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International migration and liberal democracies: thechallenge of integrationR. BaubockPublished online: 07 Dec 2010.

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RAINER BAUBÖCK 33

PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE © Institute for Jewish Policy Research, vol. 35, no. 4, 2001SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi) 0031-322X/33–49/020865

ABSTRACT Migration theories that build on economic incentives and social networkeffects will generally predict much more international migration than we observe.

We have to ‘bring the state back in’ to explain why so few potential migrations leadto actual flows, and why these flows are highly selective. Immigration policies have

been strongly shaped by particular nation-building projects but the increasingdiversity of origins in contemporary migrations has also challenged and transformedperceptions of national identity at the receiving end. Bauböck discusses the need for

studying integration regimes from a comparative and normative perspective. Heexamines characteristic features of four regimes—the United States, Canada, Israeland the European Union—and defends a conception of integration that embraces

the ambiguities of the term: it should be understood as referring to the inclusion ofnewcomers as well as to the internal cohesion of the societies and political

communities that are transformed by immigration. These two meanings arecombined in a third one of integration as federation: the process of forming largerpolitical unions from distinct societies. Particularly in the context of the European

Union integration policies for immigrants should live up to the same democraticprinciples that are invoked for the political integration of the EU. This suggests aEuropean agenda for harmonizing the legal status of third country residents and

their access to citizenship. Bringing the state back in makes us also aware that thetransnational communities of migrants are no substitute for access, status and rights

within territorially bounded polities. Instead of portraying migrants as harbingers ofthe end of the nation-state, we should rather think how to transform nation-states

so that increasingly mobile populations can still share in political authority, abounded territory and a common historical horizon. This perspective of integration

is ‘transnational’ rather than ‘postnational’. A transnational perspective does notenvisage the dissolution of nation-states, but emphasizes instead that societies and

cultures increasingly overlap both in space and time.

KEYWORDS immigration, immobility, integration, migration, multiculturalism,nation-state, national identity, transnationalism

RAINER BAUBÖCK

International migration and liberaldemocracies: the challenge of integration1

1 Different versions of this paper were presented at the Third International Metropolis Confer-ence in Zichron Yaakov, Israel, 30 November–3 December 1998, at the workshop on‘Multiculturalism and struggles for recognition in comparative perspective’ at the Center forEuropean Studies, Harvard University, 5–6 March 1999, and at seminars at the universities ofMalmö and Linköping in December 2000 and January 2001. I am grateful to the participantsat these events and to two anonymous referees for helpful criticism and comments.

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34 Patterns of Prejudice 35:4

Why migration theories seem to explain too muchThe second half of the twentieth century witnessed growing global demo-graphic and economic disparities and a simultaneous shrinking of distancesfor communication and travel. Both developments have contributed to theincrease in international migration flows. Mainstream theories explain thisvery well by understanding migration as a spontaneous movement of personswho seek to improve their situation and cause thereby a gradual reduction ofthese inequalities. One problem with this commonsense approach is that itpredicts much more migration than we can actually observe. During the nine-teenth century Europe exported its demographic transition problem to NorthAmerica. Why does the global South, where a similar transition is occurringtoday on a much more dramatic scale, not do the same? According to stand-ard economic theory the free flow of labour across borders should lead to amore efficient allocation of this factor of production and to an equalization ofincome from it, namely wages. Why then has the globalization of markets notyet created a borderless market for labour? Economists have in recent yearsgreatly refined their theories of migration. Oded Stark and others have sug-gested that in many contexts the family household, rather than the individualmigrant, is the relevant decision-making unit and that choices are not alwaysdriven by the maximization of income, but also by considerations of riskdiversification or relative deprivation in a reference community.2 Yet even forthese new approaches the basic puzzle still remains. As a group of researchersaround Tomas Hammar has pointed out,3 the challenge is not how to explainthe increase of migration, but the astonishing degree of immobility of personsin a world in which incentives and opportunities for moving to other coun-tries seem so abundant.

Sociologists and anthropologists sometimes explain this immobility byincluding the costs of cultural adaptation in the individual’s calculus as towhether to move or to stay. Cultural community may thus be a generalinhibitor for out-migration, but more plausibly it is just an initial threshold.Emigration is often not an exit from community obligations, but a form ofcompliance that involves promises by those who leave to return money andfinally to return themselves. And in every group of potential migrants therewill be some risk-seeking characters who are likely to explore new destina-tions. As the political theorist Brian Barry has pointed out, once these pioneershave established themselves in another country the cultural deterrent will bemuch lower for those who come after them. As more and more people movefrom the same origin to the same destination, they form networks of infor-mation and material support and create a familiar environment for laterimmigrants. Cultural barriers will continue to become weaker so that eventu-

2 Oded Stark, The Migration of Labor (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell 1991). 3 Tomas Hammar, Grete Brochmann, Kristof Tamas and Thomas Faist (eds), International Mi-

gration, Immobility and Development. Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Oxford and New York:Berg 1997).

