Political regimes and immigration policymaking: The contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia

It is often assumed that there is a fundamental difference between immigration policymaking in democracies and autocracies, with democracies associated to liberal immigration regimes and autocracies to migrants’ rights restrictions. But what if we start to look for similarities in immigration policymaking across political regimes? The contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia reveal that democratic politics does not necessarily lead to immigration liberalization and that autocratic policymaking can in fact drive liberal reform. Extensive fieldwork, semi-structured interviewing and archival research show that in Tunisia, democratization dynamics have ultimately fostered restrictive immigration policies; while in Morocco, immigration liberalization was central to the monarchy’s authoritarian consolidation strategy. Through the in-depth analysis of immigration policy drivers and dynamics, this thesis specifies the extent of a ‘regime effect’ in immigration politics and teases out similarities in policymaking across the ‘democracy/autocracy’ divide. Hereby, it advances general theorizing on the role of political regimes in immigration policymaking and demonstrates the value of immigration policy research for broader political sociology and comparative politics debates on modern statehood