Understanding Immigration: Issues and Challenges in an Era of Mass Population Movement

6

Comparing Immigration Lessons across Nations

If one truth emerges from examination of immigration in the United States and Europe, it is that this issue has become a permanent challenge to nations everywhere. It is no longer the case that policy can be made quietly by leadership confident that the economy will benefit and home populations will absorb newcomers into their communities. And it certainly is no longer possible to regulate flows easily or recreate the more homogeneous cultures of earlier times. All four nations studied here confront international as well as national forces for change, and how they manage those demands will shape their economic and political futures. Comparing their experiences sheds light on the question regarding what factors will be most influential in defining critical national policies.

It is useful to recall the markedly different contexts of at least the last hundred years. Most prominent is the size and history of the United States, as they define both the nation’s capacity and its long record of absorption of immigrants. Even as urban centers have become increasingly diverse and demographic shifts project the emergence of a nonwhite majority nationally, concerns about overcrowding and national identity are still far less volatile than in Europe. Nowhere in Europe has a similar commitment to an ethnically pluralist society emerged, and cautious national approaches to postwar immigration provide little guidance for dealing with the waves of refugees who have sought admission since 2013.

Adaptation would have been difficult under any circumstances. But the extraordinary development of the European Union as a major world power presented new immigration challenges, as over the last twenty years it has eliminated border controls, legislated the free movement of citizens, and mandated common labor standards. Challenged by declining national birthrates the EU has struggled—often awkwardly—to find ways to encourage the admission of skilled immigrants, yet has had no contingency plan for mass migration. Following an acrimonious experience in dealing with the Greek financial breakdown, the refugee crisis has severely strained the EU’s capacity to respond to a clear common challenge. The strains are all the worse as terrorist attacks in Germany, France, and Belgium, carried out by radicalized or disgruntled foreigners, have increased popular opposition to accepting refugees from the Middle East and Africa and one member state (Britain) has decided to withdraw from the EU largely due to widespread resistance to increased numbers of immigrants entering from other EU nations.

Despite significant differences in the tone and intensity of their discourse on the issue, all four nations have seen the ability of centrist parties to craft pragmatic if short-term solutions to immigration issues fall victim to increasingly strident calls to limit or even end foreign admissions. Rightist forces have pushed governing parties in Britain and France to embrace restrictive policies; German leadership, which took bold steps to welcome refugees, found itself facing both popular resistance and opposition from a new, anti-immigrant party; and in the United States, conservatives have stymied attempts to legalize at least some undocumented immigrants and refugees, exacerbating an institutional gridlock more intransigent than any in Europe. With Republicans gaining control of both executive and legislative branches in the 2016 election, the nation of immigrants may, ironically, be set to take steps that significantly limit access to those seeking to enter.

Comparing Basic Components of Immigration

The Disappearance and Reemergence of Geography

The reality of a shrinking globe changed many of the ways in which people, businesses, and governments interact—in instantaneous communication and transactions, common currencies, ease of travel. But recent moves to strengthen borders and assert the primacy of national identities are reminders that while geography may have reduced some barriers, its basic elements still influence policy. Three conclusions emerge from our comparisons. The first is the variable rather than absolute importance of borders, over history and currently. The most dramatic changes appear in Europe, where a history of wars and reconfiguration evolved to create a union without internal borders. Until the recent crisis involving masses of refugees, the migration of laborers did not overwhelm the more prosperous EU members, but generally followed fluctuations in demand. Exceptions included the very small numbers of East European Roma (20,000 in France, fewer elsewhere), prominent mostly for their lifestyle and disinclination to integrate, and British hostility to the influx of East Europeans, a factor that is credited with ensuring the defeat of Labour in the 2010 election. In general, the elimination of border checkpoints was achieved remarkably smoothly, apparently attesting to the power of self-regulation in national markets. Despite the more recent reintroduction of border controls in response to unresolved refugee movement policies, the EU remains committed to the Schengen system of free movement.