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ally only the flattening of economic and demographic disparities should stopthe flow.4 This is a greatly simplified account of the core idea in migrationsystem and chain migration theories.5 They explain very well why migrationis a self-reinforcing process whose patterns are not a simple function of in-equalities and distances between origin and destination. But they can rarelypredict the beginning or the saturation point of a flow.6

Bringing the state back inWhy is our world not like Barry’s model? Paraphrasing a famous nineteenth-century philosopher and economist, one might say that migrants make theirown choices as to whether and when to leave and where to go, but they do sounder circumstances not of their own making. These circumstances are notmerely economic but also political ones. The most powerful agent shapingthe conditions under which international migration occurs is of course themodern state. In recent contributions Aristide Zolberg and James Hollifieldhave argued for bringing the state back into migration theory.7

Which kinds of movement states try to control has varied greatly inhistory and between different types of regimes. In early modern times migra-tion within the state territory and emigration were tightly restricted. Bycontrast, the liberal democratic state has created a zone of internal free move-ment but has stepped up its control of immigration to unprecedented levels.The demographic, economic and cultural factors mentioned above are goodpredictors for internal migration when it has become a liberty protected bythe state. But economic migration theories have yet to ‘factor in’ state controlof external borders. Generally they do not attempt to explain what drivesregulation efforts, but instead regard governments as addressees for policyadvice on how to regulate immigration in order to maximize its economic

4 Brian Barry, ‘The quest for consistency: a sceptical view’, in Brian Barry and Robert Goodin(eds), Free Movement. Ethical Issues in the Transnational Migration of People and of Money(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1992), 281.

5 Charles Tilly, ‘Transplanted networks’, in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Re-considered. History, Sociology, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), 79–95;Douglas Gurak and Fe Caces, ‘Migration networks and the shaping of migration systems’, inMary Kritz, Lin Lean Lim and Hania Zlotnik (eds), International Migration Systems. A Glo-bal Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992), 150–76.

6 A group of scholars co-ordinated by Douglas Massey has attempted a systematic comparisonand empirical assessment of economic and sociological migration theories: see Douglas S.Massey, Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kovaouci, Adela Pellegrino and J. Edward Taylor,‘Theories of international migration: a review and appraisal’, Population and DevelopmentReview, vol. 19, 1993, 431–66; Douglas S. Massey et al., ‘An evaluation of international mi-gration theory: the North American case’, Population and Development Review, vol. 20, 1994,699–751; Douglas S. Massey et al., Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migrationat the End of the Millennium (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1998).

7 Aristide Zolberg, ‘Matters of state: theorizing immigration policy’, in Charles Hirschman,Philip Kasinitz and Josh De Wind (eds), Becoming American, American Becoming (New York:Russell Sage Foundation 1999), 71–93; James F. Hollifield, ‘The politics of international mi-gration. How can we “bring the state back in”?’, in Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield(eds), Migration Theory. Talking across Disciplines (New York and London: Routledge 2000).

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36 Patterns of Prejudice 35:4

benefits for the receiving society. Legislators and governments seem to actirrationally when they do not follow such advice. However, control effortsare never merely driven by economic interest. They invariably involve a po-litical logic of sovereignty and nationhood. The very definition of the basicunit over which costs and benefits will be aggregated is a political one: it is anational economy. And immigration complicates the aggregation by blurringthe boundaries: Are immigrants to be counted among those whose collectiveinterest is to be maximized through immigration control? Will they be countedonly after they have become citizens, or right after being admitted, or evenbefore entry? That is, should the utilitarian calculus include potential immi-grants? Thus any kind of immigration control refers us back to the basicquestion of political membership: Who belongs?

Although immigration control has become the most important way inwhich states impact on migration flows, one should not forget that states arealso often the cause of emigration. Political or religious oppression, wars andcivil wars, foreign occupation or the break-up of multinational states havetriggered some of the largest population movements in contemporary his-tory.8 Furthermore, immigration control is not always meant to reduce flows.Sometimes receiving states encourage them proactively by recruiting foreignlabour abroad or through an open door policy for co-ethnics who are re-garded as belonging to a national community. Certainly, state control overimmigration is always imperfect: it is not like opening or closing a water tap.Even where it is triggered by political action, migration is a process with itsown economic and social dynamics that may subvert regulatory efforts orproduce unintended effects. Recruiting temporary workers leads to their per-manent settlement,9 closing front doors to legal inflows diverts them to backdoors to illegal immigration,10 and sponsored immigration selected by its eth-nic origins brings in others who are not seen as belonging to the nation.11

What these well-known phenomena illustrate, however, is not a general ‘lossof control’, a succumbing of the state to the forces of economic globalization.By and large the problem is less the lack of technology for controlling bordercrossing or detecting and deporting overstayers, or the costs of implementingit. When control does not achieve its stated aims it is more often due to apolitical inhibition against using available means—such as the introduction of

8 Aristide Zolberg, Astri Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence. Conflict and theRefugee Crises in the Developing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989); MyronWeiner, The Global Migration Crisis (New York: HarperCollins 1995).

9 Stephen Castles, Here for Good. Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities (London: PlutoPress 1984); Aristide Zolberg, ‘Wanted but not welcome: alien labor in western development’,in William Alonso (ed.), Population in an Interacting World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press 1987).

10 Aristide Zolberg, ‘Reforming the back door: the Immigration Reform and Control Act of1986 in historical perspective’, in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsid-ered, History, Sociology, and Politics Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990).

11 Dietrich Thränhardt, ‘Tainted blood: the ambivalence of “ethnic” migration in Israel, Japan,Korea, Germany, and the United States’, German Policy Studies/ Politikfeldanalyse, vol. 1,no. 3, 2000.

