Crossing Borders Fiona B. Adamson · 2020. 6. 24. · 3. Fiona B. Adamson, “Globalization, International Migration, and Changing Security Interests in Western Europe,” paper presented

International migrationhas moved to the top of the international security agenda. Increasingly, policy-makers in the United States, Europe, and around the world are making linksbetween migration policy and national security. Much of this discussion hasfocused on migration ºows as a conduit for international terrorism. The abilityof nineteen hijackers from overseas to enter, live, and train in the United Statesin preparation for carrying out attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pen-tagon could not but raise concerns regarding the relationship between thecross-border mobility of people and international terrorism. Since the attacksof September 11, 2001, the management of migration has become a top na-tional security priority for the United States, with concerns about migrationhelping to drive the largest reorganization of the U.S. government since thepassage of the National Security Act of 1947.1

Even before the September 11 attacks, however, interest in the relationshipbetween globalization, migration, and security had emerged both in the policyworld and in some areas of the security studies ªeld.2 Migration was high onthe European security agenda throughout the 1990s.3 The bombings in Madrid

Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders Fiona B. Adamson

International Migration andNational Security

Fiona B. Adamson is Director of the Program in International Public Policy and Assistant Professor ofInternational Relations at University College London.

A version of this article was presented at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies workshop“Globalization and National Security,” on June 11–12, 2004, at Harvard University. The authorthanks the organizer of the workshop, Jonathan Kirshner, and the workshop participants fortheir helpful suggestions. In addition, she is grateful to Nora Bensahel, Alexander Cooley, PeterLiberman, Pieter van Houten, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions ofthis article.

1. Since March 1, 2003, immigration and border control have fallen within the purview of the De-partment of Homeland Security; in January 2004 the Department of Homeland Security rolled outthe new US-VISIT program, which began to introduce biometric technology at all U.S. immigra-tion and border control points.2. See, for example, Roxanne Lynn Doty, “Immigration and the Politics of Security,” SecurityStudies, Vol. 8, Nos. 2/3 (Winter 1998/99–Spring 1999), pp. 71–93; Keith Krause and Michael C.Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1997); Myron Weiner, “Security, Stability, and International Migration,” International Secu-rity, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter 1992/93), pp. 91–126; Myron Weiner, ed., International Migration andSecurity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993); and Myron Weiner, ed., The Global Migration Crisis: Chal-lenges to States and to Human Rights (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).3. Fiona B. Adamson, “Globalization, International Migration, and Changing Security Interests inWestern Europe,” paper presented at the Ninety-ªfth Annual Meeting of the American Political

International Security, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Summer 2006), pp. 165–199© 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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on March 11, 2004, and in London on July 7, 2005, only reinforced already-existing fears regarding the links between migration and terrorism in Europe.Earlier incidents, such as the 1995 bombings of the Paris metro system byAlgeria’s Armed Islamic Group and attacks in various Western Europeanstates in the 1990s by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, had already raised con-cerns regarding the relationship between migration and security.

Some scholars have noted that the end of the Cold War and bipolarity hashelped to transform both the nature and the function of national boundaries inways that increasingly securitize migration and lead to a greater policing ofnational borders.4 In addition, concerns about the security impacts of massiverefugee ºows and the roles that mobilized diasporas play in fueling violentconºicts around the globe were being discussed long before September 11.5

Moreover, migration and migrants have a long history of being viewed asclosely linked to national security concerns. States have traditionally forgedtheir national immigration policies in response to their security and economicinterests.6 In the United States and other countries, migrants have all too oftenbeen viewed as national security threats during times of war or crisis because

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Science Association, Atlanta, Georgia, September 2–5, 1999; Sarah Collinson, Europe and Interna-tional Migration (London: Pinter, 1994); Jef Huysmans, “The European Union and the Securitiza-tion of Migration,” Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 38, No. 5 (December 2000), pp. 751–777;Jef Huysmans, “Contested Community: Migration and the Question of the Political in the EU,” inMorten Kelstrup and Michael C. Williams, eds., International Relations Theory and the Politics ofEuropean Integration: Power, Security, and Community (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 149–170; PeterJ. Katzenstein, “Regional Orders: Security in Europe and Asia,” paper presented at the Thirty-ninth Annual International Studies Association Convention, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 17–21, 1998; and Ole Waever, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup, and Pierre LeMaitre, eds., Identity, Migra-tion, and the New Security Agenda in Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993).4. Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UniversityPress, 2000); Peter Andreas and Timothy Snyder, eds., The Wall around the West: State Borders andImmigration Controls in North America and Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleªeld, 2000);Didier Bigo, Polices en réseaux: L’Expérience Européene (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1996); DidierBigo, “Security, Borders, and the State,” in Paul Ganster, Alan Sweedler, James Scott, and WolfDieter-Eberwein, eds., Borders and Border Regions in Europe and North America (San Diego, Calif.:San Diego State University Press, 1997), pp. 81–104; and Malcolm Anderson and Monica den Boer,eds., Policing across National Boundaries (London: Pinter, 1994).5. Aristide R. Zolberg, Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conºict and the Refu-gee Crisis in the Developing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Gil Loescher, BeyondCharity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1993); Weiner, International Migration and Security; Barry R. Posen, “Military Responses to RefugeeDisasters,” International Security, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 72–111; Mary Kaldor, New andOld Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); andPaul Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conºict and Their Implications for Policy,” Working Paper(Washington, D.C.: World Bank, June 15, 2000).6. Christopher Rudolph, “Security and the Political Economy of Migration,” American PoliticalScience Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (November 2003), pp. 603–620.

of the possibility that they may possess dual political loyalties or represent a“ªfth column” in a conºict.7

Scholars in mainstream security studies have often dismissed such concernsas insigniªcant or as issues limited to matters of domestic politics and policy.Yet international security scholars and policymakers are ªnding it increasinglydifªcult to ignore the relationship between migration and security in a highlyinterconnected world deªned by globalization processes. Globalization ischanging the overall environment in which states operate, including how theyformulate their security policies. The management of international migrationºows is one area in which policymakers are having to weigh the costs andbeneªts of particular policies with an eye to their overall implications for inter-national security, in addition to their implications for other policy areas, suchas social welfare and economic growth. To assess the implications of any par-ticular set of migration policies for national security, however, it is ªrst neces-sary to understand the ways in which migration ºows can potentially help orhinder states’ security interests.

This article provides a framework for thinking about the relationship be-tween international migration and national security by surveying how cross-border migration ºows affect state interests in three core areas of nationalsecurity concern: state sovereignty, or the overall capacity and autonomy ofstate actors; the balance of power among states; and the nature of violentconºict in the international system.8 A focus on traditional national security in-terests does not imply that such interests should always trump other factorsrelating to migration, or that a state-centric framework is the only lens throughwhich to view the relationship between migration and security. Migration andmigration policies are also closely intertwined with issues relating to individ-ual and human security. While human security and national security para-digms need not necessarily be diametrically opposed, each does suggest aparticular analytical lens through which one can assess the security impacts ofinternational migration ºows.9 For the purposes of this discussion, the focus isrestricted to the impact of migration ºows on the security interests of stateactors.

The rest of this article is organized into four main sections. In the ªrst

Crossing Borders 167

7. A prime example of this would be the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.8. For discussion of these categories in relation to the broader phenomenon of globalization, seeJonathan Kirshner, ed., Globalization and National Security (New York: Routledge, 2006).9. For an analysis of the human security paradigm, see Roland Paris, “Human Security: ParadigmShift or Hot Air?” International Security, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 87–102.

section, I discuss the relationship between globalization and international mi-gration, providing a brief overview of the volume, types, and causes of con-temporary migration ºows. I examine the various categories of phenomenathat the terms “international migration” and “mobility of people across na-tional borders” refer to. To reach general conclusions regarding the impact ofmigration and human mobility on national security, it is necessary to ªrst ac-knowledge that people cross borders for a variety of reasons and that statesgenerally devise immigration policies to encourage some forms of bordercrossing and not others. The general impact of migration on national securitytherefore depends on the efªcacy of a particular state’s policy to shape migra-tion ºows according to its overall national interests.

The second, third, and fourth sections of the article discuss the ways inwhich immigration may inºuence one of three dimensions of national secu-rity: state capacity and autonomy, the balance of power, and the nature of vio-lent conºict. In the section on state capacity and autonomy, I examine the effectof migration on border control and national identity—that is, the ability ofstates to maintain control over their territory and national purpose. With re-gard to migration and the balance of power, I look at the inºuence of migrationon states’ ability to exercise and project economic, military, and diplomaticpower. Finally, in the section on the nature of violent conºict, I discuss the rela-tionship between migration and three forms of security threats to states: inter-nal conºicts, organized crime, and international terrorism. I conclude with asummary of my overall ªndings derived from the analysis in each section, adiscussion of their implications, and suggestions for further research.

