Analyses of immigration from the perspective of national security are often greeted with skepticism. In the early nineties I mentioned the work of Myron Weiner, a pioneer in thinking about the security implications of migration, to a scholar who later held a high immigration policy position in Washington, D.C. “A waste of time,” came the reply, “worse than that, positively damaging, because immigration has no important security implications and such talk only provides ammunition to anti-immigration activists.” In the wake of 9/11, that complacency has been shaken amid a groundswell of interest in security and migration, but there is in some quarters more resistance than ever to linking the two concepts. The recent literature is sharply divided over the legitimacy and necessity of policies that “securitize” migration policy and over the appropriateness of academic analysis set within a security framework. A major theme in the literature is the claim that the securitization of immigration policy is a repressive state strategy designed to capitalize on public fears in the post–Cold War era and to give security forces something to do now that keeping track of communist subversives is no longer on the table.

Those who accept that migration has security dimensions must answer the question of how best to conceptualize and interpret them. The two books under discussion are welcome attempts to advance the rigorous study of these topics. Both make serious efforts to apply social science theory to the study of migration and security, and both achieve considerable success. The authors explore migration politics across a range of countries in the postwar era. Christopher Rudolph carries out comparative analysis of national states, whereas Mikhail Alexseev focuses on an eclectic mix of regional, supranational, and local cases. The dependent variable in Rudolph's study is national immigration policy and his goal is to explicate the behavior of state policymakers in choosing open or restrictive policies. Alexseev, on the other hand, focuses on mass perceptions of immigration threat and feelings of hostility toward migrants. He accounts for these attitudes as a consequence of perceptions of both the characteristics of migrants and the ability of governing authorities to manage population flows. Rudolph wants to know how immigration policy is affected by geopolitical conditions; Alexseev asks how popular concern that migrants might undermine security feeds anti-immigrant hysteria. Neither author is primarily interested in how migration itself might threaten national security.

Rudolph starts from what he perceives to be an empirical and theoretical anomaly. Despite the fact that liberal immigration policy, like free trade, is a public good, promoting national wealth and military power through population growth, states often adopt restrictive policies. Three common explanations for this perplexing outcome—economic interest groups, institutions, and identity—are useful but insufficient. He suggests an additional factor, national security interests, understood to involve three dimensions—military defense, economic productivity, and societal stability. Rudolph advances two core hypotheses. The threat hypothesis deals with the first two dimensions of security and holds that as geopolitical threats increase, policies regarding international labor mobility should become relatively more open in order to facilitate the production of wealth and a larger population base to support a robust national defense. The rally effect hypothesis focuses on societal stability and cohesion and posits that a high degree of external threat should result in more open migration policies and a declining emphasis on ethno-cultural entry criteria as societal differences become less salient in the face of common enemies.

Rudolph tests his hypotheses against the experience of the United States, Germany, France, and Britain, describing each case over the period that includes the Cold War, détente, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and 9/11 and its aftermath. His case studies largely support his expectation that migration policy is shaped by geopolitical factors. Tilting against dominant views that immigration policymaking is a product of low politics and driven by narrow political, economic, and ethnic interests, he asserts that it is instead an element of grand strategy. He finds, for example, that U.S. policy was liberal during the height of the Cold War and less so as détente emerged. Policy then became increasingly restrictive as societal security grew in importance, especially after 9/11. One may argue with the claim that American policy in the fifties was liberal (the continuation of the wartime Bracero program is his main evidence). Even if the author's characterization of immigration policy in particular periods is accepted, one must deal with the problem of identifying the independent variables. Détente was accompanied by the rapid increase in the numbers of Asian and Hispanic migrants in the United States, which, Rudolph recognizes, fostered restrictionist sentiments. Would these sentiments have been turned into restrictive policies had the Cold War still been in full force? In the German case, he argues that the liberal policies of the fifties and sixties were a response to geopolitical threat and that the problems of ethno-cultural conflict only became salient once the threat level had declined. But, again, the impulse to restriction coincided with other developments—the global recession after the oil crisis and the gradual realization that guest workers were permanent. It is not clear how these two sets of conditions can be sorted out. Ideally, one would require some evidence that decision makers were consciously motivated by security concerns when they opened their borders in periods of high threat and that the diminution of those concerns created a climate in which they either embraced or tolerated restrictive measures. Rudolph offers little evidence of this sort. He generally imputes rather than documents motivations. Because his measures of the openness of migration policy and the degree of external threat are impressionistic (when the Cold War ends, external threat is presumed to decline, for example), many of his conclusions are contestable.

Mikhail Alexseev begins his book with a puzzle that shares some of the features of that addressed by Rudolph. Whereas Rudolph needs to figure out why states fail to take advantage of what he considers to be the obvious benefits of open immigration policy, Alexseev wants to explain the development of anti-immigrant fear and hostility in populations where, in his expert judgment, such attitudes are groundless. He introduces the concept of “immigration phobia,” which he defines as an exaggerated and inexplicable fear and hostility toward migrants. The explanation he offers is located in the dynamics of the security dilemma. As employed in international relations, this concept stipulates that when states take steps to enhance their security, they inadvertently increase the fears of their potential enemies, inciting them to build up their own weapons, leading to cycles of escalating threats. This perceptual logic has been applied to interethnic relations where it refers to the obsession with relative power that proximate groups develop in situations of declining central authority. Alexseev applies the concept of security dilemma to situations involving migration, limiting his analysis to perceptions rather than behavior. His dependent variables are the two components of immigration phobia, threat and hostility. There are four independent variables (perceptions of host society residents of anarchy, intent, groupness, and socioeconomic impact).

Alexseev tests his framework against public opinion data that he collected in Russia's Far East territory, Eurobarometer survey data in the European Union, and anecdotal evidence from Los Angeles about the time of the 1992 riots involving African Americans, Latinos, and Koreans. He finds confirmation of the link between perceptions of threat and hostility and his four independent variables. He holds, for example, that because the scale of Chinese migration into Russia's thinly populated Far East is small, mostly circular, and driven by economic motives, concerns expressed by Russian inhabitants of the region that their hold on the territory is being jeopardized are empirically unfounded and, therefore, irrational. They nevertheless hold these views due to their perceptions of anarchy (the inability of the state to manage cross-border flows), of Chinese intentions to reoccupy the region, of the ethnic and cultural distinctiveness of the Chinese, and of their adverse economic effects. He similarly finds opposition to immigration in Europe and Los Angeles difficult to fathom on the basis of the facts. Muslim migrants in Europe are a small percentage of the total population and make useful economic contributions. Blacks' anxiety that they are being displaced by Hispanics and Korean migrants in Los Angeles fueled the riots there in 1992, whether or not such anxiety was empirically justified. Perceptual dynamics, nonetheless, produce cases of immigration phobia.

These are significant books that amply display the labor and intelligence of their authors. Rudolph covers an impressively broad terrain in painstaking detail. Alexseev devotes almost half his volume to laying out his theoretical and methodological framework. This review hardly does justice to the complexity and subtlety of their analysis. Yet, both leave the reader only partly convinced. Could one not argue contra Rudolph that geopolitical threat should be associated with restrictive immigration policy (the “red scare” in twenties America) not, as he contends, open policy? Would it not have been wise for a book called National Security and Immigration to devote more attention to how immigration itself can be problematic for security? Could one not argue contra Alexseev that dismissing as symptoms of phobia anxieties about cultural and economic takeover by migrants in Russia, Europe, and Los Angeles ignores the possible long-term consequences of migration that he can foresee no better than the individuals who are his subjects?