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a general population registry in the United States—or to constraints imposedby domestic interest groups or judicial review.

In order to understand the politics of immigration at the receiving endwe must therefore consider the state not only as an agent in the internationalarena who is driven by the goals of maximizing its security and influencebut as itself an arena for domestic political forces. Democratic states areresponsive to organized interest groups and to the preferences of the generalelectorate. Unless we take these into account we can hardly explain whygovernments have adopted so very different policies towards immigration.Gary Freeman has suggested the interesting hypothesis that immigrationcontrol in liberal democracies is not merely constrained by the rule of law butalso tends to be more liberal than voter preferences. The reason is that theburdens of additional immigration (such as on social services) are widelydispersed throughout society whereas the benefits are highly concentratedin particular sectors (such as certain businesses or established immigrantgroups). The latter groups are thus more motivated and capable of organiz-ing, and can block the implementation of restrictive programmes that arepopular with voters.12

However, this does not yet explain why such programmes are so popu-lar among voters who are hardly affected by immigration. The general publicattitude towards immigration and its impact on government policies is oftenquite unrelated to the actual size of inflows and the costs and benefits theygenerate. In the 1990s the ‘immigration issue’ has become a wild card in elec-tions in Europe and both right- and left-wing governments have been understronger pressure from xenophobic sentiments than from pro-immigrationlobbies. This may change in coming years for demographic and economicreasons. Shrinking and ageing native populations threaten European socialsecurity systems,13 and a lack of qualification in new sectors of the economy ishampering Europe’s competitiveness in world markets. Given these strongpressures for more immigration, the timidity of European policymakers seemsquite difficult to explain.14

We have to take one further step, beyond the description of the state asan international agent and a domestic political arena. In democracies politicallegitimacy is grounded in the idea of popular sovereignty, that is, of a self-governing political community. Modern states have been engaged innation-building projects that identify the boundaries of their particular com-munity and its historic and cultural character. Immigration policy is an essential

12 Gary Freeman, ‘Modes of immigration politics in liberal democratic states’, InternationalMigration Review, vol. 19, no. 4, winter 1995, 881–902.

13 United Nations Population Division, Replacement Migration. Is It a Solution to Decliningand Ageing Populations? (New York: United Nations 2000).

14 In 2000 Germany introduced a ‘green card’ programme to attract 10,000 information techno-logy specialists from abroad. In contrast with the US model, the German green card does notinvolve a permanent residence permit but only a temporary five-year one. Unsurprisingly,applications have remained below expectations (Antje Scheidler, ‘Deutschland: Nachfragenach Green Card geringer als erwartet’, Migration und Bevölkerung, no. 2, March 2001).

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38 Patterns of Prejudice 35:4

instrument for this purpose. Those who come from outside are not merelyassessed according to economic criteria but also according to how well theyfit into the national mould. Ours is an age of global migration,15 but also stillan age of nationalism. The locally and historically specific interactions of thesetwo conflicting forces have shaped different immigration regimes. Since RogersBrubaker’s historical study of French and German citizenship,16 there has beena growing awareness that comparative research on the link between nation-building and immigration is indispensable for understanding both the patternsof international movements and the integration patterns of immigrants aftersettlement.

How immigration contributes to nation-building and subverts itYasemin Soysal, Stephen Castles, James Hollifield and others have suggestedvarious typologies of ‘immigrant integration regimes’.17 Often these are ‘ideal-typic’ in Max Weber’s sense: they condense observed differences betweencountries into a classification that seems to exhaust logical or conceptualpossibilities. While this is a valuable endeavour, it generally leads to over-estimating the internal coherence of such regimes. Often it will be moreinteresting to focus instead on the internal complexities of regimes. In doingso one should try to avoid the opposite danger of abandoning the compara-tive perspective by describing each national regime as a singular case.

The proposal here is to examine the make-up and shared sense—or, per-haps better, the structure and ideology—of political community in variouscountries in order to understand the different kinds of immigration andintegration regimes they have developed. Questions like the following imme-diately arise: Is a political community understood to be multi-national,mono-national or composed of a national majority and various kinds ofminorities? Does the hegemonic group regard itself as a nation of immigrantsor has it been shaped by emigration and exile? On the one hand, the particularmix of these and other building blocks of political community may then ex-plain a country’s general approach to the integration of immigrants. On theother hand, ongoing immigration becomes itself a part of the framework; it isalso an independent variable that changes the ethno-cultural make-up of‘receiving societies’ and their sense of political community, and it is often themost dynamic element of such change. Therefore it is not unsurprising that

15 Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration. International Population Move-ments in the Modern World (London: Macmillan 1993).

16 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press 1992).

17 Yasemin Soysal, The Limits of Citizenship. Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994), ch. 3; Stephen Castles, ‘Democracy andmulticultural citizenship. Australian debates and their relevance for Western Europe’, in RainerBauböck (ed.), From Aliens to Citizens. Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe (Al-dershot: Avebury 1994); James F. Hollifield, ‘The migration crisis in Western Europe: thesearch for a national model’, in Klaus J. Bade (ed.), Migration—Ethnizität—Konflikt:Systemfragen und Fallstudien (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch 1996).