Globalization, International Migration, and Cross-Border Mobility

Migration is not a new phenomenon. It is, however, more than ever before,a global phenomenon that is closely related to a number of other globaliza-tion processes in both its causes and its effects.10 The globalization of trade,ªnance, and production, and the general trend toward greater global economic


10. The literature on globalization is vast and growing. For useful overviews, see Malcolm Waters,Globalization (London: Routledge, 1995); David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jon-athan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 1999);James H. Mittelman, The Globalization Syndrome: Transformation and Resistance (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 2000); and Michael Zuern, “From Interdependence to Globalization,”in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons, eds., Handbook of International Relations(London: Sage, 2002).

integration—all contribute to the emergence of new and more mobile pools oflabor, while creating stronger ties and networks among advanced industrialand developing economies that provide new avenues and opportunities formigration.11 These economic processes are reinforced by cheaper and more ac-cessible forms of transportation and communication technologies, as well asan emerging global infrastructure of services, that link national economies andundergird the formation of international migration networks.12

“Like other ºows, whether ªnancial or commercial, ºows of ideas or infor-mation,” notes a 2003 report by the International Organization for Migration(IOM), “the rising tide of people crossing frontiers is among the most reliableindicators of the intensity of globalization.”13 In the words of David Held andhis coauthors, “There is now almost no state or part of the world that is not im-porting or exporting labor.”14 States that were once countries of emigrationhave become migration-receiving states, and states that once declared thatthey were “not countries of immigration” have amended long-standing migra-tion and citizenship policies to adjust to the realities of contemporary migra-tion ºows.15

An examination of some basic migration statistics offers an indication of thesigniªcance of migration as one component of the larger process of globaliza-tion. According to the IOM, approximately 180 million people live outsidetheir country of birth, up from 80 million three decades ago. The number ofpeople who migrate across national borders in any given year is between 5 and10 million. One out of every 35 persons in the world is a migrant, or almost 3percent of the global population. If all migrants formed a single state, it wouldbe the world’s ªfth most populous country. Migration to both Europe and the


11. Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and LaborFlow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).12. See, for example, Mary M. Kritz, Lin Lean Lim, and Hania Zlotnik, International Migration Sys-tems: A Global Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Mittelman, The Globalization Syn-drome; and Thomas Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of Migration and Transnational Social Spaces(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). There is, of course, a vast body of literature on the causesof migration, which is not addressed here. For an overview of theoretical approaches and regionalapplications, see Douglas S. Massey, Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, AdelaPellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor, Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the Endof the Millennium (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).13. International Organization for Migration (IOM), World Migration, 2003: Managing Migration:Challenges and Responses for People on the Move (Geneva: IOM, 2003), p. 4.14. Held et al., Global Transformations, p. 297. See also Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Ageof Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 3d ed. (London: Macmillan,2003).15. Examples of the former include Greece, Ireland, and Italy; and the latter, Germany.

United States has continued to increase over the past two decades. In the year2000, 40 percent of all international migrants lived in Western industrializedcountries, including approximately 19 million in the European Union.16

Many countries have signiªcant portions of their populations abroad andrely on them heavily as a source of foreign exchange. Migration plays a partic-ularly important role, for example, in the economic life of states in the MiddleEast. Ten percent of Moroccans live outside of Morocco, and 8 percent of Tuni-sians live outside Tunisia. In some of the Gulf states, up to 70 percent of the la-bor force is composed of migrant labor.17

Among the factors contributing to these overall increases are decliningtransportation costs; the growing ease of travel; continuing levels of economicinequality among states; the fall of the iron curtain and the opening up of bor-ders in the former Soviet bloc; the loosening of emigration restrictions in otherstates, such as China; refugee-generating conºict and violence, such as in theBalkans and sub-Saharan Africa; state policies of forced migration; and thegrowth in human smuggling networks.18 At the same time, as compared withother indicators of levels of globalization, levels of global migration are stillrelatively low. While 1 in 35 people is a migrant, 34 of 35 people in the worldare not migrants. Similarly, contemporary levels of migration are not unprece-dented in their volume; the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forexample, were also characterized by high levels of international migration.19

Determining which categories of migrants to let in and which to keep out isa key challenge facing states today. The United Nations deªnes a “migrant”as someone entering a country for twelve months or longer; yet individualstates have varying deªnitions of what constitutes a migrant. Some statesmeasure migration ºows based on the number of border crossings; othersmeasure migration by country of birth.20 In addition, there are broader catego-ries of temporary border crossers (e.g., tourists, commuters, and business


16. IOM, World Migration, 2003, pp. 5–6, 17, 44.17. In 2003, 70 percent of the labor force was composed of foreigners in Qatar; 67 percent in theUnited Arab Emirates; and 65 percent in Kuwait. See ibid., pp. 224, 231, 34.18. Ibid., p. 197; Castles and Miller, The Age of Migration; and Rey Koslowski, Migrants and Citizens:Demographic Change in the European State System (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000).19. During this period, approximately 60 million people emigrated from Europe; 10 million peo-ple emigrated from Russia; and 12 million Chinese and 6 million Japanese emigrated to otherstates in Asia. Aaron Segal, An Atlas of International Migration (London: Hans Zell, 1993), p. 16, ascited in Paul Q. Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Pol-ity, 1999), p. 23. See also Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Eco-nomic Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 365–366.20. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 8.

travelers) who cannot be counted as “migrants” per se, but nevertheless aresigniªcant for understanding the political dynamics surrounding migration,security, and border control.21 In practice, the lines between various categoriesof border crossers and migrants are difªcult to deªne. Nevertheless, it is usefulto think conceptually about who crosses borders and why as a prelude tothinking about how this inºuences national security.

voluntary versus forced migration

Much of the general literature and political debate on migration has dealt im-plicitly with voluntary migration—that is, migration by individuals who haveleft their homes of their own accord to pursue economic opportunities, for per-sonal enrichment, or to be reunited with their families (family reuniªcation is astandard immigrant category in most industrialized states). A second category,forced migration, includes refugees and displaced persons. Involuntary migra-tion can stem from a variety of causes, including human slavery, ethnic cleans-ing, and deportation.

Many of the major migrations throughout history have occurred as a resultof forced migration or expulsion. The formation of the Jewish diaspora afterthe destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 586 b.c.; the mass migrationºows that occurred during the transatlantic slave trade, in which approxi-mately 15 million Africans were transferred to the Americas prior to 1850; thepopulation exchanges between Greece and Turkey at the end of World War I;the forced migration of Jews during the Russian pogroms and later during theHolocaust; the expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland following WorldWar II; the expulsion of indigenous Arab populations with the establishmentof the state of Israel in 1948; the ethnic cleansing that characterized the Balkanwars in the 1990s; and the coerced trafªcking of women in many parts of theworld (especially Eastern Europe and East Asia) that has been referred to bymany as a contemporary form of slavery—all are examples of largely involun-tary waves of migration.22


21. This article does not deal with intrastate migration ºows. Particularly signiªcant for manycountries’ ability to maintain their internal security are the 25 million internally displaced persons(IDPs) around the globe. Global IDP Project, Internal Displacement: A Global Overview of Trends andDevelopments in 2003 (Geneva: Norwegian Refugee Council, 2004).22. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1997); Michael R. Marrus,The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press,1985); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987); Castles and Miller, The Age of Migration; and Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo,Escape from Violence.

The population ºows of refugees and exiles produced by forced migrationhave, as often as not, been the product of state action rather than of nonstate ormarket forces. Serbian leader Slobodan Miloševib, for example, employed refu-gee ºows during the 1999 Kosovo crisis as a weapon of war in what was anasymmetric conºict with NATO.23 More generally, many instances of forcedmigration have been intimately bound up with the emergence of new states inthe international system—a fact observed by Aristide Zolberg, who has char-acterized state making as a “refugee-generating process.”24

economic versus political migration

The impetus for an individual to migrate can be economic, political, or inmany cases, a combination of both. Economic migrants leave their countries insearch of employment or other economic opportunities. Refugees and asylumseekers leave to avoid the trauma of war or political persecution. In practice,disentangling the political and economic factors that contribute to migrationºows is often difªcult.25 Economic migrants can feel compelled to move be-cause of the harsh conditions they face in their country of origin; asylum seek-ers or refugees may be able to exercise a degree of choice in their country ofdestination, which can be inºuenced by such factors as economic opportuni-ties, family ties, and existing migration networks.26

Economic migration can include unskilled and skilled labor, temporaryworkers, guest workers, forced migrants such as trafªcked persons in the sexindustry, and slave labor. Much of the literature on international migrationwritten primarily from an economic perspective has concentrated on one formof migration—voluntary labor migration. Indeed, analyzing the global econ-omy without taking into account global migration patterns and their relation-ship to the globalization of production would be exceedingly difªcult.27 The


23. Kelly M. Greenhill, “The Use of Refugees as Political and Military Weapons in the KosovoConºict,” in Raju G.C. Thomas, ed., Yugoslavia Unraveled: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Interven-tion (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 205–242.24. Aristide Zolberg, “The Formation of New States as a Refugee-Generating Process,” Annals ofthe American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 467, No. 1 (May 1983), pp. 24–38.25. Ibid., pp. 30–33; and Eric Neumayer, “Bogus Refugees: The Determinants of Asylum Migra-tion to Western Europe,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 389–410.26. Kritz, Lim, and Zlotnik, International Migration Systems; and Faist, The Volume and Dynamics ofMigration and Transnational Social Spaces.27. See, for example, George J. Borjas, Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); Mittelman, The Global Syndrome; Leah Haus,“Openings in the Wall: Transnational Migrants, Labor Unions, and U.S. Immigration Policy,” Inter-national Organization, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Spring 1995), pp. 285–333; Lin Lean Lim, “International Labor

postwar economic boom in Europe, for instance, would have been impossiblewithout massive amounts of labor migration—much of it organized via bilat-eral agreements between particular states, such as Germany and Turkey. Theeconomies of some countries, such as those of the Gulf states, would collapsewithout foreign labor.

