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Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State, by Christian Joppke. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 344pp. $54.50 cloth. ISBN: 0674015592.
In 1999, Christian Joppke wrote Immigration and the Nation-State: the United States, Germany and Great Britain, in which he showed that nation-states were resilient in their immigration policies and that sovereignty was still important. Although each country dealt with similar issues, the nation-state largely controlled its destiny and constructed citizenship in different ways. In 2005, Joppke takes each of the case studies from the previous books and pairs them with another country: the US with Australia, the UK with France, and Germany with Israel. He also adds another pair-Spain and Portugal. He views each country as representative of a geographic-historical constellation-settler, post-colonial, and diaspora states-and further divides the post-colonial constellation into Northwest (NW) and Southwest (SW) empires. Each of these constellations differ: 1) the settler constellation is open to immigration from Europe but has had to deal with their past exclusionary policies toward Asians; 2) the post-Colonial regimes are somewhat bifurcated with the NW regime closing from its previously open position of the British and French empires, and the SW constellation using unilateral treaties with South America to "filter in" culturally similar immigrants; and 3) the diasporic constellations of Germany and Israel are the most ethnic since they privilege an ethnic...