Comments on “Modes of Immigration Politics in Liberal Democratic States”

The unassuming, unpolemical tone of Gary Freeman's article in some respects is overmodest and misleading. In its quiet way, the article sharply challenges conventional liberal wisdom about immigration policymaking. The conven? tional view is that immigration policymaking in Western liberal democracies, especially in Western Europe, is highly restrictive, driven by populist politi? cians seeking electoral advantage by appealing to the latent or manifest xenophobia of a disgrunded citizenry. While acknowledging the restrictive contours of immigration policy in Western Europe, of which he has been a keen analyst since his pioneering 1979 comparative study of France and Britain, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies, Freeman paints a fundamentally different picture of the underlying dynamics governing immigration policymaking in liberal democracies. There is much in Freeman's analysis with which I agree. Rather than dwell on these points of agreement, however, I want to raise some questions about the scope and explanation of the characteristics of immigration policymaking that Freeman identifies as common to liberal democracies. When, where and why do these commonalities exist? Consider first the temporal scope of the putative commonalities. Some of the features of immigration policymaking discussed by Freeman, I will argue, are period-specific and must be explained historically, by contextual rather than generalized structural features of liberal democratic politics. Another aspect of temporal scope involves cyclical time. Freeman observes that both business cycles and immigration cycles cycles linked to the development and maturation of immigration flows have some bearing on immigration policymaking, but does not develop this argument. To the extent that the characteristic features of immigration policymaking change over either or both of these cycles, they again cannot be attributed to the workings of liberal democratic politics as such. A fuller theoretical argu? ment would have to specify the interaction between structural features of liberal democratic politics and the temporal logic of economic and immigration cycles. A further dimension of scope is spatial. The issue here is the scope of commonality across groups of countries (such as the three groups examined by Freeman), across countries within groups, and within countries (especially