In the global economy, however, the relative immobility of labor distin-guishes it from other factors of production. Despite the sheer numbers and im-portance of labor migration, the ºow of labor across national borders isgenerally less liberalized than other factors of production and is subject tomore state intervention. In a global economy, the mobility of labor has not keptpace with the mobility of capital. As Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson note,“A world market for labor just does not exist in the same way that it does forgoods and services. Most labor markets continue to be nationally regulatedand only marginally accessible to outsiders, whether legal or illegal migrantsor professional recruitment. Moving goods and services is inªnitely easierthan moving labor.”28

In general, states still exercise a great degree of control over whom they ad-mit as migrants; it is partly due to the tight restrictions on labor migration thathave emerged since the 1960s’ economic boom in Europe that one sees a blur-ring of the lines between political and economic migration, on the one hand,and the corruption of the asylum process, on the other. Progress in liberalizingthe global market for labor has been mostly at the high end of the skills con-tinuum, with provisions for increased mobility in the service sector or forhighly skilled professionals built into broader economic agreements such asthe General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization andthe North American Free Trade Agreement, although the ºow of labor acrossborders is still much more restricted than the ºow of goods and services inthese agreements.29

International law distinguishes between political and economic migrationby assigning categories to individuals who are seeking to cross borders to es-cape political persecution or violent conºict, as opposed to those who crossborders in search of economic opportunities. International law deªnes “refu-gees” as those who have a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, re-


Movements: A Perspective on Economic Exchanges and Flows,” in Kritz, Lim, and Zlotnik, Inter-national Migration Systems, pp. 133–149; and Sassen, The Mobility of Labor.28. Hirst and Thompson, Globalization in Question, p. 29.29. Ibid., p. 29.

ligion, nationality, or membership in a particular social or political group. In2001 there were approximately 12.0 million refugees in the world, as comparedwith 8.8 million in 1980; 47.9 percent of all refugees in 2001 were concentratedin Asia, 27.3 percent in Africa, and 18.5 percent in Europe.30

Similarly, recent decades have witnessed an increase in asylum seekers. In2001, 923,000 people ªled asylum requests, up from 180,000 in 1980. Alto-gether, approximately 6 million asylum applications were ªled in advanced in-dustrialized countries during the 1990s. Of these, only a small percentage wereby individuals eventually deemed to be legitimate asylum seekers. Asylumapplications cost advanced industrial states approximately $10 billion peryear; this is ten times the annual budget of the Ofªce of the United NationsHigh Commissioner for Refugees.31 The number of false asylum seekers, com-bined with high levels of illegal migration, contributes to the perception thatstates are losing sovereign control over their borders.

legal versus illegal migration

Many immigrants enter states through formal, legal channels; others enterthrough illegal channels, including those who are smuggled or trafªcked, orwho enter with either forged papers or none at all. So-called irregular migrantsmake up 30–50 percent of all migration to Western industrialized countries.The IOM surmises that approximately 4 million people are smuggled acrossborders every year. In the United States alone, there may be as many as 12 mil-lion illegal migrants, with approximately 4,000 illegal border crossings everyday. Half of all illegal migrants have some interaction with smuggling ortrafªcking networks—a global industry that generates approximately $10 bil-lion per year.32

permanent versus temporary migration

“Permanent migration” refers to the crossing of national borders leading topermanent resettlement, what many traditionally think of as “immigration.”“Temporary migration,” on the other hand, includes so-called guest workers,seasonal laborers, and students. In addition, millions of people cross bordersfor purposes of travel, contributing to the $6.5 trillion global travel industry.33


30. IOM, World Migration, 2003, pp. 98, 17, 29.31. Ibid., pp. 102, 97.32. Numbers of illegal migrants are not counted in ofªcial statistics and are thus difªcult to estab-lish. Ibid., pp. 58–61.33. World Travel and Tourism Council, “Progress and Priorities, 2006/7,” http://www.wttc.org/publications/pdf/PandP2006-07.pdf.

The status of some border crossers—for example, artists on tour, internationalcivil servants working outside their country of origin, and military forcesabroad—is less clear.

categorization of migrants

Categories of border crossers are not always clear cut. Tourists enter a countryand then proceed to stay and look for work; political asylum seekers mayleave one country for political reasons but then decide to relocate to anotherdue to the existence of economic opportunities or family ties; members of or-ganized criminal networks and international terrorist organizations are un-likely to mention such afªliations when they apply for visas, and may wellhave a legitimate pretext to enter a country as, for example, students or busi-nesspeople. Like other dimensions of globalization—whether ªnancial ºowsor information technology or marketization processes—the intervening vari-able for understanding the relationship between migration and security isstate policy, and much of migration policy is about designing systems that al-low some categories of immigrants in, while attempting to keep other catego-ries out—clearly a signiªcant challenge.

Impacts of Migration on State Capacity and Autonomy

Some experts portray international migration ºows as overwhelming states’capacity to maintain sovereignty across a number of areas,34 thus jeopardizingthe very basis of their security. Ever larger ºows of people across borders;increasingly multicultural populations; and the emergence of informal,migration-based, transnational networks that circulate capital, goods, andideas—all challenge notions of the territorial state as a bounded entity with aclearly demarcated territory and population. This in turn calls into questiontraditional models of national security, which assume a unitary national iden-tity from which a set of national interests can be derived. Yet this does not nec-essarily mean, as some more sensational accounts claim, that large migrationºows are causing states to lose control.35 As Gary Freeman has argued, “Any-one who thinks differently should try landing at Sydney airport without an en-try visa or go to France and apply for a job without a work permit.”36


34. See, for example, Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility ofPeople and Money (New York: New Press, 1998).35. Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1996); and Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis.36. Gary Freeman, “The Decline of Sovereignty? Politics and Immigration Restriction in Liberal

It is still states that have the primary responsibility both for regulating bor-ders and for conferring citizenship rights and claims to membership in a politi-cal community.37 States have always faced challenges to their sovereignty, andthe impact of migration ºows across borders is analogous to other instancesin history in which states have had to respond to pressures arising fromincreased transnationalism.38 All states are not equally able to manage thechallenges posed by migration, however, and those with high levels of institu-tional capacity are in a much better position to adapt to this new environmentthan are weak or failing states. Two areas in which migration inºuences statecapacity and autonomy are border control and national identity. The ability ofstates to maintain control over their borders and to formulate a coherent na-tional identity are arguably necessary preconditions for the maintenance ofstate security in other areas.

regulating borders: migration and interdependence sovereignty

The ability to control who has the right to cross the borders of a state is a keydimension of what Stephen Krasner refers to as a state’s “interdependencesovereignty.”39 States have interests in controlling their territorial borders for avariety of reasons, such as maintaining control over their populations, limitingaccess to labor markets and public goods, and maintaining internal security. Afailure to control territorial borders can precipitate serious security challenges.In weak and failing states, a lack of border control signiªcantly jeopardizestheir capacity across a number of areas. Large-scale refugee ºows, for example,can overwhelm a state’s capacity to provide public services and can lead toconºicts over resources.


States,” in Christian Joppke, ed., Challenge to the Nation-State: Immigration in Western Europe and theUnited States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 93.37. Some scholars, however, have pointed to how nonstate actors, such as airlines, are assumingsome aspects of border control activities. See, for example, Gallya Lahav, “The Rise of Non-stateActors in Migration Regulation in the United States and Europe,” in Nancy Foner, Rubén G.Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold, eds., Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Per-spectives (New York: Russell Sage, 2000); Gallya Lahav and Virginie Guiraudon, “ComparativePerspectives on Border Control: Away from the Border and Outside the State,” in Andreas andSnyder, The Wall around the West, pp. 55–77; and Sassen, Losing Control?38. Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 1999).39. International migration arguably poses a challenge to two broad dimensions of sovereignty:interdependence sovereignty, or the ability of states to control transborder movements, and do-mestic sovereignty, or the level of effective control a state exercises within its borders. The othertwo dimensions of sovereignty enumerated by Krasner, which are less affected by migration ºows,are international legal sovereignty and Westphalian sovereignty. Ibid.

The end of communism in Eastern Europe was symbolized by the lossof control over state borders and offers a dramatic example of the relation-ship between border control and state strength. The fall of the iron curtainbegan when thousands of East Germans escaped to the West throughCzechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in 1989, until the border between Eastand West Germany was ªnally declared open by East Germany on Novem-ber 9, 1989.40 Similarly, one of the characteristics of weak or failing states is theinability to control their territorial borders. The world’s poorest states hostmost of its refugees, and the uncontrolled ºow of refugees or other migrantsacross borders produces additional stresses on already weak state institutions,heightens competition over scarce resources, and exacerbates ethnic and sec-tarian tensions.41

Moreover, porous borders in weak states can allow politically organizednonstate actors access to territory and population groups that can be used forpolitical mobilization, which in turn can lead to the emergence of “refugee-warrior communities.”42 Examples include the mobilization activities of thePalestine Liberation Organization in refugee camps in Lebanon in the 1970s,the role played by refugee camps in Pakistan as sites of mobilizationfor Taliban-related groups in the 1980s, and the emergence of the RwandanPatriotic Front in Ugandan refugee camps in the 1990s.43 Refugee ºows can actas conduits that regionalize and internationalize internal conºicts; the GreatLakes region of Africa provides just one example of the disastrous conse-quences that such dynamics can have on weak states.44

For advanced industrial states with very high levels of internal capacity andcontrol, the concern with maintaining secure borders is also signiªcant. AsJohn Torpey has pointed out, the monopolization of the legitimate means of


40. See Timothy Garton Ash, “The German Revolution,” New York Times Review of Books, Decem-ber 21, 1989, pp. 14–17.41. Alan Dowty and Gil Loescher, “Refugee Flows as Grounds for International Action,” Interna-tional Security, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 43–71; and Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo, Escapefrom Violence.42. See Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo, Escape from Violence, pp. 275–278.43. Sarah K. Lischer, “Collateral Damage: Humanitarian Assistance as a Cause of Conºict,” Inter-national Security, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Summer 2003), pp. 79–109; Dowty and Loescher, “Refugee Flowsas Grounds for International Action,” p. 49; and Barnett R. Rubin, “Political Exiles in Search of aState,” in Yossi Shain, ed., Governments-in-Exile in Contemporary World Politics (New York:Routledge, 1991), pp. 70–91.44. See Stephen John Stedman, “Conºict and Conciliation in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Michael E.Brown, ed., The International Dimensions of Internal Conºict (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996),pp. 235–265.

movement of people across borders through the creation of the passport andaccompanying bureaucracies has been a key feature in the development ofmodern nation-states.45 Although states are authorized to monopolize the le-gitimate means of movement, they do not necessarily control all movement—just as they do not always have a monopoly over the means of violence.46 Asthe earlier statistics on illegal migration demonstrate, even if states have for-mal control over migration processes, a number of nonstate actors—in particu-lar, organized criminal networks and smugglers—are in competition with thestate in this area.

