This project attempts to identify the various ways in which the projection of state power on the international scene can be affected by global migration patterns. It begins by examining some key aspects of state power that might be influenced by migration, and then assessing the impact that migration might have on those aspects. It closes by analyzing the ways in which these changes might alter state power and behavior, and proposing some areas for future research in this topic. / text

Following the precedent decision to expand the power of immigration enforcement set by the Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g), the Department of Homeland Security developed its own partnership agreement with local police to increase detection and deportation efforts through its 2008 policy, Secure Communities (S-Comm). S-Comm represents the nation’s “largest expansion of local involvement in immigration enforcement in the nation’s history” (Cox & Miles 2013, pg. 93). Although slated to enhance public safety by removing “criminal aliens” convicted of serious offenses, S-Comm has broaden its scope to achieve attrition in the undocumented immigrant population more generally by also focusing on the removal of those who violate low-level and immigration laws, as well as those who have recently entered the U.S. illegally. Its implementation and enforcement procedures, however, have been found to disproportionately target foreign-born Mexican residents relative to other undocumented individuals, which may lead to negative consequences for S-Comm’s efficacy. Has S-Comm effectively reduced the size of the Mexican immigrant population in the U.S.? Exploiting the variation in the timing of its implementation as well as the disparate levels of its enforcement, my research extends a quasi-experimental design to investigate S-Comm’s effect on the size of local Mexican immigrant populations. Testing the influence of S-Comm’s implementation and enforcement will reveal the salience of passing laws that target unauthorized migration—an empirical contribution to previous work that has only assessed state and local policies. Moreover, such results may also enhance theoretical knowledge of punitive practices formulated to produce deterrence. / text

This dissertation studies migration and remittances through a macroeconomic framework. In the first chapter, I compare the impact of national and regional borders on the migration decisions of agents. Migration between regions within a country is observed to be higher than migration between countries; moreover, both types of migration respond similarly to differences in economic opportunities. These observations are analyzed with the aid of a symmetric two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with labor mobility. The model is solved using dynamic programming and estimates of the latent cost of crossing borders are obtained through the method of simulated moments. The results show that the mean moving cost associated with crossing an international border is more than twice that of crossing a regional border. One important consequence of this high cost is that the mere presence of a national border decreases aggregate welfare by about 0.15% in terms of annual consumption for countries such as Sweden and Denmark. In the second and third chapters, I analyze how remittances by emigrants to their home countries affect welfare, consumption, savings, investment and the structure of production between traded and non-traded sectors in developing economies. For both these chapters, I solve a macroeconomic model with an endogenous remittance decision. However, while the second chapter considers remittances driven by investment or savings motives, the third chapter considers altruistic remittances. / text

This thesis looks at justice and home affairs (JHA) policy-making in the European Union (EU). JHA refers to those areas which have traditionally been the domain of interior and justice ministries on the national level and which are now dealt with on the EU level on the basis of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and includes areas such as immigration and asylum, visa policy and police co-operation. In short, this thesis aims to examine why the governments of the member states chose to start co-operating on these issues within the EU, what the nature of this co-operation is and what does it tell us about the EU in general. The thesis looks firstly at the forms of JHA co-operation prior to the TEU and how this led to the national governments deciding to give it a Treaty basis within the EU. There is then an account of how the negotiations on the TEU developed and resulted in JHA being governed by a set of Treaty provisions quite different to those for other policy areas. This is followed by two case studies looking in detail at how JHA policy was made after the TEU entered into force; these deal with visa policy and immigration and asylum. To help in this, two theoretical approaches, taken from political science studies of European integration, are used, namely neofunctionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism. These allow us to identify the extent to which the same processes and factors influence JHA policy-making as in more traditional areas of Community policy-making, and allow for conclusions to be drawn on what JHA policy-making can tell us about wider issues of European integration.

