Natter Katharina
Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Comp Migr Stud. 2018;6(1):4. doi: 10.1186/s40878-018-0071-9. Epub 2018 Mar 1.
How do political systems shape immigration policy-making? Explicitly or implicitly, comparative politics and migration policy theories suggest a 'regime effect' that links specific dynamics of immigration policy to liberal democracy. The literature's dominant focus on so-called 'Western liberal democracies', however, has left the 'regime effect' largely untested and research on variations and similarities in immigration policymaking across political systems strikingly undertheorized. This paper challenges the theoretical usefulness of essentialist, dichotomous categories such as Western/non-Western or democratic/autocratic and calls for a more nuanced theorizing of immigration policy-making. It proposes a two-dimensional classification of immigration policy theories, distinguishing between 'issue-specific' theories that capture immigration policy processes regardless of the political system in place and 'regime-specific' theories whose insights are tied to the characteristics of a political system. The paper also advances the 'illiberal paradox' hypothesis to explain why illiberal, autocratic states may enact liberal immigration policies. This theoretical expansion beyond the 'Western' and 'liberal' bubble is illustrated by an analysis of immigration policy-making in 21st century Morocco and Tunisia. Showing how domestic and international institutions, interests, and ideas shape immigration policy-making in Morocco's monarchy and Tunisia's democratic transition, the paper investigates the broader role of political systems in immigration politics and herewith seeks to contribute to a more general and global theorization of immigration policies.
政治制度如何塑造移民政策制定？比较政治学和移民政策理论明确或含蓄地提出了一种“体制效应”，即将移民政策的特定动态与自由民主联系起来。然而，文献主要聚焦于所谓的“西方自由民主国家”，这使得“体制效应”在很大程度上未经检验，而且关于不同政治制度下移民政策制定的差异和相似性的研究在理论上也明显不足。本文对诸如西方/非西方或民主/专制等本质主义、二分法范畴的理论效用提出质疑，并呼吁对移民政策制定进行更细致入微的理论化。它提出了一种二维的移民政策理论分类，区分了“特定问题”理论和“特定体制”理论，前者捕捉移民政策过程而不考虑现有政治制度，后者的见解则与政治制度的特征相关。本文还提出了“非自由悖论”假说，以解释非自由、专制国家为何可能制定自由的移民政策。对21世纪摩洛哥和突尼斯移民政策制定的分析说明了这种超越“西方”和“自由”范畴的理论扩展。通过展示国内和国际机构、利益和观念如何塑造摩洛哥君主制国家和突尼斯民主转型过程中的移民政策制定，本文考察了政治制度在移民政治中的更广泛作用，并试图为更普遍和全球化的移民政策理论化做出贡献。