The emergence of organized criminal networks around illegal migration canalso pose a signiªcant challenge to state authority and control. As the IOM re-port mentioned above notes, “Given the vast amounts of money involved,such operations erode normal governance and present real challenges andthreats to national sovereignty.”47 Globalization produces a situation that re-sembles a cat-and-mouse game between migration pressures and state controlover borders. If migration pressures on states increase without the state adapt-ing, then the capacity of states is indeed under threat. The record shows, how-ever, that many states are adjusting to these pressures. As Peter Andreasargues, “Globalization may be about tearing down economic borders, as glob-alists emphasize, but it has also created more border policing work for thestate. At the same time as globalization is about mobility and territorial access,states are attempting to selectively reinforce border controls.”48

Throughout the 1990s, the United States and Europe expanded the policingof their borders, increased the use of technology to monitor and regulate theseborders, and generally militarized and securitized border crossings.49 Since1993, for example, the budget of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Ser-vice (since 2003, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service) has tripled, andthe number of agents in Border Control has doubled.50 The human conse-quences of this strengthening, however, have been very high. The number of


45. John Torpey, “Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate ‘Means ofMovement,’” Sociological Theory, Vol. 16, No. 3 (November 1998), pp. 239–259; and John Torpey, TheInvention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999).46. John Torpey, “States and the Regulation of Migration in the Twentieth-Century North AtlanticWorld,” in Andreas and Snyder, The Wall around the West, pp. 31–54.47. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 60.48. Peter Andreas, “Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-ªrst Century,” Inter-national Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2003), p. 84.49. Andreas, Border Games.50. Wayne A. Cornelius, “Death at the Border: Efªcacy and Unintended Consequences of U.S. Im-

deaths at the U.S.-Mexican border has steadily increased, with approximately1,700 occurring during the second half of the 1990s—a 400 percent jump from1996 to 2000. Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security fol-lowing the September 11 attacks, the control of U.S. borders has become evenmore securitized.51 Smuggling fees from Mexico into Arizona in 2001 were 50percent lower than what they were before the attacks, because of the higherlikelihood that migrants would be interdicted.52 As a border crosser whowas caught trying to enter the United States illegally after September 11 suc-cinctly put it, “Because of this bearded guy, what’s his name, bin Laden, it isharder now. There are more reinforcements now because America is afraid ofterrorism.”53

States are learning to employ technology in ways that reinforce their capac-ity. One sees this particularly in the area of migration and border control. Theuse of biometric technology to monitor entrants into the United States underthe US-VISIT program, which commenced in January 2004, is one such exam-ple. On both the U.S. border and the external borders of the European Union,surveillance technology has been increasingly employed to deter illegal bordercrossings.54 The EU has established a European-wide corps of border guardsand a European entry visa linked to a computerized database.55 With theSchengen agreement of 1985, which was subsequently incorporated into theEU with the 1999 Amsterdam treaty, a single external border in the EU has ineffect been created. This has been accompanied by measures to improve policeand judicial cooperation, including the exchange of information through theSchengen Information System database.

Thus, even though illicit migration ºows provide states with clear chal-lenges, it would appear that overall state capacity has been threatened by mi-gration ºows to a much lesser degree than many of the more sensationalistaccounts in the globalization literature had predicted. Of course, for stateswith very weak or low capacity, monitoring borders will continue to be a chal-lenge. Even here, however, a common interest in the regulation of migration


migration Control Policy,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 27, No. 4 (December 2001),p. 661.51. Ibid.; and Timothy Egan, “Risky Dream and a Rising Toll in Desert at the Mexican Border,”New York Times, May 23, 2004.52. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 60.53. Quoted on National Public Radio, Strangers at the Gates, January 30, 2002, as cited in ibid.,p. 66.54. Andreas, Border Games.55. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 65.

has prompted stronger states to earmark economic, technical, and develop-ment assistance to weaker states for border control. In Europe during the1990s, for example, approximately 50 percent of funds spent on technical assis-tance for the EU Phare programs to Eastern Europe were targeted at illegal im-migration and border control in candidate states.56

Migration does, however, challenge states’ autonomy, as they come to real-ize that effective border control requires increased levels of interstate coopera-tion in areas such as information sharing. Europe, of course, is the mostprominent example of this trend, as it has basically managed to harmonizemuch of its border control policy, allowing for free movement within theSchengen area. Other examples include international coordination on U.S. “no-ºy” or “automatic selectee” lists used to screen passengers on internationalºights entering the United States. Thus, although international migration doesnot yet pose an insurmountable challenge to states’ abilities to regulate theirborders, it does create incentives for states to selectively relinquish dimensionsof their autonomy so as to increase their capacity to control their borders.57

International cooperation on migration and border control can be seen as es-sential to maintaining a state’s capacity to regulate population ºows, and istherefore a vital component of a state’s national security policy.58

reshaping national identity: multicultural states and diasporas

State migration policies generally have two main objectives: regulating whoenters (e.g., controlling borders), and deciding who is entitled to membershipin a polity (e.g., conferring citizenship or political membership in a commu-nity). States may be able to rely on technology to control borders, but how dothey respond to challenges to their national identity? Traditional conceptionsof national security are based on national interests, which, as social construct-ivists and others have argued, are derived from a state’s national identity.59

Even rationalist and realist perspectives on security, which emphasize materialinterests over identity, acknowledge that models of the state as a unitary ratio-nal actor assume an underlying coherence in its collective identity. In modern


56. António Vitirono, EU commissioner in charge of justice and home affairs, lecture, Minda deGunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, March 22, 2001.57. Bimal Ghosh, ed., Managing Migration: Time for a New International Regime (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000).58. James F. Holliªeld, “The Emerging Migration State,” International Migration Review, Vol. 38,No. 3 (September 2004), pp. 885–912.59. See Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).

times, a coherent identity has been provided by the ideology of nationalism,which confers legitimacy on and brings cohesion to nation-states.60

International migration processes call into question the cultural basis of astate’s identity and provide incentives for states to take up more liberal and ex-pansive national identities. The challenge that migration ºows pose to unitaryconceptions of national identity has deep historical roots and continues to pro-voke political debate. Many states have historically incorporated national, eth-nic, or racial criteria into their migration policies; examples include racialrestrictions on immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, the favoring of ethnic Germans (or Aussiedler) byGermany in its post–World War II immigration policy, the “White Australia”policies that deªned Australian migration policies for much of the twentiethcentury, and the automatic right to immigrate to Israel that is granted to Jewsin the 1950 Law of Return.61

The spread of international norms of racial equality and universal humanrights, the rise of civil rights movements and multiculturalism, and economicimperatives resulting from the changing global structure of production haveincreasingly delegitimized the use of ethnic and racial criteria in the formula-tion of immigration policy.62 Debates surrounding the relationship betweenmigration and national identity, however, are still politically contentious:when established patterns of national identity formation are called into ques-tion, even highly institutionalized and liberal democratic states may experi-


60. See, for example, the discussion of nationalism and states as units in Kenneth N. Waltz, Man,the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 175–176; and James Fearonand Alexander Wendt, “Rationalism v. Constructivism: A Skeptical View,” in Carlsnaes, Risse, andSimmons, Handbook of International Relations, pp. 52–72. Representative literature on nationalism,more generally, includes Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reºections on the Origins andSpread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism: New Perspec-tives on the Past (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Or-igins of Nations (New York: Blackwell, 1989).61. On discrimination against Asians in U.S. immigration policy, see Sucheng Chan, “Europeanand Asian Immigration into the United States in Comparative Perspective, 1820s to 1920s,” inVirginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (New York:Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 37–75; and Aristide Zolberg, “Global Movements, GlobalWalls: Responses to Migration: 1885–1925,” in Wang Gongwu, ed., Global History and Migrations(Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), pp. 279–302. On the privileging of ethnic Germans, see RogersBrubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1992).62. On international human rights norms and deracialization, more generally, see Neta C.Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Interven-tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On international human rights norms andcitizenship, see Yasemin Nuho�glu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Member-ship in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

ence some levels of internal instability and incoherence at the societal level—what Ole Waever has referred to as “societal insecurity.”63 The problem is mostacute for states that derive their identity and legitimacy from an ethnic versionof nationalism, rather than a civic nationalism.64 Meanwhile, some culturalconservatives argue that even states whose identities are primarily liberal,civic, and constitutional can be threatened by migration, as they claim that lib-eral constitutionalism itself has its origins in a particular culture. Samuel Hun-tington, for example, has made the argument that recent waves of immigrationto the United States threaten to undermine its core identity, which he asserts isbased on an “Anglo-Protestant” heritage.65