The European and American examples converge in their shared concern with external borders. The dominant challenge to EU states has consistently been that of refugees, initially from Eastern Europe and most recently from the Middle East and Africa, and the American parallel is its long southern border, historically porous to determined crossers from Mexico and Central America. As American political leaders decried the 2013–14 deluge of 57,000 unaccompanied minors and mothers with children, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees reported that applications for asylum in EU nations exceeded 435,000, triple the number reached two years earlier. By mid-2016, there were more than 4.7 million Syrian refugees living in exile, most of them seeking to relocate in Europe. More than 300,000 African refugees in camps in Libya, and 30,000 in Spanish settlements in Morocco, strained local resources while awaiting chances to escape to Europe by sea. The overall figures are staggering. The UN High Commission of Refugees estimated that at the end of 2016, some fifty million people were displaced, fully half of those in the Middle East and Africa. Immigration as traditionally defined in Europe and the United States includes people seeking entry on family or economic grounds, either legally or by evading border agents. The refugee crises differ dramatically, as mass movements of people fleeing violence and arriving without documents, often without resources, and with no intent of slipping through border controls. In other times, they might have been supported as refugees in distress; in the highly charged post-2001 climate they have become the new and potentially dangerous immigrant deluge that justifies secure borders.

Second, geographically defined national capacity—of both space and resources—has become a common theme across nations. The two components are, of course, related. As the smallest in area, Britain suffers from depleted natural reserves and limited land for agriculture or development; larger land areas and more natural resources give Germany and France more industrial and agricultural options; and the American expanse, 27 times larger than Germany, still has immense amounts of land and water suitable for development. The United States dwarfs the others in both residents and habitable area, but still has by far the lowest density of people per square mile at 85 (^{Table 6.1}). Britain has the least land and the fewest people but a population density of 679—almost eight times as many people per square mile as the U.S. Even after unification with the less densely populated East, Germany is closer to Britain in density (591); and larger France enjoys a much lower density figure (306).

Table 6.1. Spatial and Population Characteristics of European Nations and the U.S., 2016

Sources: U.S. Census Population Clock; British Office of National Statistics; Statistische Amt Deutschland, INSEE.

Despite variations in resources and population density, and despite the fact that in 2016 Germany, Britain, and France ranked fifth, tenth, and fourteenth among European nations in percentage of foreign-born residents, claims that capacity has been reached have been made in all four nations, especially in areas with large concentrations of immigrants. That pattern is almost certainly a function of popular perceptions, which have been part of each nation’s geographic self-definition. For Germany and France, histories of foreign invasion reinforced images of occupation, overcrowding, and abuse; even migration from rural areas in periods of industrial growth has created concerns about overpopulation. Such themes almost certainly fueled fears of traditional migrants, guestworkers, and refugees as invaders of precious space. It is hardly surprising that recent, seemingly uncontrolled numbers arriving on European shores and streaming into the American Southwest generated capacity-defined opposition. Even with histories of absorption of huge numbers of refugees—after World War II, in the 1980 boatlift from Mariel, Cuba, the 1980–1990 exodus from Eastern Europe—fears of invasion are common first reactions across all nations. Thus, even as barriers have come down within Europe, secure external borders and the right to limit access remain central values. Immigration discussions in all four nations include strikingly similar commitments to geographic integrity.

The Burden and Perspective of History: Contrasting Themes

Like geography, history, in the larger immigration scheme, is a combination of facts and their interpretation over time. In this context, two major contrasts among our four nations stand out. First, what we might call the overall historical tradition of immigration varies sufficiently to suggest important consequences. The preponderant American theme is openness to immigrants. Despite periods of indifference, wariness, and exclusion, the United States has commonly recognized immigration as an important part of its founding as well as its identity and enacted receptive policies. Initial fears were ultimately diffused by continuous assimilation into an increasingly diverse nation. Also exhibiting openness to immigrants was France, which, over time, welcomed both Europeans persecuted for religious or political views and relatively small numbers of emigrés from colonies in North Africa. Buoyed by the ideals of the French Revolution, the nation’s leaders assumed that its political model would be a magnet for migrants eager to assimilate. Although the devastating experience with rebellious Algeria after the war muted expectations that immigrants would always be transformed into French nationals, the longer history boasted generally harmonious settlement and adaptation.

At the other end of the welcome spectrum is Britain, whose long period of colonial rule created a firm if naive belief that culturally and racially different subjects of the Empire would never migrate to Britain. Postcolonial independence and the pressure to accept immigrants found the British unprepared, leading successive governments to flounder in awkward attempts to recast notions of the Commonwealth that would retain fundamentally hostile positions on race and diversity. Traditions of Britain sharing little with its empire’s citizens continued long after breakup and, many argue, continue to be central to British national identity.

