Antje Ellermann

What explains India’s low emigration rate despite it being one of the world’s largest migrant-sending states? This thesis argues that existing scholarship has overlooked the actions of sending states when it comes to migration control and as a result, has missed the construction of what I term as ‘emigrant-unfriendly’ states, particularly among liberal democracies. Despite being the leading country of origin for international migrants, India has a strikingly low emigration rate compared to its neighbours in South Asia and other developing democracies with large populations. In this thesis, I argue that the low rate is the result of restrictive policy. Focusing on economically driven emigration, I hypothesize that the key variable that best explains the path of restrictive emigration policy in India is the post-independence adoption of Nehru’s anti-imperial and regulatory foreign policies that differentiated between emigrants of varying skill levels. To test this argument, I employ process-tracing to determine whether India’s post-independence institutions continue to play a role in restricting emigration from India. I look at three empirical cases as critical junctures for India’s emigration history, namely, the policy making period in 1947 immediately after independence, the Oil Boom in the 1970s, and the Tech Boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. I test my hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis which is that India’s low emigration rate can be explained by government actors restricting emigration due to its negative domestic economic implications. This thesis concludes that policy decisions made and institutions established at the time of India’s independence have persisted and continue to hinder pro-emigration policy reform, resulting in India having one of the lowest emigration rates of any developing state in the world today.

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Western liberal democracies have experienced increased political anxieties vis-à-vis migration, with a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment due to perceptions of immigrants threatening national identity and norms (Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014). States promote migrant integration, encouraging immigrants to become more “embedded” in their host society’s cultural, social, economic, and political structures, as a diversity management response (Valtonen, 2016). However, recent scholarship has begun to criticize the very notion of ‘immigrant integration’ for upholding neocolonial power, maintaining purified notions of class and of race, implicitly characterizing immigrants as ‘objects of problematization’, and creating images of society that demarcate ‘us’ versus ‘them’ (Schinkel, 2017). On a pragmatic level, policies under the integration umbrella have been argued to fail to address the nature of ‘superdiversity,’ which encompasses an increased number of new, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants. Thus, we are presented with a tension between the necessary normative criticisms of the idea of integration, the limited analytical utility of integration in a superdiverse society, and the tangible and often material benefits of integration. How can we reconceptualize the politics of integration in an era of super-diversity? I argue that by placing an emphasis on entering the ‘mainstream,’ scholars miss an important dimension of immigrant social mobility that involves not ‘bridging’ into the mainstream, but instead participating in a host society through ways that transcend a national demarcation. Through an assessment of Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles, I demonstrate how Landau and Freemantle’s concept of ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ serves as a reconciliation between these divides on the benefits of integration and its necessary criticisms. Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles choose not to mainstream their identity with a host society. Rather, they practice social mobility in ways that do not constitute traditional bridging—demonstrated by tactical cosmopolitanism—while nonetheless reaping the benefits of ‘integration.’

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In 2018, the government of the province of Québec put forward and passed Bill 21, An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State, which proposed, among other measures, to ban public servants from wearing religious symbols at work. While ostensibly seeking to further secularism in the province, an analysis of the legislative debates makes it clear that the main question at issue was one of nationalism rather than secularism. Further, parties’ voting patterns were not split according to the more classic Québec party divisions of left-right economic positioning and stance on separatism. This thesis puts forward an analysis of the legislative debates surrounding Bill 21, using qualitative coding and textual analysis to determine party priorities in presenting opposition or support for the bill to the public in a highly mediatized debate.While each party puts forward a distinct narrative of what it means to belong in the Québec nation in these debates, party positioning on Bill 21 can be explained by speakers’ positioning on a plural-monist axis related to questions of nationalism, intersecting with normative ideals of how restrictive or inclusive the idea of the nation should be. This finding has interesting implications for the study of integration measures in other subnational states—notably, that understandings of nationhood, and who should be included in it, may prove more influential in shaping integration policy than other traditional party markers, such as economic left-right positioning or positioning on questions of separatism.