Despite Huntington’s claims, language is arguably the most salient symbolof national cohesion in the United States; whereas it is religious identity, somehave argued, that plays this role in many European countries. If this is thecase, it would help to explain why, even after September 11, neither Muslimimmigrants nor Islam more generally is viewed as posing a cultural threatto American identity in the same ways that have been manifested in someEuropean states, such as France, which has outlawed the wearing of head-scarves in public schools.66

The relationship between migration ºows and national identity provides anexample of the many ways in which market forces are challenging traditionalstate functions. States are increasingly using market criteria to make migrationpolicy, with economic skills largely trumping cultural and identity criteria inevaluating potential migration requests. At the same time, a global “market”for the political loyalties of individual migrants and their descendents isemerging. Old models of incorporation or assimilation into a nation are givingway to new discourses of multiculturalism, transnationalism, and diasporic


63. Ole Waever, “Societal Security: The Concept,” in Waever et al., Identity, Migration, and the NewSecurity Agenda, pp. 17–40.64. Some authors have tried to group states according to these criteria, with states such as France,Great Britain, and the United States being classiªed as states deriving their identity from civic na-tionalism, and states such as Germany deriving their identity from ethnic nationalism. In reality,most states exhibit a mix of ethnic and civic nationalism. For discussions, see Liah Greenfeld, Na-tionalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); andBrubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.65. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York:Simon and Schuster, 2004).66. For an interesting discussion, see Aristide Zolberg and Long Litt Woon, “Why Islam Is LikeSpanish: Cultural Incorporation in Europe and the United States,” Politics and Society, Vol. 27, No. 1(March 1999), pp. 5–38. Additional factors, such as differences in the origins and composition ofMuslim populations in the United States and Europe, may also help to account for this variation.

identities—all of which challenge the notion of a unitary and territoriallydeªned national entity.

Factors such as the ease of travel, new communication technologies, and theemergence of a global media infrastructure allow migrants to maintain tieswith their homelands or even take part in wholly new transnational identitycommunities. Migrants and their descendents can easily maintain dense socialnetworks that stretch across national borders, are rich in social capital, and canbe used for a variety of purposes—including political mobilization.67 YaseminNuho�glu Soysal has observed that migrant communities in Europe engage inpolitical activities at the supranational level, in addition to the national level.68

And Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc demonstratein their work that migrants increasingly “live lives . . . stretched across nationalborders.”69

The literature on diasporas points to how the emergence of transnational or-ganizational structures, such as diaspora organizations, creates identities andpolitical loyalties that challenge conventional notions of citizenship. GabrielSheffer, for example, notes, “The establishment of diaspora organizations andparticipation in those organizations can create the potential for dual authority,and consequently also for dual or divided loyalties or ambiguous loyalty vis-à-vis host countries. Development of such fragmented loyalties often results inconºicts between diasporas and their host societies and governments.”70

Members of diaspora groups are sometimes actively involved in the politics oftheir “home state.” Prime examples are the political activities of Jews in the di-aspora directed toward politics in Israel or of Armenians vis-à-vis Armenia.71

Migrants and their descendents thus form contested constituencies that can bemobilized by a variety of actors.

Some scholars have argued that the transnationalization of political par-ticipation and the existence of diaspora networks can impair a state’s abil-ity to formulate a coherent foreign policy based on a uniªed national interest.Huntington and Tony Smith, for example, argue that U.S. foreign policy


67. Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, pp. 96–123.68. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship.69. Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: TransnationalProjects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and De-territorialized Nation-States (Langhorne, Pa.: Gordon andBreach, 1994), p. 4.70. Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003), p. 81.71. Yossi Shain and Aharon Barth, “Diasporas and International Relations Theory,” InternationalOrganization, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Summer 2003), pp. 449–479.

formulation in some areas can be inºuenced by skilled ethnic lobbyinggroups whose loyalties are to a real or imagined homeland.72 Interestingly,Huntington makes the comparison between transnational ethnic groups andeconomic actors, such as multinational corporations. Both, in some sense, illus-trate how increased levels of marketization and pluralization can challenge astate’s ability to act coherently as a unitary rational actor in the area of foreignpolicy formulation.

Global migration ºows may challenge some classical notions of nationalidentity. Yet the overall effect this has on the core national security interests ofstates is debatable, and may in fact be more positive than negative. Most mod-ern industrial states are increasingly identifying themselves according to civicforms of nationalism and are deªning themselves using liberal criteria. Aprime example is Germany, a state that has traditionally displayed an ethnicform of nationalism, yet since 2000 has begun to consider jus soli criteria, in ad-dition to jus sanguinis criteria, in deciding who can become a German citizen.73

Such changes to national identity are ultimately security enhancing rather thandetracting, as they help states to adjust to the demands of globalization anddecrease the dangers posed by virulent and exclusionary forms of nationalism.The spread of liberal and civic forms of nationalism across states ultimately en-hances overall levels of international stability.74

The adoption of liberal forms of national identity is indicative of the resil-ience of the state and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Europeanstates are becoming increasingly multicultural in response to changes associ-ated with migration. While banning the wearing of headscarves in publicschools, France is also working to institutionalize and incorporate Islam asan ofªcial religion, on a par with the institutionalized representation givento Christian and Jewish communities—a process also taking place in otherEuropean states.75 Although cultural conservatives may bemoan the loss of ho-


72. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Erosion of American National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76,No. 5 (January/February 1997), pp. 28–49; and Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of EthnicGroups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2001). See also Eric M. Uslaner, “A Tower of Babel on Foreign Policy?” in Allan J. Cigler andBurdett A. Loomis, eds., Interest Group Politics (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1991),pp. 299–318.73. This challenges some of the claims in Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France andGermany.74. Stephen Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” International Security, Vol. 18,No. 4 (Spring 1994), pp. 5–39; and Jack L. Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Na-tionalist Conºict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).75. Jonathan Laurence, “From the Elysée Salon to the Table of the Republic: State-Islam Relationsand the Integration of Muslims in France,” French Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 23, No. 1(Spring 2005), pp. 36–63.

mogeneous national identities, most observers view the global trend toward aconvergence in states deªning themselves according to nonracial and liberalidentities as a positive and security-enhancing development. Likewise, thepresence of ethnic and diaspora lobbies in, for example, the United States andGreat Britain can be viewed as a healthy indicator of the robustness of democ-racy in these states, highlighting the ability of interest groups to operate in plu-ral societies, rather than being seen as a threat to a unitary national interest.76

International Migration and the Balance of Power

The size of a state’s population, in addition to its natural resources, territory,economy, and military strength, are the most basic measures of its power.77

The distribution of power in the international state system may now be unipo-lar, but as the IOM report notes, “Migration circuits span the globe like a spi-der’s web, with complex ramiªcations and countless intersections. The currentworld map of migration is therefore multipolar.”78

Migration policy can be a tool for states to exercise their national interests. Acountry’s population is arguably its most important resource; to be an effectiveinstrument of power, however, it must be mobilized. Purely on the level of ba-sic demographics, migration can make a difference to a state’s power. Manyadvanced industrialized countries have aging populations and need youngerworkers if their social security systems are to function and if they are going tocompete on the world market. Japan is a key example, with the governmentinstitutionalizing various measures to encourage labor migration in the mid-1990s.79

Migration and human mobility inºuence three core areas of state power:economic, military, and diplomatic. Here, again, the intervening variable be-tween migration and national security is policy: if states have the capacity todesign and implement effective policies that “harness the power of migra-tion,” international migration ºows can enhance, rather than detract from orcompromise, state power.


76. See, for example, Charles McC. Mathias Jr., “Ethnic Groups and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Af-fairs, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Spring 1981), pp. 975–998; Yossi Shain, “Multicultural Foreign Policy,” ForeignPolicy, No. 100 (Autumn 1995), pp. 69–97; and Robert W. Tucker, Charles B. Keely, and Linda Wrig-ley, eds., Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990).77. On counting poles and measuring power, see Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), pp. 129–131.78. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 4.79. In 2001, for example, more than 140,000 economic immigrants entered Japan—a ªgure thatwas nearly 10 percent higher than in 2000. Ibid., p. 200.

economic power: human capital in a globalizing world economy

Some scholars argue that, in an increasingly global economy, states will in-evitably see labor migration as a means of maximizing economic gains.80

Immigration ºows are highly correlated with economic growth. The postwareconomic boom in Germany and other Western European countries would nothave been possible without the inºux of migrant labor from Mediterraneancountries in the 1960s. In the 1990s, migration ºows and an increase in theforeign-born labor force were largely responsible for spurring growth inthe U.S. economy.81 Highly industrialized countries are designing their immi-gration systems to harness the talent of skilled workers, attempting to outdoone another in luring talent in what the IOM has referred to as a “human capi-tal accretion ‘sweepstakes.’”82 This trend is especially noticeable in the area ofinformation technology and the knowledge economy, which has become an in-tegral component of state power.83 The United States, for example, has encour-aged highly skilled labor migration with the H-1B visa, which brings people into work temporarily in the information technology and communicationsectors, a route that often becomes a fast-track for permanent migration.84

In 2000 Germany initiated a new “Green Card” program, modeled on theU.S. program, as a way of attracting highly skilled labor, especially computerspecialists.85

