Private Actors and Public Opinion in Migration Regulation in Europe and the US

• In Event: Visa Regimes and Non-State Actors in Border Control

Abstract

This paper argues that the framing of immigration as a security threat has prompted liberal democratic states to enlist private and non-central state actors, adopt special legal regimes and enforcement strategies that transcend the normal decision-making processes and politics in ways that undermine human mobility and rights. Based on various sources of evidence, including longitudinal public opinion and elite surveys, discourse analyses, as well as policy tracing, the analyses suggest that over the last 20 years, as migration has become increasingly associated with public safety and physical security, citizens are more likely to support non-state actors in the service of restrictions on human mobility. Contrary to the conventional scholarly wisdom of globalists (Bhagwati 2003; Hollifield 1992; 2008; Sassen 1996), contemporary liberal national states and policy-makers can exercise considerable control over immigration and human mobility flows because they are sanctioned by their consensual and threatened domestic publics to adopt these modes of implementation that compromise the liberal values and norms that underpinned state immigration and human mobility policy during most of the post-WWII period.

Author

• Gallya Lahav, Stony Brook University