Immigration and European Politics

Immigration is among the most transformative experiences of postwar Europe. It has reoriented political parties, restructured the European party system, and given birth to new political parties, namely far-right exclusionary populist parties. Alongside these political changes, immigration presents innumerable social and economic challenges that have forced political elites to face hard questions about national belonging, economic growth, and demographic realities in aging nation-states. Reflecting the scale of this challenge, there are several branches of scholarship that strive to understanding and contextualize immigration in the European political landscape. There are three, general areas of immigration-related fields: immigration policy, immigration politics, and migrant politics. Immigration policy studies examine the rules and procedures that facilitate the entry, settlement, integration, and citizenship of a migrant. This is an admittedly maximalist definition—one can reserve the term “immigration policy” merely to the process and dynamics of admission. Yet, the reality of immigrant-related policy design and implementation shows policies as joined-up, aligned, and mutually reinforcing. As such, “immigration policy” incorporates all policies that address the condition of and consequences of migration. This body of work traditionally examines political, economic, and social determinants of policy and the effects of immigration policy on a variety of attitudinal and behavior outcomes, among both immigrant and native populations. The second group of scholarship looks at immigration politics. This body of work considers how political parties and elections structure and mobilize around immigration issues and saliency. Work within this strand may range from studying public opinion and electoral data to interviews that capture elite or other stakeholder (e.g., firm) preferences. This strand stretches across multiple levels of analysis, from the very local—like neighborhoods and city blocks, to regions, to national politics, to the supranational European Union. A final strand of literature looks at migrant politics. These are studies that look specifically at the formation of political identity, migrant political behavior, and migrant representation. Of course, these three strands of immigration studies are not mutually exclusive and often overlap, e.g., studies on how policies affect immigrant political behavior. Immigration politics is a critical factor shaping domestic politics and foreign policy alike. As immigration continues to fundamentally transform the European political space—immigration from both within Europe and without—we identify a number of critical pieces that help shape our understanding of this transition here to which scholars that seek to understand European politics today ignore at their own peril.