What motivates the gatekeepers? Explaining governing party preferences on immigration

Most scholarship on immigration politics is made up of isolated case studies or cross-disciplinary work that does not build on existing political science theory. This study attempts to remedy this shortcoming in three ways: (1) we derive theories from the growing body of immigration literature, to hypothesize about why political parties would be more or less open to immigration; (2) we link these theories to the broader political science literature on parties and institutions; and (3) we construct a data set on the determinants of immigration politics, covering 18 developed countries from 1987 to 1999. Our primary hypothesis is that political institutions shape immigration politics by facilitating or constraining majoritarian sentiment (which is generally opposed to liberalizing immigration). Our analysis finds that in political systems where majoritarianism is constrained by institutional “checks, ” governing parties support immigration more strongly, even when controlling for a broad range of alternative explanations. Human migration has become perhaps the most pressing political problé-matique of the twenty-first century. In many developed countries, publics and elites alike consistently rank immigration as one of the most impor-tant political problems facing the nation (Lahav 1997). Not only does immigration reshape politics in its own right, it also intersects with other pressing issues of the era: security, terrorism, and globalization. Global-ization concerns not only flows of capital, goods, and services across borders, but also human flows. And in an insecure world, states and publics tend to view these flows as threats, despite the huge gains in economic prosperity generated by immigration (Huysmans 2005