The Politics of Immigration: Contradictions of the Liberal State

James Hampshire (2013), The Politics of Immigration: Contradictions of the Liberal State . Cambridge : Polity Press , 185 pp., £16.99, pbk, 9780745638997

Despite the centrality of the state to the nature and forms of international migration, it has often been overlooked and under theorised in empirical migration research. When 'the state' does feature it is often treated as monolithic, intervening from somewhere outside of 'society'. James Hampshire's book The Politics of Immigration: Contradictions of the Liberal State pays heed to 'the now familiar (but still sometimes inadequately realized) injunction to 'bring the state back in', and he does so in a way that is both analytically clear and nuanced. Hampshire distinguishes between four constituent features of liberal statehood: representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism and nationhood. These features, he argues, produce different and contradictory pressures with regard to immigration. Crudely, capitalism and constitutionalism tend towards encouraging openness, and democracy and nationhood towards closure. Thus for governments the intractability of immigration policy, the difficulty of getting it right, springs not from poor governance but from the contradictory imperatives of the liberal state. This approach enables him to present an analytical framework that is sensitive to different institutions and histories and enables comparison between states. While his focus is on liberal democratic states, it is not exclusively so. From Syria to Mali,...