Circumventing deadlock through venue-shopping: Why there is more than just talk in US immigration politics in times of economic crisis
This article addresses the question of how the financial and economic crisis that hit the US in the late 2000s impacted immigration policies. We find that the crisis has not significantly changed dynamics. Instead, it has highlighted and aggravated persisting trends. Drawing on Kingdon’s multiple streams model and combining it with the notion of two-level games, we find that while the policy stream and the problem stream would call for both restrictive and liberalising changes, the political stream impedes change: The fact that Congress has been divided for a long time over Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) impedes any restrictive or liberalising changes. With problems resulting from c…
Regional Mobility Spaces? Visa Waiver Policies and Regional Integration
Visa policies today are a central instrument for filtering wanted and unwanted types of travellers, leading to a hierarchy of mobility rights. While there is evidence of a “global mobility divide”, we still know little about the role of regional integration when it comes to the distribution of mobility rights and the (re)structuring of mobility spaces. Against this background, the paper examines the structure of visa relations in different bodies of regional integration (EU, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, ECOWAS, EAC, NAFTA, SADC and SICA). In this article, we compare visa policies in the member states of these institutions in 1969 and 2010 from a social network perspective. While one would generally exp…