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countries cannot be easily classified by ethnic versus civic national identitiesthat are frozen in time and that shape the general public attitude as well asimmigration policies.18 To do so would be simply to translate nationalist ideo-logy into research hypotheses. What needs to be explained are the persistentdifferences as well as convergences between integration regimes. In order todo this the structural features of political communities and their endogenousas well as exogenous evolution over time must be examined. With these ideasin mind, four different kinds of integration regimes—the United States,Canada, Israel and the European Union—will be briefly considered.

The United States and the ethno-racial pentagonThe United States is generally seen as the world’s foremost society of immi-gration, which is still true in terms of absolute numbers of legal admissionsper year although not with regard to per capita immigration or the percentageof foreign-born persons among the population. In these regards it has beenovertaken by Israel, Australia, Canada and some Western European states. Itis also important to remember that the American self-perception as a nationof immigrants has not prevented widespread resentment against successivewaves of European migrants (first Germans, then Irish, then Slavs and Jews),the Asian Exclusion Acts of the late nineteenth century, an upsurge of nativismand a policy of ‘Americanization’ around the First World War,19 and finally along period of extremely restrictive and selective admission from 1924 to 1965.In the early 1990s both immigration and integration became divisive issues inAmerican politics. Anxieties about national identity are a subtext to many ofthe debates on illegal immigration or on welfare benefits for foreign residents.They rise to the surface in ballots against bilingualism in education and otherareas of public life. Yet on balance there is a remarkable persistence of the ideathat the United States is not only a nation of immigrant origins but one thatought continually to renew and change itself through further immigration.

It has often been said that what keeps this country united and open tofuture self-transformation is a civic rather than an ethnic idea of nationhood.But, paradoxically, since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, the very com-mitment to a more inclusive interpretation of political equality has led to arenewed emphasis on ethnic and racial difference. American nationhood hadbeen constructed on the twin foundations of inclusion of European immi-grants and exclusion of Blacks. Attempts to cope with the continuingdiscrimination against African Americans have produced a much more het-erogeneous nation. In the late nineteenth century the United States may havebeen close to becoming a multi-national society of European immigrant

18 For empirical evidence that there is surprisingly little difference in the distribution of ethnicversus civic national identities between the German, Swedish and Australian populations, seeMikael Hjerm, ‘National identity: a comparison of Sweden, Germany and Australia’, Journalof Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 1998, 451–70.

19 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press 1955).

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40 Patterns of Prejudice 35:4

groups;20 during much of the twentieth century it was a real melting pot forimmigrant identities, and now it has become a multi-cultural society, divided,according to David Hollinger, into an ‘ethno-racial pentagon’ with Euro-American, African-American, Indigenous, Asian and Latino segments.21 Thefastest growing groups of recent immigrants form the latter two sectors. Theborders between these five categories are of course quite artificial, but whetherthey will soften over time does not merely depend on rates of intermarriageand residential desegregation. Or rather, these social patterns of intermin-gling will be strongly influenced by public perceptions of ethno-racialdifference. Softening the borders will require a more inclusive national con-sensus, which may feed on the old idea of a republic of immigrants but whichhas to interpret it in new ways. The alternative to this is a pattern of whatAlejandro Portes and Min Zhou have called the ‘segmented assimilation’ ofnew immigrants into the separate compartments of the pentagon.22

Canada: binational, indigenous and multiculturalCanada is the country where the term ‘multiculturalism’ was for the first timeembraced for public policy purposes. In 1971 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeauintroduced a policy of official multiculturalism. The 1988 MulticulturalismAct declares that ‘multiculturalism is a fundamental characteristic of theCanadian heritage and identity and that it provides an invaluable resource inthe shaping of Canada’s future’.23 The general framework of national identityand officially recognized diversity is quite different from the US model ofethno-racial segments. It is more like a multilayered structure in which eachlayer has different fault lines along which it may crack or break apart. If thewindshield of a car has such a structure it offers better protection in case ofcollision than if it is made from homogeneous glass. Yet, in contrast to theSwiss federation, which has been remarkably stable for just this reason, in theCanadian case one fault line dominates the others, and it is showing numer-ous cracks. Although currently support for the secession of Quebec seems tobe rather low, it is unclear whether the country would survive, in its presentform, the impact of a third referendum on independence for the Francophoneprovince.24

Canada is a white settler society, split into two language groups, thesmaller of which has over time developed a distinct national identity and hasacquired substantial powers of self-government within the province where it

20 This vision was most eloquently defended by Horace Kallen (‘Democracy versus the meltingpot’, Nation, vol. 100, February 1915, 18–25).

21 David Hollinger, Postethnic America. Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books 1995).22 Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, ‘The new second generation: segmented assimilation and its

variants’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 530, Novem-ber 1993, 74–96.

23 Quoted in Will Kymlicka, Finding Our Way. Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada(Toronto: Oxford University Press 1998), 185.

24 Referendums were held in 1980 and 1995. In 1995 voters were asked a rather ambiguousquestion, which resulted in an extremely narrow defeat for secession by 49.4 to 50.6 per cent.

