By Marc R. Rosenblum
Published 2004, 127 pages, paperback

The politics of immigration and migration control has taken on new urgency in the post-9/11 world as sovereignty concerns clash with industrialized democracies’ continuing need for immigrants to fill jobs and sustain social security reserves.

Rosenblum analyzes U.S. immigration policy over the last 25 years, conceptualizing it as a two-stage, two-level game—thereby avoiding the failures of past approaches that looked, respectively, at only one of two key factors in this issue area: either at competition among domestic groups or at the international aspects of migration.

By developing a more complex model, Rosenblum has been able to tease out the interaction between the domestic and international politics of migration. His analysis is based on 120 interviews with elites in the United States, Mexico, and Central America.

Rosenblum concludes by considering the implications of his transnational model for migration policymaking after September 11.

Reviews

“It is an enormously challenging task to account for the variegated immigration politics and policy outcomes of liberal democratic states like the United States. Marc Rosenblum has produced a theoretical model and empirical findings that help us make sense of contradictory policy processes and outcomes. For these reasons, The Transnational Politics of U.S. Immigration Policy makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how domestic and international forces together shape policy outcomes.”—Daniel J. Tichenor, Rutgers University