Pathways from September 11: Politics, Policy, and State Sovereignty in an Age of Terror

My nascent book project seeks to identify and assess the effectiveness of European state strategies since September 11, 2001, to navigate the policy contradictions raised by the securitization of immigration. Framing my research is a nearly universal dilemma for politics and policy in a post-September 11 international and domestic security environment: Is the liberal state’s traditional role as the guarantor of the physical safety of its citizens reconcilable with its pursuit of expansive immigration policies and inclusive immigrant incorporation policies? While I cannot answer this question definitively, I hope to illuminate the broad parameters of states' policy making freedom under the unfavorable domestic and transnational security conditions within Europe and, by extension, other advanced industrial democracies including the United States. Although not an entirely new phenomenon, the conflation of immigration with international terrorism and the framing of immigrants as societal “enemies” (Faist 2002; Tsoukala 2005) in political discourse across post-September 11 Europe have brought the challenge of reconciling the contradictions embedded within what had been a fairly stable immigration policy equilibrium. During most of the post-WWII period, this policy equilibrium was comprised of three discreet dimensions: economic—securing an adequate and appropriate supply of foreign workers; societal— successfully incorporating immigrants into the host societies and facilitating good social relations with native populations; and physical safety—safeguarding Europe’s external borders and deterring transnational crime. Indeed, until September 11, European political elites were more or less secure in assuming that each of the dimensions of contemporary immigration policy—labor immigration policy, immigrant incorporation policy, and border control policy—could be formulated and implemented in relative isolation; that is, decisions on one policy dimension did not much intersect or circumscribe decisions made along others. With the inclusion of immigration-related issues in a new European “security continuum” (Aradau 2001), however, the veracity of this premise has been challenged. Specifically, terrorism now suggests that the liberal state’s commitment to expansive immigration and generous immigrant incorporation policies possibly conflict with its core responsibility to safeguard the physical safety of its citizens. Against this backdrop my project poses a central research question: What are the broad implications of the securitization of immigration for the capacity of individual states to pursue coherent and self-interested immigration and immigrant policies (Messina 2007)? Embedded within this question are five interrelated puzzles: (1) Why has the securitization of immigration affected the three dimensions of the immigration policy equilibrium unevenly? (2) Why has the securitization of immigration influenced the course of domestic politics more profoundly in some major countries than others? (3) Why have the major immigration-receiving states responded differently to the challenges posed by securitization of immigration? (4) Why has the degree to which immigration has been securitized fluctuated within some countries? (5) Why have immigration issues become securitized at the EU level? One of my working hypotheses is that the capacity of European states to pursue coherent and self-interested policies, while challenged by September 11 and its aftershocks, has not been severely compromised. This said, depending upon national historical experiences and domestically-based political assets and factors, they appear to retain different capacities to reconcile the contradictions posed by the three dimensions of immigration in a post-September 11 environment. Among the aforementioned historical experiences, I hypothesize, is a state’s pre-September 11 experience with, and policy responses to, domestic terrorism (Macleod 2006; Schain 2007). As currently conceived, the book will include chapters on the major and direct impacts that post-September 11 security-related events have had on national and EU immigration and immigrant policy regimes; the political (as opposed to the policy) responses of a select number of European governments to the securitization of immigration; the pre and post-September 11 patterns (i.e., liberal/ illiberal, inclusive/exclusive, etc.) of European political elite opinion; the post-September 11 trajectory of European public opinion on key issues pertaining to immigration and immigrant incorporation; and the influence of extra-governmental actors, and especially extreme right political parties, on domestic politics and policy before and after September 11. The project departs from previous scholarship on the securitization of immigration and its public policy implications in at least three respects. First, it is not centrally concerned with the motives driving contemporary state immigration policies (Rudolph 2006) or the effects of the securitization of immigration on settled immigrant groups. Second, it will juxtapose the respective trajectories of elite and public opinion on immigration-related issues over time. A few works excepted, previous scholarship has focused on trends in either elite or public opinion or, alternatively, it has been limited to only a couple of points in recent time. Finally, it will carefully scrutinize the validity of the widely-disseminated, but hitherto empirically unsubstantiated, supposition that immigration politics and policies in Europe have been fundamentally altered by the “focusing event” of September 11 (Levy 2005).