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is now almost exclusively concentrated. However, Canada’s bilingual federal-ism does not easily fit its constitutional design as a federation of ten provinceswhose equal federal representation and political powers conflict with Que-bec’s claim to be recognized as a ‘distinct society’. These parallel structures,of regional and of multinational federalism,25 combine with a third layer ofindigenous self-government for Indians, Inuits and Métis. Their autonomyhas more political weight than in the United States and relies strongly onfederal protection from the provincial governments of both language groups.Immigrants form the fourth layer and the notion of ‘multiculturalism’ is mainlyassociated with respect for their ethnic diversity. Both aboriginal First Na-tions and the Québecois have seen in this policy a downgrading of their morespecific claims to territorial self-government. The Québecois government hassignalled its reservation by replacing the term itself with the notion ofinterculturalism, emphasizing thereby the importance of integrating immi-grants into its distinct political community.26 The integration of immigrantshas to some extent been instrumentalized for the national conflict within theCanadian federation. In its admission system Quebec gives more points toimmigrants with a Francophone background, and it requires immigrant par-ents to send their children to French-speaking public schools. But focusingon maintaining French as the language of public life makes Quebec’s policy inthe end not so different from that of many democratic nation-states.27 Andpromoting immigration from diverse origins (including Francophone WestAfrica and Caribbean islands) has made Québecois identity much less ‘eth-nic’ and more similar to multiculturalism in other parts of the country.

The dilemmas of Canadian multiculturalism have provided a backgroundfor some of the most imaginative political theories as to how liberal democra-cies ought to respond to cultural heterogeneity. Charles Taylor suggests thatin an asymmetrical federation of this sort ‘deep diversity’ requires a mutualacceptance not just of cultural differences in society, but of different ways ofbeing a citizen of the federation.28 Will Kymlicka disagrees with Taylor on themoral foundations and limits of cultural rights, but his theory contributes toan understanding of the implications of diversity in societies that are simulta-neously multinational and multi-ethnic.29 ‘Polyethnic rights’ for immigrantsas well as self-government and special representation for national minorities

25 Philip Resnick, ‘Toward a multination federalism’, in Leslie Seidle (ed.), Seeking a NewCanadian Partnership: Asymmetrical and Confederal Options (Montreal: Institute for Re-search on Public Policy 1994).

26 Danielle Juteau, Marie McAndrew and Linda Pietrantonio, ‘Multiculturalism à la Canadianand intégration à la Québécoise’, in Rainer Bauböck and John Rundell (eds), Blurred Bounda-ries. Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship (Avebury: Ashgate 1998).

27 Joseph Carens (ed.), Is Quebec Nationalism Just? Perspectives from Anglophone Canada(Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press 1995).

28 Charles Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism(Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press 1993).

29 Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford:Clarendon Press 1995).

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are justified in so far as they provide external protection against majoritypreferences, but their purposes are different: while the former serves to inte-grate immigrants as equal citizens, the latter establishes groups as constitutiveparts of a federal polity. The common label ‘multiculturalism’ for both kindsof claims has distorted this difference and caused false alarms that culturalrecognition for immigrants would eventually lead to separatism.30

Israel: immigrant nation, multireligious state, contested bordersThe third regime under consideration is Israel. It is much more obviously asingular case, but it is also a mixed one and some of the ingredients may notbe so utterly unique that comparison becomes meaningless. First, like thetwo countries discussed so far, it is a political community created and sus-tained through immigration. But immigration is linked to a nation-buildingproject in a quite different way. Israel is a state that remains not only open toimmigrants but whose proclaimed raison d’être is to serve as destination foraliyah, the ingathering of exiles from around the world. Some have even sug-gested that the newcomer rather than the veteran or native-born Israelirepresents the core identity of this community. Yet, compared to the earlystages of other nation-building projects, and in spite of the avowedly Jewishcharacter of the state, there seems to be remarkably little effort to create ahomogeneous public culture and identity. Israel is therefore, second, also adeeply diverse society split along religious and ethnic lines between secularand orthodox Jews and between Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews.31 The reli-gious divide is not merely derived from the diversity of immigrant origins butis linked to a regime of established religious group rights, the roots of whichextend back via the British mandate to the Ottoman Empire. Third, Israel isalso a multi-national society if one considers its Arab citizens as a group whoseparticular identity is not so much shaped by its Muslim or Christian religion,but much more so by the history of conflict between the Israeli and Palestin-ian national projects. As the local majority population before 1948, theyobviously perceive Jewish immigration as an instrument for their furthermarginalization in their own country. In Michael Walzer’s words, Israel thuscombines three different ‘regimes of toleration’,32 which frequently generateintolerance when they come into conflict with each other. In addition to allthis there is the overriding concern and unresolved question of external bor-ders and of peaceful co-existence with its Arab neighbours and with a futurePalestinian state. This context has shaped a peculiar immigration regime, butthat regime has also been transformed in quite unexpected ways by immigra-

30 For the United States, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York:Norton 1992) and Michael Lind, The Next American Nation. The New Nationalism and theFourth American Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster 1995); for Canada, see NeilBissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin1994) and Richard Gwyn, Nationalism without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of BeingCanadian (Toronto: MacClelland and Stewart 1995).

31 Eliezer Ben-Rafael, ‘The Israeli experience in multiculturalism’, in Bauböck and Rundell (eds).32 Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1997), 40–3.

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tion so that over time Israel has in certain aspects become less exceptional.Three phenomena illustrate this interaction.