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Based on the political communication and public opinion on immigration literatures, this paper develops and tests hypotheses for the visual news coverage of 2019 migration crisis at the Mexico-United States border. The news websites used here, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Times and Breitbart News, span a polarized ideological spectrum. The way they use photography to frame the immigration crisis and immigrants should be consistent with their respective political biases and those of their audiences. Looking at 987 images used by these outlets for two months, the findings presented here are largely consistent with the expectations of the referenced literatures. The more conservative a news sources, the likelier it is to visually link immigration to criminality and to portray immigrants as criminals and mostly males. The more liberal the source, the more it will depict the situation at the border as a humanitarian one or link it to the economic benefits of immigration. It will also portray immigrants as family members and show more mobilization against government policies. Looking at the visual coverage of immigration during that period also allows us to uncover two specific editorial practices driving polarization. First, more radical sources tend to make a rhetorical use of images at the expense of a more strictly informational approach. Second, Breitbart displays systematically stronger frames and exploits the images’ potential for implicit messaging to advance more radical positions than the Huffington Post, which implies that polarization might be skewed to the right, at least in the case of media discourses on immigration.

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Best practices regarding methods of immigrant integration remain inconclusive within the literature. Previous research has come to divergent conclusions regarding the role of multiculturalist policies on different types of integration; multiculturalism has been linked with increased sociopolitical integration, while other scholarship deemed multiculturalism detrimental to socioeconomic outcomes. None of this literature, however, examines the effects of these policies on strictly economic concerns and most are restricted to the comparative analysis of a small number of cases. This study attempts to fill this empirical gap by examining the relationship between multicultural policies and economic integration — specifically, are multicultural policies (as opposed to assimilation) effective or detrimental to the economic integration of immigrants in Western Europe? Further, this study seeks to determine the role of multicultural policies on immigrants from non-Western countries of origin, given multiculturalism’s commitment to affirming the cultural difference of immigrants and minorities. Do multicultural policies have a stronger positive effect on immigrants from non-Western countries as opposed to immigrants from within Europe or North America? Drawing on rounds 1 to 6 of the European Social Survey and the Multicultural Policy Index, this study uses regression analysis to assess economic integration outcomes over a ten-year period in 16 European countries. It operationalizes economic integration through dependent variables such as income decile, occupational status, and employment status. It finds that multiculturalism is associated with increases in economic integration. Furthermore, when immigrants are examined heterogeneously based on cultural difference, the results suggest multicultural policies have greater effects on those who display higher levels of cultural difference; namely, non-Western immigrants. Moreover, the multicultural policies of accommodation such as affirmative action and dress code exemptions are found to be linked with more pronounced economic integration outcomes for non-Western immigrants.

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The Chinese government has issued a series of directives of hukou system reform. However, the strength and depth of the hukou reforms at the local level differ greatly across localities. Some local governments refused to reform, while others implemented local reforms either radically or conservatively. Among those that reformed local system, some decided to suspend or alter it and others continued. Thus, the paper asks what accounts for the variance of hukou system reforms across localities. Specifically, the research question is two-fold: 1) regarding the initiation of reforms, why some local governments implemented radical hukou reform, others partially reformed their hukou policies, and still others did not carry out the reform, and 2) as for the maintenance of reform, why, among those that pursued hukou reform, some decided to suspend or alter it while others continued. The paper adopts the comparative case study method and delves into three cases: Zhengzhou, Hohhot, and Fenghua. Different from existing literature that focuses merely on either incentives or disincentives of local hukou reform, this paper brings the political factors in and argues that it is local leaders’ political decisions based on different degrees of pressure of urbanization from upper level governments and different levels of policy adjustability to costs that cause such divergence. What’s more, I contend that the variance of the adjustability to expected costs leads to different outcomes in maintaining hukou reforms.

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This thesis explains the origins of the differing domestic energy policy regimes in the United States and Germany. Using historical process tracing, the author argues that policy diverged following the 1973-74 Energy embargo. This crisis allowed space for considerable policy innovation in the two nations, but Germany was able to carry out far more extensive domestic reforms. The author argues Germany had a much greater incentive to pursue these often costly policies thanks to its limited foreign policy capacities. This hypothesis is tested using a methodology derived from Alexander George and Andrew Bennett’s work on case studies and a theoretical model based on Terry Karl and Paul Pierson’s analysis of critical junctures and path dependence. The United States, by contrast, was able to execute a solution based on securing external supplies. The thesis concludes by exploring the implications for contemporary energy policy.

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