic electorate has a high share of working-class voters, they should act more welfare chauvinist than if their electorate is mostly middle class. We test these hypotheses by combining survey and macro-level policy data in 14 Western European countries from 1980 to 2018. We find consistent evidence of the existence of a working-class/middle-class divide regarding welfare chauvinism, even within social democratic electorates. On the macro-level, we find partial evidence that social democratic parties in power respond to the class demands of their electorate: They are less welfare chauvinist when they have a higher proportion of middle-class voters, whereas their working-class vote share does not significantly condition their policies at all, contrary to assumptions in the literature. We therefore conclude that as social democratic parties become parties of the middle classes, the likelihood that they will retrench immigrant welfare rights reduces.

Previous scholarship has shown that experience with public policies can affect citizens’ willingness to participate in politics. However, few studies have examined whether the effect of experience with policy is moderated by existing policy environments. We focus on the impact of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and examine how it affects foreign-born Latinos’ political orientation and behavior. We find a relationship between enrollment in DACA and political orientation and that the effect on participation is moderated by the intensity of enforcement in an immigrant’s county of residence.

This article presents an historical and comparative analysis of the bargaining power and agency conferred upon migrant workers in Australia under distinct policy regimes. Through an assessment of four criteria – residency status, mobility, skill thresholds and institutional protections – we find that migrant workers arriving in Australia in the period from 1973 to 1996 had high levels of bargaining power and agency. Since 1996, migrant workers’ power and agency has been incrementally curtailed, to the extent that Australia’s labour immigration policy resembles a guest-worker regime where migrants’ rights are restricted, their capacity to bargain for decent working conditions with their employers is truncated and their agency to pursue opportunities available to citizens and permanent residents is diminished. In contrast to recent assessments that Australia’s temporary visa system is working effectively, our analysis indicates that it is failing to protect temporary migrants at work.

Labor Secretary Frances Perkins championed liberal immigration policies between 1933 and 1940. Some efforts were successful, but most were not due to political, economic, and social constraints on immigration policy making, especially in Congress. Yet, she reorganized the enforcement functions of her department when she created the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Narratives abound about the period, though few delve into this reorganization. In this article, I share an analytical framework that I developed, “policy innovation through bureaucratic reorganization,” to explain how Perkins temporarily eased the debarments, as well as deportations, of newcomers by adjusting agency resources, including staffing, budget, and infrastructure. I describe how she responded to pressures from immigration restrictionists by tightening these functions. My narrative adds to the literature on immigration policy history, which has not fully appreciated the role of bureaucratic reorganization. This research bolsters the perspective in political control theory that bureaucratic structure merits as much attention as does legislation as a tool for control.

Why do some authoritarian states adopt more restrictive immigration policies than others? Much of the existing literature focuses on the politics of immigration in democracies, despite the presence of large-scale immigration to autocracies. In this article, I argue that the level of electoral competition can be a key factor in immigration policymaking in electoral autocracies. Autocrats who face high levels of electoral competition tend to impose immigration restrictions as a way of mobilizing anti-outgroup sentiment and boosting their own popularity. I test this hypothesis by conducting comparative case studies on Russia and Kazakhstan, both of which are major immigrant-receiving autocracies. Based on the analysis of original data gathered from 11 months of fieldwork in the two countries, I find that the relatively high level of electoral competition in Russia in the 2010s facilitated increased immigration restrictions, while Kazakhstan depoliticized labour immigrants and enacted a de facto open immigration policy in the absence of electoral competition.

Why do politicians and policymakers not prioritize pro-immigration reforms, even when public opinion on the issue is positive? This research note examines one previously overlooked explanation related to the systematically greater importance of immigration as a political issue among those who oppose it relative to those who support it. To provide a comprehensive empirical assessment of how personal immigration issue importance is related to policy preferences, I use the best available cross-national and longitudinal surveys from multiple immigrant-receiving contexts. I find that compared to pro-immigration voters, anti-immigration voters feel stronger about the issue and are more likely to consider it as both personally and nationally important. This finding holds across virtually all observed countries, years, and alternative survey measures of immigration preferences and their importance. Overall, these results suggest that public attitudes toward immigration exhibit a substantial issue importance asymmetry that systematically advantages anti-immigration causes when the issue is more contextually salient.

As early as 1704, noncitizen immigrants were legally allowed to vote in what would become the United States. By the end of the eighteenth century, noncitizens could legally vote in most states. State lawmakers offered the franchise as an incentive for white, male, Europeans of working age to migrate. However, rising immigration and nativism led states to reconsider alien suffrage, as noncitizen voting was known, and alien suffrage nearly disappeared by the 1840s. Revived by territorial expansion, demands for cheap labor, urbanization, racism, and sexism, alien suffrage expanded in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, peaking a century after the nation’s founding. However, resurgent nativism, wartime xenophobia, and corruption concerns pushed lawmakers to curtail noncitizen voting, and citizenship became a voting prerequisite in every state by 1926.