Michele Wucker:

Christopher Rudolph: National Security and Immigration: Policy Development in the United States and Western Europe Since 1945

The Algerian-born terrorist Ahmed Ressam was arrested December 14, 1999, as he attempted to smuggle explosives into the United States from Canada as part of a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium celebrations. Ressam was foiled nearly two years before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but his story illustrates the typical, though simplistic, connection between immigration and national security that has dominated policymakers' nightmares since 9/11.

Christopher Rudolph, a political scientist at American University in Washington, D.C., uses the incident to make the point that-of course-immigration and national security were linked before 9/11. In National Security and Immigration, Rudolph outlines the ways that four Western democracies-the United States, Germany, France, and Great Britain-have defined and addressed the relationship between immigration policies and national security.

Rudolph amasses a wealth of evidence showing the need for a more complex model of the security rationales behind immigration policy. He is wholly correct in advocating a broad definition of national security that goes beyond border crossings, guns, and bombs to include economic security and "societal" security (concerns about national identity and immigrant integration).

He marshals these solid foundations toward the challenge of building a new overarching theory of how nations use immigration policy to respond to threats. He presents generally clear, concise, and informative accounts of the development of immigration policy in his four target countries, though his theory is not without flaws.

In Rudolph's view, serious geopolitical threats will result in more open and foreign policy-oriented immigration policies. His "threat hypothesis" suggests that as geopolitical threats increase, immigration policies should become more open in order to facilitate wealth production, which would bolster a nation's defense capabilities. His second contention, the "rally hypothesis," is that external threats promote a sense of shared interest and identity, thus reducing xenophobia and producing more liberal immigration policies-unless, of course, immigrant groups are identified (correctly or not) with the enemy, like Japanese Americans in World War II.

The economic logic behind his theories makes sense. Unfortunately, the timeframe that Rudolph addresses-the early days of the cold war-represented the only period of geopolitical conflict when immigration policy indeed became more liberal. Periods like the war of 1812, World War I, and post-9/11 do not support his hypothesis that geopolitical conflict leads to liberalized immigration policies.

Postwar economics

Were Rudolph to slightly modify his threat hypothesis to suggest that perceived economic weakness in postwar societies is what determines the liberalization of immigration policies, he might stand on firmer ground. After World War II, both Britain and France made a point of encouraging migration from former colonies in order to bolster populations as well as their own geopolitical reach. France after World War II had the lowest fertility rate in Europe, leading to a postwar "populate or perish" mentality. On military and economic grounds, France made immigration a pillar of its plan to add to manpower resources.

Economic versus societal security

Rudolph blames increases in tensions over immigration primarily on the lack of external threat. He certainly mentions other factors-the social proximity of immigrants within host societies, their geographic concentration, and their attitudes to integration. Yet his threat and rally hypotheses underplay the sheer force of demographic pressures-typically after decades of policy neglect, often coupled with an immediate shock-in explaining the recent heightened US and European restrictionist pressures. Germany, for example, received two-thirds of Europe's refugees throughout the late 1980s, and then underwent the economic and social challenges of reunification. These two demographic shocks played a significant role in increasing resentment of non-Germans.

Rudolph is correct in pointing out the economic benefits of immigration and, in turn, its importance to stability and security. He challenges the widespread view that economic weakness leads to immigration restrictions. As evidence, he cites the US Congressional passage of draconian immigration laws during the relative economic prosperity of 1996 as well as the tightening of US immigration quotas during the still-roaring year of 1929. He is certainly right that economic weakness is not sufficient as a single motivator. In my view, though, 1996 represented a continuation of restrictionism that emerged from the recession of the early 1990s, compounded by the migration that resulted from the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-1995. Economic and demographic pressures were coupled with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing which, although carried out by Americans, added to fears of Muslim terrorism raised by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Rudolph's book is useful in its analysis of the cavalier way in which governments have approached economically driven migration policies, assuming that guestworkers would indeed be temporary and failing to take into account the importance of societal security. Early success with Germany's guestworker program-which actually reduced unemployment despite the greater number of workers-led to a false sense of confidence in the country's ability to manage labor flows. Rudolph argues correctly that the resulting lack of concern for societal security was at fault in creating rising xenophobia during the 1980s and 1990s.

Liberal or entho-cultural republics

Building on the work of Rogers Brubaker, Rudolph demonstrates the differences in the challenges facing states that have based their identity primarily on ideological conceptions of nationality, as the United States and (to a lesser degree) France traditionally have done, and those that have relied on bloodline, ethnic, and racial ideas, like Great Britain and Germany.

Ironically, Germany's post-World War II effort to liberalize migration policy by easing re-entry from the Soviet bloc for ethnic German refugees reinforced the völkisch ideology behind German national identity because of its emphasis on bloodlines. Blood-based national identity became an increasing problem, however, as non-ethnic German immigration rose from the 1960s onward and these immigrants had no way of integrating into society. While new laws in 1991 and 2000 made it easier for these new populations to naturalize, relatively few have done so.

Rudolph deftly describes how migration in France and the United States-and to a lesser extent Great Britain-has created significant tensions between liberal republicanism and ethno-cultural ideals. "[T]he French mainstream believed that Muslim immigrants' ability to assimilate was compromised by the presence of Islam in the construction of their personal and social identity," he writes. "This was directly at odds with the French emphasis on the notion of laïcité, or liberal secularism."

This tension led to an experiment-still unresolved-with trying to end automatic birthright citizenship. A 1993 law amended the Nationality Code so that children of immigrants, upon reaching majority age, would have to declare their intent to become citizens as well as prove five-year residency. In 1997, despite polls in which more than three-quarters of respondents wanted to grant citizenship only to those who requested it, a new law restored automatic citizenship, with an option to decline it, at majority age for many children raised in France.

Policy lessons

Rudolph challenges the notion-though it is not as widely held as he implies-that immigration is determined largely by domestic interest groups. Immigration clearly has an important place in nations' grand strategies, as it did in the US-Japanese Gentleman's Agreement of 1908 and in Western nations' welcoming refugee policies during the cold war.

Certainly, though, domestic problems have arisen when foreign-policy and economic interests have blinded governments to the importance of paying attention to the domestic elements of national security. Rudolph's accounts show how common it is for governments to ignore the eventual impact of guestworker programs and overall dramatic increases in immigration on domestic perceptions of security. Clearly, their efforts to defuse identity politics have been too little and too late.

Just over a decade separates the end of the cold war from the post-9/11 "war on terror." During that brief period, societal security concerns took front stage. Yet they remain unresolved even as more traditional security concerns, particularly border security and terrorism, have regained prominence. The countries Rudolph examines have combined tightened immigration security, detention, and deportation policies with renewed attention to policies-though contradictory and often counterproductive-whose stated purpose is to promote assimilation to existing cultural and societal norms.

Rudolph's brief treatment of the post-9/11 era shows how challenging it is to take on the economic, societal, and military fronts of national security at once, especially after long neglect of the societal side. His book is most instructive in drawing attention back to the broader issues of human, economic, and societal factors in the discussion of the relationship between immigration and national security.

Michele Wucker is senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York. This book review was first published here by our partner Internationale Politik.

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