Yet a different tradition exists in Germany, whose history included only a brief period of colonial rule, insufficient to develop any real relations with other continents. Nineteenth-century European conflicts, on the other hand, included several in which Germany imported foreign labor, often by force, and that practice was repeated in the twentieth century. All such practices ended in 1945, but left behind a history in which foreigners existed primarily as enemies or a conquered workforce.

Historical traditions were thus significantly different among the countries under examination. In 1945, however, the three allied victors and the reconstituted Germany confronted a vastly changed world in which all would find themselves having to confront large numbers of immigrants. All four developed policies to deal with people displaced by war and seeking work in more promising labor markets while attempting to forge altogether new lives. Over a half-century, an array of new or modified national traditions were forged, by necessity as much as choice. Prominent among them would be traditions of immigration, essentially new to all but the United States.

Such histories of accepting or resisting foreign entry were central to the second contrast, that of differing rubrics of “national identity.” The American commitments to individualism and opportunity, molded by the nation’s quest for independence, defined an identity whose emphasis on opportunity necessarily included openness to those seeking it. In the same way, a sense of national superiority appeared in the identities claimed by world power Britain and successful revolutionary France. The former would define foreigners as lacking the culture and achievement of the British and thus presenting themselves as poor candidates for incorporation; the latter would insist that any who migrated accept a makeover in the French Revolution’s tradition of republican ideals. Germans, although directed to repudiate their recent history of aggression and repressive policies, nonetheless retained at least some of their wariness of neighbors as well as a pragmatism that would guide them to define immigration in terms of economic necessity. The outcome resulted in four different postwar orientations toward immigration, setting different stages for later attempts to resolve the tensions historical traditions had created.

Common Historical Themes

Given the different histories these nations have experienced, one has to be impressed by the similarities among them that have emerged. The most obvious is the increase in the proportion of immigrants in each country over time. Steady increases in numbers and percentages of the populations represented by immigrants since 1960 appear in all examples (see figures 1.1–1.4). By 2016, the percentage of foreign-born had reached 13.4 in Britain, 14 in the United States, 15.6 in Germany, and 12.3 in France—peak levels for the three European nations and close to peak in the U.S.—despite almost continuous pressure from within all four to reduce immigration levels.

The prime mover for that growth has been labor demand across nations and a willingness to override reservations in order to meet that demand. In 1945, shortages were everywhere, but greatest in a postwar Germany with huge war-related gaps in the workforce, which were initially filled by ethnic Germans and discontented Eastern Europeans, then by hundreds of thousands of workers from southern Europe, Turkey, and North Africa. Britain renewed permits for colonial workers who had served during the war and welcomed more from Eastern Europe. France, distracted by conflicts in Indochina and Algeria, encouraged businesses to recruit foreigners directly. In all three, postwar labor demands trumped antipathy toward immigrants. In the United States, immigration also picked up after 1945, even expanding the Bracero program to bring temporary farmworkers from Mexico. The 1965 immigration reform opened doors to workers at all levels, providing labor throughout receptive industries and agriculture. Persuasive arguments across all four nations were presented on behalf of economic necessity, and governments responded by authorizing short- and long-term entry by nonnatives.

A related theme has been that governments have been reactive rather than proactive on immigration issues. The United States let the marketplace dictate the flow of labor for more than a century before devising rules, and the few laws passed in the next hundred years were largely restrictions on particular groups. After centuries in which immigration was a nonexistent issue, Britain offered an ill-considered invitation to half the world’s population before issuing a succession of awkward rules preventing them from ever accepting it. Germany and France aggressively recruited labor for their booming economies, then abruptly changed course to ban new entry, encourage repatriation, and block family reunions. When the EU economy began to grow again, its members rushed to lure skilled immigrants while declaring collective resistance to illegals and asylum seekers. Long-term plans simply have not been part of national dialogues.

It might be argued that government policies are almost always reactive, and the tendency to hope that problems resolve themselves constitutes the norm in democratic systems. But most issue areas do require actual planning: defense programs are calibrated to anticipate threat; education budgets project enrollments and costs; trade policies are based on expectations of current and future demand. The reluctance of governments to plan for immigration has been different, resulting in policies that embrace conservative numbers and integration largely left to the inherent forces of the work and social environments. That pattern reflects another persistent theme, that of varying levels of wariness, and often opposition, toward immigrants, especially during unanticipated surges. In all four nations, past and recent histories have included episodes of widespread resistance, which, in turn, has led to policies of restriction, detention, even deportation, even as most immigrants have settled into host environments.

