The politicization and framing of migration in West Africa: transition to democracy as a game changer?

"The politics of immigration in liberal democracies exhibits strong similarities that are, contrary to the scholarly consensus, broadly expansionist and inclusive. Nevertheless, three groups of states display distinct modes of immigration politics. Divergent immigration histories mold popular attitudes toward migration and ethnic heterogeneity and affect the institutionalization of migration policy and politics....I begin by discussing those characteristics of immigration politics found in all liberal democracies. I then investigate the distinctive modes of immigration politics in the three subsets of Western democratic states with distinctive immigration histories. I conclude by considering whether these three patterns will persist or how they might change as a result of future migration pressures and the further institutionalization of immigration politics and policies in Europe." Comments by Rogers Brubaker (pp. 903-8) and a rejoinder by the author (pp. 909-13) are included.

This article explores why liberal states accept unwanted immigration, discussing the cases of illegal immigration in the United States and family immigration in Europe. Rejecting the diagnosis of state sovereignty undermined by globalization, the author argues that self-limited sovereignty explains why states accept unwanted immigration. One aspect of self-limited sovereignty is a political process under the sway of interest-group politics (“client politics,” as Gary Freeman says). The logic of client politics explains why the United States accepts illegal immigration. The case of family immigration in Europe suggests two further aspects of self-limited sovereignty: legal-constitutional constraints on the executive, and moral obligations toward historically particular immigrant groups. However, these legal and moral constraints are unevenly distributed across Europe, partially reflecting the different logics of guest worker and postcolonial immigration regimes.

Starting from a critique of protest event and political discourse analysis, we propose an extended methodological approach that has the quantitative rigor of event analysis but also retrieves the qualitative discursive elements of claims. Our political claims approach extends the sample of contentious actions beyond protest event analysis by coding institutional and civil society actors, and conventional and discursive action forms, in addition to protests by movement actors, This redefines the research object to acts of political claims making in a multi-organizational field. We use examples from a research project on mobilization about migration and ethnic relations in Britain and Germany to demonstrate the analytic gains that are possible with our approach. By situating protest and social movements, not just theoretically but also methodologically, in a wider context of political claims making, we are in a better position to follow the recent calls for more integrated approaches, which place protest within multi-organizational fields, link it to political opportunities and outcomes, and are sensitive to discursive messages.