Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective

This text is a systematic, comparative, multidisciplinary study of immigration policy and policy outcomes in nine industrialized democracies: the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Japan. It has two central theses. The first, the convergence hypothesis, is that there is a growing similarity in immigration policy, results, and public reaction within these nine countries. The second thesis, the gap hypothesis, argues that the gap between the goals of immigration policy and its outcomes is wide and growing wider. Beyond testing these hypotheses against new evidence, the book seeks to explain the declining effectiveness of immigration control measures in todays labour-importing democracies. In each of the country profiles, the author explains why certain measures were chosen, and why they usually failed to achieve their stated objectives.