Students are another group of sought-after “migrants.” The United Statescontinues to be a world leader in issuing student visas, although other statesare increasingly attempting to capture a greater share of this “market.” Univer-sities in Great Britain, for example, are turning to overseas students as a sourceof revenue to stem the ªnancial crisis that has hit its education sector; in 2005,for example, Britain was host to approximately 50,000 students from China.86

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, U.S. leadership in attracting interna-tional talent has been called into question, as the United States has reduced thenumber of visas issued to foreign students and increased the time it takes for


80. Rudolph, “Security and the Political Economy of Migration.”81. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “U.S. Immigration and Economic Growth: Putting Policyon Hold,” Southwest Economy, No. 6 (November/December 2003), http://www.dallasfed.org/research/swe/2003/swe0306a.html.82. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 149.83. Rudolph, “Security and the Political Economy of Migration”; and Mittelman, The GlobalizationSyndrome.84. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 149.85. For details, see German Embassy, Washington, D.C., http://www.germany-info.org/relaunch/welcome/work/work.html.86. Nick Mackie, “Chinese Students Drawn to Britain,” BBC News, September 7, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4219026.stm.

students to acquire visas: an overall drop in foreign graduate student applica-tions to top U.S. universities has caused some to question the ability of theUnited States to maintain its leading edge in science and technology if such re-strictions continue.87

In the global competition for highly skilled workers, however, there are win-ners and losers. In particular, many parts of Africa continue to experience abrain drain of skilled labor. In 1987, 30 percent of Africa’s skilled workforcelived in Europe, and in the 1990s more than 5 percent of all Africans were esti-mated to be living outside their country of origin.88 According to estimates,70,000 professionals and university graduates leave countries in Africa everyyear with the aim of working in Europe or North America; more than 20,000Nigerian doctors practice in North America; and in 2003 the South Africaneconomy had lost approximately $7.8 billion in human capital due to emigra-tion since 1997.89 The exit of highly skilled labor from developing economiescontributes to the growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest membersof the international state system.

Yet the effects of emigration processes from the developing world to the de-veloped world are multiple, and developing countries also beneªt greatlyfrom out-migration. Perhaps the most signiªcant result of migration from de-veloping countries is the capital ºows that are generated through labor remit-tances. If states are able to capture the developmental beneªts of remittances,this can contribute substantially to economic growth in ways that have advan-tages over other types of capital ºows. Unlike other categories of external capi-tal ºows, which are measured as changes in the assets and liabilities ofresidents vis-à-vis nonresidents in a state, many labor remittance ºows aretechnically transfers of capital from one set of nationals (living abroad) to an-other set of nationals. Additionally, remittances tend to be more stable thanother forms of private capital ºows across borders.90

The size of remittances has been growing steadily since the 1970s. Whereasin 1970 global remittances were estimated at slightly more than $3 billion,by 1988 the ªgure had increased to $30.4 billion.91 In the mid-1990s global re-mittances were estimated at $66 billion, an amount greater than the sum of all


87. “Science, Visas, and America: On the Turning Away,” Economist, May 6, 2004, p. 76.88. Mittelman, The Globalization Syndrome, p. 45.89. IOM, World Migration, 2003, pp. 6, 216–217.90. John McHale and Devesh Kapur, “Migration’s New Payoff,” Foreign Policy, No. 139 (Novem-ber/December 2003), pp. 48–57.91. Segal, An Atlas of International Migration, p. 150, as cited in Hirst and Thompson, Globalizationin Question, p. 30.

state-sponsored foreign development aid programs.92 Estimates for remit-tances in 2002 ran as high as $100 billion annually in transnational ºows acrossnational borders.93

Labor remittances from migrants make up more than half of all totalªnancial inºows in a number of countries. In Morocco, they total approxi-mately $3.3 billion a year, accounting for 83 percent of the trade balancedeªcit.94 In both Egypt and Tunisia, they account for 51 percent of capitalinºows.95 Labor remittances can be put to use for a variety of purposes and, ifeffectively utilized, can help to stimulate economic development.96 In the year2000, labor remittances contributed more than 10 percent to the national econ-omies of several developing countries, including El Salvador, Eritrea, Jamaica,Jordan, Nicaragua, and Yemen. As such, more states are trying to harness thepower of labor remittances. Morocco, for example, is prioritizing migrationmanagement through the establishment of foundations that encourage thetemporary return migration of skilled professionals; it is also seeking to fostera core of elite émigrés who can further the country’s development and pro-mote Moroccan culture abroad.97

military power: immigrant skills, expertise, and recruits

Immigrants can also contribute to a state’s military strength by, for example,providing technical and intelligence expertise (e.g., foreign language skills andanalysis). An extreme example is the role that émigré scientists played in de-veloping the U.S. nuclear program in the 1930s. Albert Einstein, Edward Teller,and others who ºed National Socialism in Europe put their scientiªc expertiseto work in developing the ªrst atomic bomb. This is but one of many examplesof the ability of states to harness the skills and expertise of immigrants for mili-tary ends.


92. United Nations Population Fund, The State of World Population, 1993 (New York: UNPF, 1993),as cited in Mittelman, The Globalization Syndrome, p. 45.93. Peter Gammeltoft, “Remittances and Other Financial Flows to Developing Countries,”Working Paper (Copenhagen: Center for Development Research, 2002), as cited in IOM, WorldMigration, 2003, p. 310.94. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 224.95. International Organization for Migration, “Facts and Figures on International Migration,”Migration Policy Issues, No. 2 (March 2003), p. 2.96. See, for example, Nicholas Van Hear, “Sustaining Societies under Strain: Remittances as aForm of Transnational Exchange in Sri Lanka and Ghana,” in Nadje al-Ali and Khalid Koser, eds.,New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home (London:Routledge, 2002), pp. 202–223.97. IOM, World Migration, 2003, pp. 17, 225.

The state can also draw on immigrant populations when ªghting a war. Theuse of noncitizens mirrors, in some respects, the recent increased use of privatecontractors in U.S. military operations.98 In 2004 it was estimated that 40,000noncitizens were enrolled in the U.S. military, or 4 percent of all enlistees. Infact, joining the military is one way to expedite the naturalization process fornoncitizens. U.S. military recruiters regularly seek new recruits in immigrantcommunities. In some areas of California, up to half of all enlistees do not haveU.S. citizenship, and ªve of the ªrst ten Californians who perished in the warin Iraq were noncitizens.99 The U.S. military also attempted to mobilize recentimmigrants or their descendents when it sought to create a separate divisionof approximately 3,000 Iraqi expatriates and exiles known as the Free IraqForces.100

diplomatic power: migrants as ambassadors

Migration can enhance a state’s ability to engage in diplomacy. In some re-spects, this is the ºip side of the earlier discussion regarding a state’s ability tomaintain a coherent national identity. Small states in the international systemcan involve their diasporas in diplomacy by drawing on emigrants and theirdescendents within a target country, and by sponsoring lobbying and publicrelations activities. In the United States, for example, NATO enlargement washelped along by the domestic lobbying activities of Americans of EasternEuropean descent. Armenia has a diaspora desk in its ministry of foreign af-fairs.101 The Republic of Cyprus draws on its diaspora in the United Kingdomand elsewhere to represent its interests abroad in the Cyprus conºict. Promi-nent members of the Cypriot diaspora have acquired VIP status because,“much like honorary or career consuls, they enjoy a certain number of limitedfacilities, privileges and immunities.”102


98. On private contractors, see Deborah D. Avant, The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privat-izing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors:The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).99. Ron Hayduk and Michelle Wucker, “Immigrant Voting Rights Receive More Attention,” Mi-gration Information Source, November 1, 2004, http://www.migrationinformation.or/USfocus/display.cfm?ID=265; and Duncan Campbell, “Dying to Belong,” Guardian, April 22, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,941202,00.html.100. This endeavor, albeit, was viewed as unsuccessful by many critics. For ªgures, see JimGaramone, “U.S. Army Trains Free Iraqi Forces in Hungary,” February 24, 2003, http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2003/n02242003_200302243.html.101. Shain and Barth, “Diasporas and International Relations Theory.”102. Fiona B. Adamson and Madeleine Demetriou, “Reshaping the Boundaries of ‘State’ and ‘Na-tional Identity’: Incorporating Diasporas into IR Theorizing,” European Journal of International Rela-tions (forthcoming).

Powerful states in the international system can project their inºuence abroadby manipulating immigration policy, by drawing on immigrant populations,and even by mobilizing diasporas living within them for foreign policy ends.During the Cold War, for example, the United States crafted a refugee policythat encouraged emigration and defection from the Soviet Union and EasternEurope, and, in the process, sought to “inºict a psychological blow on commu-nism.”103 As in the economic and military realms, highly skilled immigrantscan enhance national strength in the diplomatic sphere; in the case of theUnited States, one need only think of such prominent examples as HenryKissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Madeleine Albright.

In the post–Cold War world, transnational diaspora populations have beenan important source of national inºuence abroad. Yossi Shain, for example, hasargued, contrary to Huntington, that rather than hurting the United States’ na-tional interests, migrants and diasporas can promote them by acting asunofªcial ambassadors who propagate American values in their home coun-tries.104 At the level of ofªcial policy, states can mobilize ªrst- and second-generation immigrants to assist in achieving particular foreign policy projects;recent examples include drawing on Iraqi exiles in the process of postconºictreconstruction and nation building in Iraq, mobilizing highly skilled Afghanémigrés for nation building in Afghanistan, and relying on PalestinianAmericans as negotiators in various rounds of Middle East peace talks.