It is difficult to explain such hostility as reflecting primarily a natural aversion to the unfamiliar, since most immigrant groups have become nonthreatening and productive contributors to their new homelands in relatively short periods of time. In many instances, both public and elite hostility has correlated with preferences for racial and ethnic exclusion. Chinese and other Asians were targeted in nineteenth-century American laws; British leaders insisted that nonwhites could never fit into their society; quotas were placed on Algerian immigrants even when they were considered part of France itself; for years after 1961 Germans routinely referred to foreign workers as Schwarze and Fremdarbeiter (blacks and alien workers) rather than the official term of Gastarbeiter (guestworkers). The United States formalized naturalization rules before 1945, but all three European nations delayed and complicated citizenship for almost fifty years after the onset of postwar immigration. Even in a post–2005 climate with improved access to residence and work in Europe, resistance to accepting refugees from Africa and the Middle East has been notable. In all four nations, political leaders have continued to avoid instituting comprehensive policies, and many still delegate decisions to administrators rather than embrace definitive rules for admission.

On a broader level, all four nations have experienced a common pattern of immigration in which the first waves have consisted mostly of single males, eager to work and making little use of support services. When bans on new admissions were imposed in 1974, all three European nations were unprepared for large increases in secondary, or family, immigration, and all struggled as restrictive policies inconsistent with constitutional guarantees were consistently rejected by national courts or councils. After 1970, all four experienced, for the first time, greater costs than benefits in some areas with high concentrations of the foreign-born. Except in a few cases, second and third generations tended to integrate economically and socially to become part of larger national cultures.

Common Economic Patterns

Although noting major national variations in the geographic and historical components of immigration, we expected that universal rules of economics might well exert a distinct and common force. Two of the economic premises regarding immigration are that it is driven primarily by labor demand and that its benefits outweigh its costs. Across all nations, the pressure to facilitate economic growth has, in fact, consistently been the most powerful driver of immigration. Seventy years after the end of World War II, the need for additional labor persists, guaranteeing that pull as well as push factors will continue to generate population movement and compel nations to construct appropriate policies.

Familiar economic patterns thus characterize national experiences. First, until recently the majority of immigrants came to the host lands with skill levels below those of native workers and took jobs rejected by them. They filled openings among lower-level occupations and at the same time created new jobs and services, expanding local economies. As had been the case in earlier periods in the United States, the first postwar waves of migrants in Europe were mostly single males from poor regions; businesses were the key recruiters and, in the case of France, actually served as agents. All hosts initially enjoyed outsized benefits from labor forces contributing labor and taxes but requiring little in the way of public services.

A natural corollary to this flow emerged when dependents joined established immigrants. Faced with new costs to accommodate the integration of permanent families, all three European nations took steps to discourage or prohibit relatives from entering, by stiffening fraud laws, instituting difficult language requirements, requiring documents often not available in home countries. In all three countries, governments claimed well into the 1990s that residence could be denied if economic conditions changed. In the United States, family reunion was by then an established criterion for admission, but the unanticipated surge of mothers and children seeking to join relatives in 2013–14 cultivated a level of native resistance similar to that shown in Europe thirty years earlier. Opposition to the provision of services to dependents is a constant across nations.

A second group of similarities are associated with the economic impact of immigrants. Foreign workers have propped up labor-intensive industries and agriculture, maintaining supplies and steadying prices for a wide array of products. Immigrants often became the first workers in new enterprises, some based on ethnic products and even more in expanding fields such as health care, tourism, and personal services. Many sectors in which lower-level jobs are shunned by nationals have been and continue to be dependent on immigrant labor.

In the broader labor equation, the most controversial impact has been on employment. Critics have claimed that even as they take jobs unfilled by locals, migrants increase unemployment rates. Data from all four nations, however, indicate no consistent correlation between immigration flows and current unemployment rates, and unemployment rate differences between the foreign-born and nationals exist only in France. There, higher school dropout rates among immigrant teens have been cited in characterizing foreigners as lacking skills and demonstrating aversion to work despite government efforts to assist employment. Interestingly, school dropout rates in Britain are higher among nationals than immigrants, indicating that factors other than nationality affect employment patterns, at least in that nation.

Similarly, concerns that immigrants depress the wages of native workers are evident across nations but largely unsubstantiated. Immigrants have, for the most part, not competed with native workers for jobs. Lower wages among immigrants are common in all four nations, as they achieve parity with other immigrants but expect their children and grandchildren to narrow the gap between themselves and the natives. Lower wages for the newly arrived are consistently correlated with poor language skills and the educational and skill deficits they bring to the marketplace, deficits that typically decrease or disappear by the second generation.