The first observation is that, while immigration is of course still strictlyselective, the mode of integration has thoroughly changed. The original Zion-ist vision of a melting pot in which the various Jewish identities would betransformed into an Israeli one has given way to a more limited insistence onHebrew as the common language and much wider scope for the toleration oreven recognition of persistent diversity among Jews. This transformation froman assimilationist to a multicultural regime of integration, which parallelsdevelopments in the United States or Canada, is not merely a result of theincreasing diversity of origins that have shifted from European to Middle East-ern and finally Russian. It has also been greatly accelerated by the immigrants’political empowerment in a state that grants them citizenship not at the end ofa process of integration but already at its very beginning.

The second observation is how the goal of nation-building through im-migration has come into conflict with a religiously grounded definition ofmembership. In order to decide who is a Jew, the Law of Return uses thetraditional definition of matrilineal descent and includes converts, but a 1970amendment broadened this substantially by imparting an independent rightof access to all spouses, children and grandchildren of a Jew and their chil-dren’s or grandchildren’s spouses, making thereby a lot of room for non-Jewishimmigrants. Recently, the status of Jewish converts has become a bone ofcontention, with some denying the validity of conversions unless a tribunalof orthodox rabbis has accepted them. Current policies with regard to non-Jewish relatives and converts have given rise to concerns about abuse by purelyeconomically motivated immigrants. This sounds very familiar to observersfrom Europe where the institution of asylum, which during the Cold Warserved to define a western political identity, has been tightly restricted underthe pretext of preventing similar abuse. Of course, aliyah is much more cen-tral to the Israeli national project than political asylum ever was for anyEuropean state, but the debate about the Law of Return signals anotheraspect in which the dynamic of immigration undermines exceptionalism.

The third point relates immigration to the external conflict about thestatus of the occupied territories in Gaza and the West Bank. In reaction tothe first Intifada and to violent attacks in Israel itself a previously well-estab-lished system of commuter migration of Palestinian workers was not onlytemporarily suspended, but to a large extent replaced by recruitingguestworkers from abroad. Israel embarked thus for the first time on the courseof temporary migration and has since learned the same lesson as so manyother countries before: nothing is so permanent as temporary labour.33 Ulti-

33 Estimates for 1998 by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics counted 153,000 foreign work-ers, more than half of whom had an irregular status: Binyamin Fefferman, ‘Foreign workersemployed illegally in Israel’, in Dilek Çinar, August Gächter and Harald Waldrauch (eds),Irregular Migration: Dynamics, Impact, Policy Options, Eurosocial Reports, vol. 67 (Vienna:European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research 2000).

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mately, Israel will have to face the task of integrating a great part of this non-Jewish population socially, culturally and politically. This will create a wholeset of new dilemmas in a nation whose public culture and institutions havebeen shaped to provide a homeland for Jews.

European Union: supranational governance and multinational federationThe European Union is of course not a state, nor should it be understood as anation-building project. It is a union of states with very different traditionsand conceptions of nationhood. However, it is more than an internationalalliance or confederation in which decisions at the federal level are exclusivelytaken by representatives of national governments and have to be translatedinto domestic law before becoming effective. The European Commission isremoved from the control of national governments, the European Parliamentformally does not represent national electorates but a European citizenry andthe European Court of Justice’s sweeping powers in interpreting the treatiesresemble those of a supreme court. Decisions by the Council of Ministershave direct effect in national systems of law and are in some areas now takenby majority vote. All these are indicators of an emerging supranational politythat ‘pools’ national sovereignties. But is this federated polity as democraticas its separate parts? Concerns about the ‘democratic deficit’ have led to theformal introduction of a citizenship of the European Union in the MaastrichtTreaty of 1992. This citizenship is still extremely thin with regard to the rightsand obligations it confers upon its holders. And it is entirely derivative ofmember state nationality. The current fifteen members are the gatekeepers ofaccess to European citizenship.

Although the European Union is not a state it has developed a distinctmigration regime. Among the EU’s basic principles is the free movement ofpersons between member states. This had led to the abolition of internal bor-ders between the countries participating in the Schengen Agreement and tothe harmonization of external border controls, asylum and visa policies. Whilethe criteria for admitting legal immigrants and integration policies towardsthem still remain within the domain of domestic legislation of the memberstates, the Treaty of Amsterdam has cleared the path for the harmonization ofpolicies. At the Tampere summit in October 1999 the EU Council of Minis-ters for the first time accepted the principle that third country nationals oughtto enjoy rights comparable with those of EU citizens. Since then the EU Com-mission has undertaken a number of initiatives, most importantly with regardto family reunification, that would interfere with current immigration poli-cies of several member states.

One policy area that has so far remained fully excluded from this trendtowards a European regime is naturalization and the acquisition of national-ity at birth. There is something strange about this. How can there be a commoncitizenship of the EU that is acquired in fifteen different ways? And whywould a federation deprive its members of their sovereign power to controladmissions to their territory but leave them with the prerogative to determine

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who will become a member of the federal polity? The United States, for ex-ample, established a uniform naturalization regime soon after adopting theConstitution, almost one hundred years before immigration policies becamea federal matter. There appears to be a simple explanation for the Europeanfederation’s different course, and this is its multinational character. The Am-sterdam Treaty affirms that ‘the Union shall respect the national identities ofits Member States’.34 Whereas governments share a common interest in uni-form rules for access to a space of free internal movement, the rules for admissionto citizenship do indeed reflect various conceptions of national identity.