Cross-Border Mobility and the Changing Nature of Violent Conºict

The nature of violent conºict in the international system is arguably the area inwhich migration, in particular, and globalization, more generally, has beenmost signiªcant in reshaping the security environment facing state actors.Mainstream approaches to security, particularly realist and neorealist ap-proaches, have traditionally assumed that states seek to protect themselvesprimarily against security threats from other states. What emerges in the con-text of globalization, however, is the proliferation of a number of securitythreats to states that emanate from nonstate actors.105


103. Aristide Zolberg, “From Invitation to Interdiction: U.S. Foreign Policy and Immigration since1945,” in Michael S. Teitelbaum and Myron Weiner, eds., Threatened Peoples, Threatened Borders:World Migration and U.S. Policy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), pp. 123–124.104. Yossi Shain, Marketing the American Creed Abroad: Diasporas in the United States and Their Home-lands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).105. Fiona B. Adamson, “Globalization, Transnational Political Mobilization, and Networks ofViolence,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 1 (April 2005), pp. 35–53.

Migration ºows can interact with other factors in three ways to exacerbateconditions that foment violent conºict in the international system: by provid-ing resources that help to fuel internal conºicts; by providing opportunities fornetworks of organized crime; and by providing conduits for international ter-rorism. The degree to which each of these factors affects a state depends onthe level of its capacity. Organized crime, for example, presents itself as alaw enforcement problem to highly institutionalized states; but for weakly in-stitutionalized states, organized crime can lead to much more serious conse-quences, corrupting, challenging, or even hijacking state institutions.106

Like many other aspects of the relationship between migration and nationalsecurity, these factors are not all necessarily new, but rather have been under-studied by specialists in international relations and security studies. For exam-ple, in the period of nineteenth-century globalization, which saw similarwaves of migration, there was also a plethora of political activity by nonstateactors who utilized migration channels and immigrant communities to mobi-lize transnationally and, at times, employed political violence that challengedstate security interests. Examples include nineteenth-century anarchist and so-cialist networks, as well as various nationalist movements, such as the Fenians,who were particularly active in mobilizing within Irish immigrant communi-ties in the United States.107 International relations, as an academic discipline,has been heavily shaped by the experiences of World War I and World War II—and is, to some extent, an intellectual response to these devastating events.Scholars of international security, however, may have to step back and exam-ine pre–World War I dynamics in the international system to understand someof the post–Cold War and post–September 11 challenges facing states today.

internal conflict: mobilized diasporas and refugees

International migration processes, combined with the availability of new tech-nologies and media markets, allow for migrants and their descendents to re-main connected to their home country and co-ethnics through diasporanetworks. These transnational diaspora networks, in turn, can be used as a po-litical resource, including in violent conºicts. Studies have shown that dias-pora funding played a key role in providing resources for violent conºictsduring the 1990s. According to a World Bank study, countries experiencing vi-


106. For the case of Russia, see Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Makingof Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002).107. See, for example, David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Rebel Terror and September 11,” inCharles W. Kegley, ed., The New Global Terrorism: Characteristics, Causes, Controls (Upper SaddleRiver, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003), pp. 36–59.

olent conºict that had signiªcant diaspora populations abroad were six timeslikelier to experience a recurrence of conºict than states without such pop-ulations. The author of this report, Paul Collier, argued that “diasporasappear to make life for those left behind much more dangerous in post-conºictsituations.”108

A number of qualitative studies of diasporas in internal conºicts haveechoed this observation.109 The Independent International Commission onKosovo, for example, noted that it was Kosovar Albanians in the diaspora whocreated the Kosovo Liberation Army, raised money in the diaspora to supportthe conºict, and even utilized the diaspora to recruit ªghters.110 Other exam-ples include the conºict between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Turkishstate throughout the 1990s, as well as that between the Tamil Tigers and the SriLankan state. Islamists drew upon migrant workers in Gulf states in the 1980sand 1990s to fund Islamic fundamentalist networks that were eventually ableto take over the state in Sudan.111 In the Gulf, more generally, states haveshifted to recruiting labor from Asian, as opposed to Arab states, in reaction tothe politicization of Arab immigrant communities through mobilization activi-ties by nonstate actors.112 In many of these cases, diaspora mobilization ap-pears to feed into “transnationalized cycles of political violence.”113

A similar dynamic exists with regard to refugee populations and violentconºict. Just as political entrepreneurs can mobilize resources and politicalsupport for a conºict within diasporas in Western industrial states, refugeepopulations can also provide a base for political mobilization activities inconºicts.114 Not all refugee populations are likely to become the targets of po-litical mobilization activities, but when they are targeted, dilemmas are createdon multiple levels.115 Humanitarian assistance operations that target refugee


108. Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conºict and Their Implications for Policy,” p. 6.109. Kaldor, New and Old Wars; Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, South-east Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 58–74; and Daniel Byman, Peter Chalk, BruceHoffman, William Rosenau, and David Brannan, Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements(Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2001).110. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report: Conºict, InternationalResponse, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 45.111. Khalid Medani, “Funding Fundamentalism: The Political Economy of an Islamist State,” inJoel Beinin and Joe Stork, eds., Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1997), pp. 166–177.112. IOM, World Migration, 2003, p. 206.113. Fiona B. Adamson, “Displacement, Diaspora Mobilization, and Transnational Cycles of Polit-ical Violence,” in John Tirman, ed., Maze of Fear: Migration and Security after 9/11 (New York: NewPress, 2004), pp. 45–58.114. Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo, Escape from Violence.115. Lischer notes that “state-in-exile” refugees are more likely to be violence prone than “situa-tional” or “persecuted” refugee populations. Lischer, “Collateral Damage.”

populations, for example, can fuel violent conºicts by providing material as-sistance, support, and legitimacy to militants who are embedded in or linkedto refugee camps and populations. This is what occurred in refugee camps inthe Democratic Republic of Congo (at that time, Zaire) following the 1994Rwandan genocide and in camps in Pakistan following the 1979 Soviet inva-sion of Afghanistan.116

organized crime: human smuggling and gray economy networks

Perhaps the most obvious link between migration and organized crime is theglobal industry in human smuggling and trafªcking that has emerged to meetthe demands of individuals seeking to cross national borders. This is an in-stance in which market-based mechanisms take over when the demand for op-portunities to immigrate outstrips the supply provided by ofªcial channels instate migration policies. Smugglers command high prices for their services,ranging from $500 for passage from Morocco to Spain to as much as $50,000from some countries in Asia to the United States.117 Like other nonstate actors,smuggling networks have been able to take advantage of new technologiesto achieve their goals. Albanian smuggling groups operating in the CzechRepublic during the 1990s, for example, were equipped with night-visionequipment, cell phones with network cards, and other high-technology gearthat were used to help smuggle some 40,000 “clients” across the Czech-German border.118

The nexus between organized criminal groups, armed rebel organizations,and terrorist networks is often difªcult to disentangle. Andreas has pointedout the extent to which transnational criminal networks provided the materialbasis for the Bosnian conºict.119 Similar arguments can be made for conºicts inKosovo and Turkey. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, for example, was heavilyinvolved in human smuggling as a way of both raising money for the conºictin Turkey during the 1990s and smuggling in supporters to engage in politicalactivities in Europe.120

Global organized criminal networks are often deªned by a particular ethnic-ity and are able to operate transnationally by forging networks of solidarity


116. Ibid., pp. 92–95.117. IOM World Migration, 2003, p. 60.118. Rey Koslowski, “The Mobility Money Can Buy: Human Smuggling and Border Control in theEuropean Union,” in Andreas and Snyder, The Wall around the West, pp. 203–218.119. Peter Andreas, “The Clandestine Political Economy of War and Peace in Bosnia,” InternationalStudies Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 29–51.120. Koslowski, “The Mobility Money Can Buy.”

that take advantage of migration-based networks and migration circuits.Again, organized criminal networks are not new. Chinese criminal networks,or “Triads,” for example, smuggled Chinese into California during the GoldRush in the 1840s.121 What is new, however, is the globalization of ethnicallybased criminal networks and their ability to forge alliances with one another—organizing themselves internationally, just as any legitimate business might doin a global economy. Peter Lupsha details how contemporary “Chinese illegalsin Naples produced counterfeit French perfume in bottles made in Spain, withfaux Chanel perfume made in Mexico, and covered in gold wrappings and la-bels printed in Belgium.”122 Just as globalization provides opportunities for le-gal operations to transnationalize production structures, so too does it provideopportunities for criminal operations that rely on networks of individuals thatstretch across national borders.