A final common concern about economic impact involves the costs of supporting immigrants relative to the contributions they make to local and national economies. Here, data are mixed and comparisons complicated by differing measures and the absence of reliable data on undocumented immigrants. A major OECD report estimated that costs were higher than contributions in France and Germany, but attributed that pattern to unusual demographic distributions created when both curtailed immigration between 1974 and 1990. That move resulted in smaller numbers entering the labor force (and contributing to pension funds to support retirees). In Britain, figures are skewed by the fact that a large percentage of all residents receive more in benefits than they contribute in labor, consumption, and taxes. In spite of those patterns, contributions of migrants to Britain from other EU states have created an overall positive ratio of contributions to costs. The American models differ by region and are particularly confounded by lack of data on the undocumented, but still conclude that over their lifetimes immigrants contribute at least as much as they take from the system. The chief beneficiary is the federal treasury, as it collects taxes and retirement contributions; major costs are borne by localities, which provide services without reimbursement from federal funds.

The most compelling case for positive economic impact across nations is the evidence that economic growth, or at least sustainability, requires a stable or growing population. Immigrant flows into the United States have increased the national birthrate needed to provide a replacement workforce and support for retirees. In Europe, persistently low national birthrates continue to underscore the need for additional immigrants; in all three of our three cases governments project worker shortages as early as 2015 with no relief for decades after that. Across the continent labor is needed in both primary and tertiary sectors and seasonal work opportunities consistently outnumber the workers available to fill them, indicating that demand is not being met. Prior to the refugee surges, the estimated 600,000 undocumented workers in Germany and 200–400,000 in France were almost certainly indicators of labor shortage, not an uncontrolled deluge of unemployable migrants.

The economic impact of unskilled labor may have been unusual in Britain. Although the need for additional labor was pronounced during and after World War II, conditions most receptive to immigrant labor may have been muted by features of Britain’s class system. That entrenched culture has discouraged individual mobility, motivating nationals to continue to work in industries that in other nations had become magnets for immigrant labor. In the wartime and postwar periods, the labor shortage caused by war casualties was alleviated by admitting a half-million colonials, but after reconstruction leveled off, Britain opted to curtail immigration for almost thirty years before new shortages appeared after 1990. By that time, European states had already begun to revise their systems to favor skilled immigrants and Britain became a late entrant in competition for talent in a society confronting high numbers of retirees and inadequate numbers of workers to replenish insurance funds. Such imbalances are likely to persist for years without measures to increase labor supplies.

Despite historical and geographic differences, all four nations have shifted to similar approaches to immigration standards. All facilitate the admission of applicants with high-level skills but also admit foreigners to sectors with labor shortages, especially agriculture and service industries. Although only the United States gives priority to applicants with family in residence, others accept the likelihood that family will follow if not accompany skilled immigrants. All understand that native birth rates cannot guarantee economic health, and all have at least identified education as essential in combating unemployment in areas with large concentrations of immigrants. If political leaders and their institutions respond to these concerns, questions about immigration will not ask whether it will happen, but who and how many will be admitted and how their adaptation will be supported.

Political Actors in Immigration Policy

In a 2006 New York Times piece on immigration in the United States, Roger Lowenstein argued that although economists strongly supporting an admission system based on skills were baffled that Congress paid little attention to their research, “immigration policy has never been based on economics” (July 9). That conclusion is only partly true, since such research has consistently documented the strong relationships between economic conditions and migration, which ultimately drove policy. But it does point to the reality that immigration debates and much policy have always been framed—and often battered—in political arenas. And those arenas have most frequently produced policies reflecting popular sentiment as much as economic logic.

Contrasting Experiences

Since the end of World War II, policies have rarely been developed comprehensively to meet long-term needs. When immigration occurred relatively infrequently and unpredictably, it was understandable that policies were developed as responses rather than in anticipation of unknown events, and that they were shaped by public opinion. What is remarkable in the current context is the persistence of that pattern. After more than two centuries of American immigration and almost seventy years in European states, immigration has not been a standard item on political agendas but one that has, typically, presented as a crisis or new problem defying resolution. Comparing national responses has illustrated that political forces, however lax in their approaches, are still critical factors.

