The inconsistency of immigration policy: the limits of “Top-down” approaches

ABSTRACT

To what extent can we infer government objectives from policies on paper? We show that this assumption in migration scholarship is problematic because most states adopt immigration policies that are inconsistent, combining or alternating between contradictory objectives. Further, we develop a measure to track how immigration policy inconsistency varies over time. We use these methods to demonstrate that some of the main theories of policy inconsistency, which focus on variables located at the national scale, find limited empirical support. Based on these findings, we make the case for further research into the local scale of politics, focusing on the agency of street-level bureaucrats and migrants. We then discuss the potential for crossing quantitative and qualitative divides in order to further explore the impact of local factors on national immigration policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration policy
• Inconsistency
• State capacity
• Mixed methods
• Micro-politics
• Scale

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Evelyn Ersanilli, Anja Karlsson Franck, Audie Klotz, Agnes Kvistborg and Abbey Steele for their generous comments on previous drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Scale” refers to the nested hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size, such as the local, regional, national and global (Delaney and Leitner 1997, 93). Scales are relatively discrete spatial containers of political behaviour and phenomena, which tend to feature specific sets of actors, dynamics and norms (Brenner 2001, cf. Marston, Jones III, and Woodward 2005).

2 Helbling et al. define “restrictiveness” as “the extent to which a written policy mandates the limitation or liberalization of the rights and freedoms of immigrants” (2017, 88).

3 We also are not interested in contrasts between the restrictiveness of policies in different countries. Hence, we did not interpret differences between aggregate measures of policies at the regional or global scale as inconsistency.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was developed through funding received from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (406.22.SW.046), Vetenskapsrådet (DNR: 2019-05443), and the Transnational Configurations of Conflict and Governance Programme Group at the University of Amsterdam.