Yet it seems to me that a multinational federation can respect the na-tional identities of its constituent parts and still have uniform standards foradmission to federal citizenship. In the case of the European Union, it is notonly the common federal citizenship but also domestic considerations thatprovide arguments for harmonizing nationality laws and the legal status ofthe extracommunitari. All the member states have become countries of immi-gration and their own norms of democratic inclusion should require them toset their immigrants, once more to quote Michael Walzer, ‘on the road tocitizenship’.35 Consider the case of Muhlis Ari, called ‘Mehmet’, a boy of four-teen born in Germany who had inherited his parents’ Turkish citizenship buthad never lived in that country. On 14 November 1998, after having commit-ted a series of criminal offences, he was deported to this ‘home country’. Whatis at stake here is not only the question of whether this kind of banishment isan unreasonably harsh penalty, but also whether Mehmet should not havebeen entitled to German citizenship, as he would have been after the reformof German nationality in 1999.36 A ‘decent society’ must not humiliate per-sons within its jurisdiction by a ‘withholding of citizenship from someoneentitled to it’.37 Even less should it use this exclusion as a pretext for expellingsuch persons into another state’s jurisdiction.

Such normative arguments for convergence apply to each European statetaken separately. And one can indeed observe a ‘parallel path development’towards a liberalization of nationality law.38 But there are also reasons forharmonizing nationality law that emerge from political integration within theEuropean Union. European citizenship includes the right of access to em-ployment and social welfare benefits in other member states. Europeangovernments must therefore be interested in the other states’ naturalization

34 Article 1(8).35 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic

Books 1983), 60.36 Since 1 January 2000 children born to at least one parent legally resident in Germany for eight

or more years acquire German nationality at birth, with the child deciding whether to retainGerman or the parents’ citizenship by age twenty-three.

37 Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1996), 152.38 Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, ‘Introduction: citizenship, immigration and nationality:

towards a convergence in Europe?’, in Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil (eds), Towards aEuropean Nationality. Citizenship, Immigration and Nationality Law in the EU (Basingstoke:Palgrave 2001).

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policies. Some readers may object that a harmonization of nationality law inthe European Union is impossible because this touches the very core of mem-ber state sovereignty. However, much the same could have been said in thepast about national currencies, national borders and foreign policy. Becausenationality law is so strongly charged as a symbolic remnant of national sov-ereignty it might be particularly important to turn it into a symbol of Europeanpolitical identity.

For the time being this identity is not that of a federal state in whichfederal citizenship determines that of the provinces. The institutions of theEuropean Union have created a powerful supranational structure of govern-ance, but they still lack an adequate project for the political community theyare about to build. This community should indeed be a multinational federa-tion that affirms the different identities of its constituent members. KeepingEU citizenship derivative of member state nationality properly highlights thismultinational character of the Union. At the same time the membership regimeshould reflect the fact that Europe as a whole has become a continent of large-scale and permanent immigration. And that requires common standards forthe integration of immigrants, including their access to citizenship.

The virtue of ambiguity: integration as inclusion, cohesion and federationThis brief tour d’horizon through the four integration regimes has empha-sized their different starting points as well as internal complexities that makethem difficult to classify. From the perspective of immigrants the differencesbetween nation-building projects appear less relevant. What newcomers seekis after all very much the same in various countries: economic opportunities,security of residence and cultural freedom to use their languages or to prac-tise their religions and to pass them on to their children. By and large, theseexpectations are underwritten by liberal democratic principles that westernreceiving countries embrace in their constitutional traditions. The basic normis that all those who are permanently subjected to a political authority mustenjoy the liberties that this authority is mandated to protect and must berepresented in the legislative process. This is a powerful argument for provid-ing immigrants with previously often denied civil rights, such as free choiceof employment and freedom of speech and association, a right to familyreunification, a consolidation of residence permits, inclusion in welfare ben-efits and access to citizenship by naturalization or birth in the territory. Anextension of rights along these lines has been achieved in many countries sincethe Second World War. Some have taken more significant steps towards atransnational conception of citizenship by introducing local voting rights forforeign residents,39 or by recognizing dual citizenship.40 This semi-secular trend

39 The Maastricht Treaty has introduced the local franchise for EU citizens residing in othermember states. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands grant aresidence-based local franchise to all foreign nationals. In Britain, Portugal and Spain certainforeign nationals can vote in various elections. In the Swiss cantons Neuchâtel and Jura for-

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was of course not brought about by the sheer force of moral persuasion, butit converged for a significant time with an enlightened self-interest in receiv-ing countries that wanted to attract immigrants.

In the 1990s concerns about external sovereignty and a rise of anti-im-migrant sentiment in domestic politics limited and to some extent even reversedthe extension of rights. Diffuse fears about the effects of globalization onnational sovereignty and more manifest fears about the decline of welfarestates have been projected on to immigrants. They personify the threats ofglobalization both as its agents and its victims. In contrast to the anonymousforces of financial markets immigrants are visible, not only as competitors forjobs, but also as a ‘third world’ within the first, showing to native populationsa frightening image of a possible future they might face: hard work and pre-carious jobs, poor housing and the need to rely on solidarity within familyand ethnic networks rather than within the wider political community.