Most migration literature shows that skilled professionals have upward social mobility. But all of this literature is mostly about men. Plus, it focuses on individuals who are already on the job market. How immigrant women fare in the labor market and what about women who are still not incorporated into the high wage sector are seldom discussed. This research shows that professional migrant women face downward mobility. With limited job opportunities, as a result of having both visible barriers (legal constraints) and invisible barriers (culture, language, social network, credential and so on), the high-achieving migrant women become more "traditional" in the United States. Their roles as wives, mothers, part-time workers, volunteers take on a bigger aspect of their lives than their professional lives. In Taiwan they were far more active in the sphere of the economy, earning an independent income, but in the U.S. that is reversed. The experiences of these educated migrant women demonstrate that immigration does not uniformly empower migrants nor does it imply upward economic and social mobility. The study hopes to be the basis for further investigations of upper middle class migrant women in other areas in the America, and hopes to be the basis for future development to understand migrants’ downwards mobility in general. / text

This report explores the confluence of history, demographics, law, culture, national identity and human aspirations that frame immigration politics in Austria through the plight of a teenage girl named Arigona Zogaj who was forced to leave Austria after an eight-year fight to stay. / text

All populations present the historian with certain questions. Their origins, the date of their arrival, their reason for coming and finally, how they came - all demand explanation. The population of Ulster today, derived mainly from Scotland, far from proving an exception, personifies the problem. So greatly does the population of Ulster differ from the rest of Ireland that barbed wire and road blocks periodically, even now, demark the boundaries between the two. Over three centuries after the Scots arrived, they still maintain their differences from those who Inhabited Ireland before them.

The European Union expanded from its first conceptualization as an economic union hedging possible German expansion to encompass policy areas traditionally controlled by the state. One of these areas—immigration and asylum—is closely associated with ideas of state identity and citizenship, and is an area in which states have been unwilling to cede control. Two member states—Italy and Spain—have many similarities, one of which is significant issues in regard to large and undocumented migration but, despite that, took quite different policy directions vis-à-vis the EU’s proposed immigration and asylum norms. This research examines Italy and Spain using Knill and Lehmkuhl’s mechanisms of Europeanization during three policymaking timeframes in order to determine how and why these states have taken divergent paths. This thesis found that different mechanisms were used during different periods and that counterintuitive to expected findings, the weakest mechanism is dominant during the current era.

Through an in-depth study of the Canadian case, this thesis demonstrates how a loss of control over national borders can result from liberal-democratic state efforts to restrict the rights of non-citizens. It argues that the gaps created between certain fundamental due process and equality rights and state control practice increase the risk of policy failure by opening up avenues along which the authority and capacity of the state can be challenged effectively---by encouraging rights-based politics, irregular migration, and administrative inefficiencies. Part I provides an overview of recent international migration trends, followed by a detailed examination of the liberal-democratic control literature, identifying three biases---restrictionist, domestic-statist, and historical---that obscure the state's role in the creation and perpetuation of control problems. In response, this thesis employs an analytic framework rooted in the concept of the universe of political discourse to trace the evolution and interaction of two competing perspectives that have defined Canadian control policy debates and developments since Confederation, Liberal Internationalism and Liberal Nationalism, each of which posits a different relationship between the rights of non-citizens and the state. Part II presents a thorough account of Canadian control policies towards immigrants and refugees from 1867 to 1965, and reveals that the proposed link between rights-restrictive policies and control problems has deep liberal-democratic roots in Canada. Part III focuses on Canadian policies towards asylum seekers from 1965 to 1988, and demonstrates the central role that the state's rights-restrictive approach played in the creation, breakdown, and replacement of the country's first inland refugee status determination system. Parts II and III are based on an extensive examination of published Canadian government documents, and secondary materials from the fields of history, legal studies, and politics, among other sources. In a concluding chapter, it is argued that by giving greater conceptual and empirical clarity to control, the findings presented in this thesis are of continued relevance to the study of control policies---contemporary or historical---in Canada and other liberal democracies.

The European refugee problem between 1933 and 1947 posed serious difficulties for the nations of asylum. Despite the trend towards immigration restriction, France and the United States remained the foremost countries of refuge and resettlement during the interwar years. The overwhelming numbers of refugees, however, tested their tradition of asylum, and both nations failed that tradition from the humanitarian point of view. / During the 1930's, the French harried the Americans for refusing to aid and resettle the refugees from France, complicating the diplomatic relations between the two countries. Disagreements over the proper handling of refugee affairs continued throughout the war years. After the war, the Americans and the French concluded that their disagreements postponed a successful solution to the refugee problem, and by 1947 they had embarked on a more cooperative refugee relationship through the auspices of the United Nations.