One of the most contentious and politically sensitive issues in Europe is immigration. The demographic trends indicate that the Old Continent is indeed getting older. To maintain their living standards, Europeans have to either increase birth rates or open the gates to immigrants in an orderly and welcoming way. Yet despite the practicality and, sooner rather than later, the necessity for an open, comprehensive and pro-active immigration policy, European countries are far from having one. At best, they have procedures concerning how to handle foreigners. The main “culprits” for this state of affairs are the people rather than governments. The Europeans, however rational the arguments for increasing immigration may be, are unwilling to embrace it. Paradoxically, those who are most opposed (and vote accordingly) are older people, even though they depend most on a large taxpayer base without which cheques from government-run pension plans would stop flowing eventually and publicly managed health care systems would run out of money.
Anthony Messina has written an erudite study on immigration in Europe. He starts his book with two opposing quotations. The author cites Hannah Arendt's view of sovereignty being most absolute in matters that relate to controlling the state's borders, and also the view of Rey Koslowski, who concludes that immigration “impinges” on sovereignty (1). As the author states, “this book approaches the subject of post-war immigration from a cross-national perspective” (9). But it is not Koslowski's view that the author adopts: “this study contends that as immigration has evolved as a policy challenge … , it has been driven and dominated by a political logic, a logic that has superseded and trumped economic and humanitarian imperatives whenever these imperatives conflict with the goals and interests of politics” (10–11). Messina continues, “the traditional nation-state in Western Europe remains the primary reference point for defining citizenship and granting citizenship rights” (17). It is the state, therefore, that drives the logic, sets the goals and determines the interests.
The emphasis placed on the state in the studies on immigration and, in broader terms, on citizenship, is quite unorthodox nowadays. As defined in the 1990s, globalization, both as a policy and a concept, asserted that the state was disappearing and governments were becoming irrelevant (K. Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies, New York: Free Press, 1995). The decade also produced studies that concluded that citizenship was becoming postnational and “deterritorialized” (Y. N. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) or “overlapping” and, in a way, cross-territorial” (T. Faist, “Dual Citizenship as Overlapping Membership,” Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations,” Malmö, School of International Migration and Ethnic Relations, November 2001).
The state-centric approach has made this study comprehensive, for the author analyzes various western European states and their immigration policies. Moreover, while analyzing particular state policies, Messina tests various assumptions or “theses” concerning the ability (or inability) of the state to control immigration: in addition to globalization, these include liberal, realist and “statist” perspectives, as well as questions of path dependency and political institutional breakdown (6–9). These approaches are explored in chapter five, which tries to reconcile the state-centric approach with European integration, the EU and, inevitably, supranationality. Not surprisingly, the chapter reads as if it were the most difficult to work on. And it might have been, indeed!
The author notes, “this chapter argues that the puzzle of interstate co-operation on immigration policy should be viewed through the lens of a predominantly rational, state-centred perspective” (139). In the general context of European integration studies, this perspective places the study in the intergovernmental school of thought, as advanced by A. Moravcsik (“Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach,” Journal of Common Market Studies, 31 (4) (1993): 473–524). At the same time, intergovermentalism is not easy to apply to immigration. It is straightforward when it comes to third-country nationals (migrants who are not citizens of EU member states), but the difficulty begins when considering citizens of the EU who have moved from their home countries to settle elsewhere in the union. The author adds both groups to “the pool of ‘foreigners’” and estimates that “there are probably over 22 million persons of migrant origin residing in contemporary Western Europe” (3).
The problem is that the citizens of member states are treated differently from those who originate outside the EU. The former have the same social rights, same legal protection and almost the same political rights as local citizens. The status of the latter is significantly different. These persons are indeed treated as immigrants, and their position is the concern of immigration policy. Messina deals with the difficulty by providing a thorough historical survey of the developments that have created this state of affairs. This makes things clearer, but it does not necessarily explain in full the relationship between national and supranational. In any case, whether it was the author's intention or not, readers of this book will have a good understanding of how Europe's immigration issues differ from those in North America.