Resisting these trends towards nativism and xenophobia requires a newemphasis on integration that appeals to the universalistic norms of liberaldemocracy but pays equal attention to the historic particularities of ‘receiv-ing societies’ and to the perspectives of the migrants themselves.41 But isintegration not a dubious concept? Does it not often merely serve as a lessoffensive substitute for assimilation that nonetheless still conveys the sameold message of unilateral adaptation into a supposedly homogeneous nationalculture? And is it not inevitably linked to a ‘receiving country perspective’that ignores the interests of sending societies as well as the ethnic diasporasand transnational networks of migrants? There is some truth in these charges.Still, I want to defend the use of the concept in a modest way, not as generalparadigm, because it seems sufficiently flexible to be combined with otherperspectives.

Different terms such as ‘inclusion’, ‘incorporation’ or ‘settlement’ havebeen suggested to replace the discredited concept of ‘integration’. While thesemay serve to describe certain aspects of the process of how immigrants be-come a part of the societies they have entered, the advantage of ‘integration’ isthat it is not only more readily accepted by a wider public but is also morecomplex. Integration can be understood in three different ways: as inclusionof outsiders or newcomers into an already established society, but also ascohesion, as the internal integration of that society itself that makes it a stable

eign residents can vote, but cannot be elected in local elections. France and Italy have recentlypassed legislation to introduce the local franchise for third country nationals but constitu-tional and political obstacles have so far blocked these moves.

40 Patrick Weil, ‘Access to citizenship: a comparison of twenty-five nationality laws’, in T. Alex-ander T. Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer (eds), Citizenship Today. Global Perspectivesand Practices (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 2001); T. Al-exander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, ‘Plural nationality: facing the future in a migra-tory world’, in Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer (eds).

41 Rainer Bauböck, ‘The crossing and blurring of boundaries in international migration. Chal-lenges for social and political theory’, in Bauböck and Rundell (eds).

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and bounded social entity. Finally, as in ‘European integration’, the conceptcan refer to a process of federation, the forming of a larger union from varioussocieties. This ambiguity of the concept should be seen as a virtue.42 It allowsus to understand how an integration regime for immigrants is shaped by adominant understanding of a society’s own integration and by projects ofintegration into larger regional federations and global institutions. This mayhelp to explain why integration is in some countries or for some groups equatedwith assimilation but is in other contexts compatible with a high degree ofsocial and cultural segregation. In liberal democracies we can link the threeinterpretations by demanding that the norms of integration for immigrantsshould be derived from those that are meant to secure internal cohesion or tofacilitate larger federations. Societies that are themselves divided into manydifferent interests and identities but are politically integrated through the ruleof law, equal citizenship and democratic representation must not only inte-grate immigrants as equal citizens but must also accept that immigration willcontribute to their group-differentiated internal diversity.

Obviously, this interpretation of integration still focuses on the receiv-ing societies. There is a tension with two other views of migration: with alarger systemic one that sees it as an aspect of globalization that underminesthe very idea of separate societies bounded by nation-states, and with themicro-perspective of the migrants’ biographies, family networks and com-munities that transcend national spaces and projects. Let me conclude bysuggesting that the challenge for migration studies is how to reconcile thesethree views.

My own preferred term for describing such an integrated perspective istransnational rather than postnational.43 The national outlook sees communi-ties whose membership is internally homogeneous and does not externallyoverlap with that of other nations. Its spatial image looks like a political mapof the world with each country painted in one single colour and separatedfrom others by a black borderline. At the same time, these communities areimagined as unbounded in time, as an unbroken chain of generations reachingback into a mythical past and forward into a distant future. The postnationalliterature imagines deterritorialized communities that mark their differencesby invoking ethnic or religious origins, and seem to live in time rather thanspace while the spatial aggregates we used to call societies exist merely in the

42 Rainer Bauböck, ‘Integration von Einwanderern—Reflexionen zum Begriff und seinenAnwendungsmöglichkeiten’, in Dilek Çinar and Harald Waldrauch (eds), Die Integrationvon Einwanderern. Rechtliche Regelungen im europäischen Vergleich (Frankfurt: CampusVerlag 2001).

43 Rainer Bauböck, Transnational Citizenship. Membership and Rights in International Migra-tion (Aldershot: Edward Elgar 1994). These two perspectives are rarely distinguished. See, forexample, Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound.Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Am-sterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers 1994), and Soysal. For a sympathetic overview ofthis literature, see Linda Bosniak, ‘Citizenship denationalized’, Indiana Journal of GlobalLegal Studies, vol. 7, spring 2000.

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present tense of market exchange.44 A transnational perspective emphasizesinstead that societies and cultures increasingly overlap both in space and time,and it challenges the assumption that this makes it impossible to integratethem into larger and multilevel polities that share a political authority, abounded territory and a historical horizon. This is not meant to deny thatthere are powerful nationalist as well as postnational forces that reshape ourworld by pulling it in opposite directions. I only want to suggest that atransnational view of this world provides the most convincing starting pointfor dealing with the dilemmas arising from the clashes between these twocontrary developments.

RAINER BAUBÖCK is a senior researcher at the Research Unit for Institutional Changeand European Integration at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He alsoteaches political science at the universities of Vienna and Innsbruck. His research in-terests are normative political theory and comparative studies of democratic citizenship,European integration, migration, nationalism and minority rights, and he is the au-thor of Transnational Citizenship. Membership and Rights in International Migration(Edward Elgar 1994).

44 See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globaliza-tion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996).

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