The emergence of transnational criminal networks that use migration strate-gically to pursue their interests can inºuence the national security interests ofstates in a number of ways. At the most basic level, it can have an impact onthe security of the victims of its illegal activities—whether they are individualswho die in transit or under other circumstances, or who are touched by the vi-olence that accompanies such criminal activities. Organized crime, however, isalso destabilizing at the global level, leading to what James Mittelman andRobert Johnston term “the corruption of global civil society”—the same civil-society channels and networks that help to produce an international publicsphere also provide opportunities for increased levels of transnationally orga-nized illicit activities.123 Finally, in states that are already weak or failing, theinºux of resources tied to international criminal networks can help to supportmaªa-like organizations that actually challenge the ability of states to maintainsovereignty over particular areas or that otherwise corrupt their authority.When criminal networks take over law enforcement functions and monopolizeviolence at the local level, as well as engage in distributive and service-provid-ing activities normally associated with the state, a local dependence on inter-national networks of organized crime can develop, creating serious internalsecurity problems, as can be seen, for example, in states such as Colombia.124


121. Mittelman, The Globalization Syndrome, p. 208.122. Peter Lupsha, “Transnational Organized Crime versus the Nation-State,” Transnational Orga-nized Crime, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 1996), p. 27.123. James H. Mittelman and Robert Johnston, “Global Organized Crime,” in Mittelman, The Glob-alization Syndrome, pp. 203–222.124. Louise Shelley, “Transnational Organized Crime: The New Authoritarianism,” in H. Richard

terrorism: migration and transnational political violence

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, questions relating to migration and se-curity are increasingly viewed through the lens of international terrorism. Thisis true not just in the United States but also in Europe and other states. Foreignminister Josep Piqué of Spain, for example, argued that “the ªght against ille-gal immigration is also the reinforcement of the ªght against terrorism.”125

A recent report published by the Nixon Center declares, “Immigration and ter-rorism are linked—not because all immigrants are terrorists but because all, ornearly all, terrorists in the West have been immigrants.” The same report goeson to cite Rohan Gunaratna’s claim that “all major terrorist attacks conductedin the last decade in North America and Western Europe, with the exception ofOklahoma City, have utilized migrants.”126

Such claims are sensationalist and highly problematic, not the least becausethey do not take into account attacks by domestic groups in Europe such as theseparatist group Basque Fatherland and Liberty, also known as ETA. Migra-tion policies and migration networks, however, do provide avenues for terror-ist organizations and other nonstate actors to pursue their interests, just asthey provide opportunities for states and other actors. Robert Leiken arguesthat states tend to view immigration from an economic perspective, whereasterrorist organizations view immigration from a strategic perspective—usingall aspects of the immigration system to gain access to target states. Heindentiªes two strategies for getting such access: the ªrst is the use of so-calledhit squads that enter a state with the explicit aim of committing a terroristact—this was the case in the attacks of September 11. The second strategy is re-lying on sleeper cells, that is, groups already inside the target state that areactivated at a particular point to carry out attacks. While internal U.S. surveil-lance has focused on uncovering the latter since September 11, all evidencesuggests that the United States is more at risk from external inªltrators thanfrom any form of domestic mobilization around radical Islam—a concern thatis much more pronounced in European states such as France, Germany, andGreat Britain.127


Friman and Peter Andreas, eds., The Illicit Global Economy and State Power (Lanham, Md.: Rowmanand Littleªeld, 1999), pp. 25–52.125. Quoted in “EU: Terrorism, Harmonization,” Migration News, Vol. 8, No. 11 (November 2001),http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id?2488_0_4_0.126. Robert S. Leiken, Bearers of Global Jihad? Immigration and National Security after 9/11 (Washing-ton, D.C.: Nixon Center, 2004), p. 6. Gunaratna’s quotation is attributed to his presentation at theNixon Center on December 1, 2003.127. Leiken, Bearers of Global Jihad? p. 6.

U.S. immigration policy and border control have become a front line inprotecting the United States from further terrorist attacks. The reorganizationand incorporation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service into theDepartment of Homeland Security, the screening of potential border crossers,the use of immigration lists for intelligence purposes, and increased coopera-tion with other states on such issues as the forgery of passports and other doc-uments have all become tools in the war against terrorism. Striking a balancebetween border control and intelligence gathering, on the one hand, and facili-tating the beneªts of maintaining relatively open borders, on the other, is a del-icate task.

One danger in making the link between migration and security with regardto international terrorism is that states may overreact. Already, measures takensince September 11 appear to be deterring foreign students from studying inthe United States, which may hurt its ability to lead in science and technologyover the long run. Even more serious is the negative impact that surveillanceactivities have had on alienating Muslim and other populations within theUnited States.128 The detention of Muslims and non-Muslim Arabs, the moni-toring of Islamic charities, and the shutting down of money-transfer servicesthat are thought to feed into the hawala system have all caused widespread re-sentment. In addition to raising serious questions with respect to civil libertiesand racial proªling, such actions contribute to other counterproductive out-comes, such as weakening incipient diasporic civil-society networks that couldsupport bottom-up processes of political liberalization in the Middle East anddamaging United States efforts at public diplomacy abroad.129

Conclusion

The management of international migration ºows is a key challenge facingstates in a globalized international security environment. Like other dimen-sions of globalization, many of the mechanisms by which migration ºows af-


128. For critical overviews of the impact of internal security measures on Arab and Muslim popu-lations in the United States, see Louise Cainkar, “Targeting Muslims, at Ashcroft’s Discretion,”Middle East Report, March 14, 2003, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero031403.html; and LouiseCainkar, “Impact of the September 11 Attacks on Arab and Muslim Communities in the UnitedStates,” in Tirman, Maze of Fear, pp. 215–239.129. Amaney Jamal and Steven Heydemann, “Social Capital: Rise or Decline in the ImmediatePost–9/11 Environment,” background paper for the Social Science Research Council projectReframing the Challenge of Migration and Security, http://www.ssrc.org/programs/gsc/publications/gsc_activities/migration/Heydemannjamal.pdf.

fect national security are not necessarily new, but rather operate cumulativelyand in combination with other factors, and as such have been largely ignoredby much of the literature in mainstream security studies. In part, this is be-cause dimensions of globalization such as international migration inºuencestate security interests in much more complex, contradictory, and diffuse waysthan do traditional security threats, such as the threat of one state actor usingmilitary force against another. To address these more nuanced dimensions ofthe international security environment, security specialists must move awayfrom grand theories that focus on unitary state actors and begin to employmore conventional forms of policy analysis and evaluation.

A ªrst step in devising migration policies that are appropriate to the contem-porary international security environment is to assess the range of effects thatcross-border ºows of people can have on the overall security interests of states.Based on the discussion in this article, the overall impact of international mi-gration and human mobility on core national security concerns can be brieºysummarized as follows. With regard to state capacity and autonomy, there aretwo broad ªndings. First, migration ºows inºuence both the capacity and theautonomy of state actors: the extent to which they do so, however, varieswidely across states. Migration ºows can have serious security impacts on thecapacity of states that are already weak or failing. Yet states with high capacityhave generally shown themselves adept at adjusting to the realities of in-creased human mobility. Second, some globalization processes may be bring-ing about a more profound change in the relationship between state autonomyand state capacity. As two distinct components of state sovereignty, autonomyand capacity are often viewed as going hand-in-hand. One impact of global-ization on the state, however, could be the increasing divergence between statecapacity and state autonomy as measures of state effectiveness: to managecross-border challenges, state capacity is enhanced, rather than threatened, byincreased cooperation with other states in areas such as the formulation andenforcement of migration policy.

With regard to the impacts of migration on the balance of power amongstates, the results are mixed. On the one hand, current migration regimes,which favor highly skilled workers, tend to exacerbate already existing in-equalities by widening the gap between the “winners” and “losers” of global-ization and by contributing to problems such as a brain drain from developingeconomies to advanced industrial economies. In addition, global inequalitiesare reinforced through the greater barriers and other obstacles placed on themobility of labor across national boundaries as compared with the mobility of


capital. For strong states with the capacity to effectively mobilize the talents ofmigrant populations, migration generally enhances the ability of these popula-tions to project power in a number of areas. Economically disadvantagedstates, however, can also beneªt from the effective mobilization of their over-seas populations. Although populations in institutionally weak and economi-cally less developed states suffer disproportionately from current migrationregimes, there is also the potential for migration processes to promote devel-opment and technology transfer between states, which could, over the me-dium to long term, help to temper levels of global inequality, as well as lead togreater levels of interdependence among states.

Finally, with regard to migration and the nature of violent conºict, my anal-ysis supports the general conclusion that international migration ºows do in-deed provide opportunities for new forms of transnational action that areutilized by violent nonstate actors perpetrating civil wars in weak states; by or-ganized criminal networks that beneªt from the disjunction between the lowsupply of migration opportunities to advanced industrial countries and thehigh demand for such opportunities; and by international political movementsthat employ strategies of violence and terror to achieve their goals. Interna-tional migration ºows provide conduits for the diffusion of network-basedforms of political violence and instability, a challenge that harms weak statesto a greater degree than strong states and that requires increased levels ofinterstate cooperation to meet. A signiªcant danger for states, however—especially advanced industrial states—would be to overreact to these threatsin ways that would unnecessarily curtail the many beneªts of international mi-gration, including beneªts that enhance overall levels of state security and in-ternational stability.

In each of these areas—state capacity and autonomy, the balance of power,and the nature of violent conºict—migration ºows change the environment inwhich states formulate policy, including security policy. Ultimately, however, itis how states respond to global migration ºows through policy formation andimplementation that will determine the extent to which national security is en-hanced or diminished by international migration. International migrationºows, like other globalized dimensions of the international security environ-ment, “do not present iron laws, but rather they change the cost-beneªt calcu-lus of various policy choices.”130 The challenge facing states is to adopt an


130. Kirshner, Globalization and National Security.

expansive, long-term view of migration, taking into account the many beneªtsof international migration and devising comprehensive migration policies thatenhance overall levels of international security. States that are best able to“harness the power of migration” through well-designed policies in coopera-tion with other states will also be the best equipped to face the new global se-curity environment.


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Crossing Borders Fiona B. Adamson · 2020. 6. 24. · 3. Fiona B. Adamson, “Globalization, International Migration, and Changing Security Interests in Western Europe,” paper presented