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…
EU Refugee Policies and Politics in Times of Crisis: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives
Phenomena such as civil war, protracted conflict, and deteriorating internal security, especially in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Asia, have triggered massive departures of civilian populations in recent years. The war in Syria alone has displaced over 5 million people (UNHCR, 2017a). While most of these forced migrants are either internally displaced or remain in Syria’s immediate neighbourhood, the numbers of those trying to come to Europe have steeply increased in 2015 and 2016. In each of these two years more than 1.2 million asylum-seekers submitted their asylum claims in the EU (Eurostat, 2017a), as compared to 625,000 in 2014 (Eurostat, 2015, p. 4). This represents the larges…
The global economic crisis as a critical Juncture? The crisis's impact on migration movements and policies in Europe and the US
The current global economic crisis has resulted in the strongest recession in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries since the Great Depression in the early 1930s and the 1970s oil shocks. This special issue sets out to explore how the most recent economic crisis impacted immigration and immigration-related policy in the United States of America and in European countries that are part of the OECD. The crisis of the late 2000s was offset by the collapse of the subprime US housing market, destabilising the financial system and leading to a sovereign debt crisis. The shock was marked by a “sudden […] deterioration of most, or all, key macroeconomic indicator…
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…
Norms matter! The role of international norms in EU policies on asylum and immigration
Abstract This Article investigates how international norms impact on eu asylum and immigration policy. To this end we scrutinize the assumption that the robustness of international norms indicates the quality of eu integration. Drawing on international norms literature we argue that four characters define an international norms’ robustness: specificity in definition, binding force, coherence with domestic law and international law, and concordant understanding among actors. Our analysis covers three eu policy areas, asylum policy, family reunification policy, and labour migration policy. Across the three areas international norms had varying degrees of robustness at the time of eu negotiat…