This book offers a systematic exploration of the changing politics around immigration and the impact of resultant policy regimes on immigrant communities. It does so across a uniquely wide range of policy areas: immigration admissions, citizenship, internal immigration controls, labour market regulation, the welfare state and the criminal justice system. Challenging the current state of theoretical literature on the ‘criminalisation’ or ‘marginalisation’ of immigrants, this book examines the ways in which immigrants are treated differently in different national contexts, as well as the institutional factors driving this variation. To this end, it offers data on overall trends across 20 high-income countries, as well as more detailed case studies on the UK, Australia, the USA, Germany, Italy and Sweden. At the same time, it charts an emerging common regime of exploitation, which threatens the depiction of some countries as more inclusionary than others. The politicisation of immigration has intensified the challenge for policy-makers, who today must respond to populist calls for restrictive immigration policy whilst simultaneously heeding business groups’ calls for cheap labour and respecting legal obligations that require more liberal and welcoming policy regimes. The resultant policy regimes often have counterproductive effects, in many cases marginalising immigrant communities and contributing to the growth of underground and criminal economies. Finally, developments on the horizon, driven by technological progress, threaten to intensify distributional challenges. While these will make the politics around immigration even more fraught in coming decades, the real issue is not immigration but the loss of good jobs, which will have serious implications across all Western countries. This book will appeal to scholars and students of criminology, social policy, political economy, political sociology, the sociology of immigration and race, and migration studies.

Many of America's greatest artists, scientists, investors, educators, and entrepreneurs have come from abroad. Rather than suffering from the "brain drain" of talented and educated individuals emigrating, the United States has benefited greatly over the years from the "brain gain" of immigration. These gifted immigrants have engineered advances in energy, information technology, international commerce, sports, arts, and culture. To stay competitive, the United States must institute more of an open-door policy to attract unique talents from other nations. Yet Americans resist such a policy despite their own immigrant histories and the substantial social, economic, intellectual, and cultural benefits of welcoming newcomers. Why? In Brain Gain, Darrell West asserts that perception or "vision" is one reason reform in immigration policy is so politically difficult. Public discourse tends to emphasize the perceived negatives. Fear too often trumps optimism and reason. And democracy is messy, with policy principles that are often difficult to reconcile. The seeming irrationality of U.S. immigration policy arises from a variety of thorny and interrelated factors: particularistic politics and fragmented institutions, public concern regarding education and employment, anger over taxes and social services, and ambivalence about national identity, culture, and language. Add to that stew a myopic (or worse) press, persistent fears of terrorism, and the difficulties of implementing border enforcement and legal justice. West prescribes a series of reforms that will put America on a better course and enhance its long-term social and economic prosperity. Reconceptualizing immigration as a way to enhance innovation and competitiveness, the author notes, will help us find the next Sergey Brin, the next Andrew Grove, or even the next Albert Einstein.

The fourth edition of this classic work provides a systematic, comparative assessment of the efforts of major immigrant-receiving countries and the European Union to manage migration, paying particular attention to the dilemmas of immigration control and immigrant integration. Retaining its comprehensive coverage of nations built by immigrants—the so-called settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand— the new edition explores how former imperial powers—France, Britain and the Netherlands—struggle to cope with the legacies of colonialism, how social democracies like Germany and the Scandinavian countries balance the costs and benefits of migration while maintaining strong welfare states, and how more recent countries of immigration in Southern Europe—Italy, Spain, and Greece—cope with new found diversity and the pressures of border control in a highly integrated European Union. The fourth edition offers up-to-date analysis of the comparative politics of immigration and citizenship, the rise of reactive populism and a new nativism, and the challenge of managing migration and mobility in an age of pandemic, exploring how countries cope with a surge in asylum seeking and the struggle to integrate large and culturally diverse foreign populations.

How should Western democracies respond to the many millions of people who want to settle in their societies? Economists and human rights advocates tend to downplay the considerable cultural and demographic impact of immigration on host societies. Seeking to balance the rights of immigrants with the legitimate concerns of citizens, Strangers in Our Midst brings a bracing dose of realism to this debate. David Miller defends the right of democratic states to control their borders and decide upon the future size, shape, and cultural make-up of their populations. “A cool dissection of some of the main moral issues surrounding immigration and worth reading for its introductory chapter alone. Moreover, unlike many progressive intellectuals, Miller gives due weight to the rights and preferences of existing citizens and does not believe an immigrant has an automatic right to enter a country...Full of balanced judgments and tragic dilemmas.” —David Goodhart, Evening Standard “A lean and judicious defense of national interest...In Miller’s view, controlling immigration is one way for a country to control its public expenditures, and such control is essential to democracy.” —Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker

This dissertation studies different issues of the political economy of immigration. Chapter 1 studies whether the empirically higher fertility of immigrants could help explain political support of immigration by a majority of native young workers in overlapping generation models with production and capital accumulation. Immigration represents a dynamic trade-off for native workers as more immigrants decrease current wages but for sufficiently high fertility rates of immigrants, inflows of immigration can increase the future return on savings, in which case there is political support for immigration. Different games are considered and it is found that these policies can be politically sustainable, and they imply redistribution of welfare across generations.

The political economy of punishment suggests that the evolution of punitive systems should be connected to the transformations of capitalist economies: in this respect, each 'mode of production' knows its peculiar 'modes of punishment'. However, global processes of transformation have revolutionized industrial capitalism since the early 1970s, thus configuring a post-Fordist system of production. In this book, the author investigates the emergence of a new flexible labour force in contemporary Western societies. Current penal politics can be seen as part of a broader project to control this labour force, with far-reaching effects on the role of the prison and punitive strategies in general.