Because context has been consistently crucial in understanding immigration politics, it is important to recall some basic philosophical orientations to immigration, established before the postwar era began. Of two contrasting general worldviews, the American version linked immigration to a destiny of territorial expansion and population growth, based from early times on the concept of E Pluribus Unum (from the many, one) in an increasingly multicultural society. The most similar European case is France, whose revolutionary break with its past established a republicanism firmly committed to citizen equality. It differs from the American model in that its notion of identity—created by the French rather than immigrants—precluded or at least limited any role for non-French cultures. The equally fundamental concept of laïcité added a political loyalty consciously separate from and superior to others, including religion. In such a system, assimilation would be the only logical course for those who might choose to live there.

A contrasting philosophy defined British and German orientations. For the British, the legacy of world dominance fostered a sense of cultural difference that distinguished them from colonial and most other national populations. When wars and global change exposed the unsustainability of the Empire, the British assumed a position of conscious separation from former colonies, and later from other nations, relying on natural borders and restrictive laws to keep foreigners from entering (and altering) the home culture. In that context the 2016 Brexit vote, rooted largely in public opposition to the EU mandate of free movement of people among member states, is eminently understandable. By contrast, the origins of German wariness of foreigners (in nineteenth and twentieth-century conflicts) were sufficiently different (and the postwar labor needs sufficiently greater) to allow postwar governments to pursue pragmatic programs to recruit foreign labor, which they defined in terms of temporary rather than permanent and as constituting diverse additions to its society. While all four nations promised tolerance and basic protections for foreigners, only the United States and France anticipated integration and assimilation.

The corollaries of those philosophical differences have been evident in critical political arenas. Most obvious have been different policies toward the future of immigrants in the host society. Before the 1989 seismic changes and later in refugee crises arising in 2013, Germany and Britain recruited foreign labor under rules that made permanent residency difficult and periodically encouraged foreigners to leave. Although Germany was required to accept ethnic Germans and offered receptive procedures to asylum seekers for more than 40 years, reforms in 1992 brought its policies closer to the restrictive laws of its EU neighbors. The French experience in Algeria led to the end of lax immigration processes and created quotas for North Africans. Only the United States actually expanded opportunities for immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The new American policy, despite expectations that overall immigration patterns would not significantly change, invited diversity, just as European policies sought to limit it. Policies also reflected contrasting attitudes toward family reunion, with the United States raising the priority of family and European nations erecting barriers, many of which would be voided by judicial decisions. One important consequence of those variations was that the birthrate in the U.S. increased as that in Europe fell in the years since 1965.

Immigration has always been unequally distributed, as new entrants gravitate to areas where others have settled. Those areas have been major urban centers and their immediate suburbs in all nations, and more recently American border states. In the United States, that has moved states to enact restrictions that conflict with federal law. Unlike Europe, where the primacy of national government has been clear in defining policy, localized conflicts pose far greater challenges in an American system with substantial real and presumed state powers. By 2014, federal district and appeals courts had become arbiters of immigration policy, in often lengthy processes of judicial consideration and decision. By 2016, it was clear that those courts would not uniformly strike down state and local restrictions on immigrants, and that Supreme Court decisions would ultimately have to determine the shape of much immigration law.

Finally, anti-immigrant sentiments have varied greatly, and the views of national leaders have not always agreed with those of the public. In Germany, negative views have been relatively understated and their voices limited by a strong tendency to avoid sentiments that implied any link to the nation’s Nazi past. Until recently, even in periods of high unemployment or refugee pressure, strident opposition has been confined to marginal groups. In Britain and France, however, parties defined by opposition to immigrants have proven surprisingly durable. The French National Front has continued to influence elections for more than thirty years, achieving support from as much as 28% of the electorate in 2016 polls; the UK Independence Party has emerged as a serious challenge to both major British parties as they flounder in the face of opposition to both the EU and new immigration. Both of the nativist parties have broadened their agendas, still emphasizing immigrant threats to the economy, national security, and cultural identity but targeting the EU as the authority that is diminishing national policy options, and pressuring governing and opposition parties to adopt restrictive positions. Although the staying power of the Alternative for Germany Party has yet to be demonstrated, its surprising strength in 2016 state elections suggests a more active role than such parties have had over 60 years there. Similar resistance to immigration has emerged in the American Tea Party movement’s influence in the Republican Party. Unlike the FN and UKI, Tea Party identifiers have avoided breaking off into a third party—historically a losing strategy in winner-take-all electoral systems—but have elected supporters to state and national offices. Its success has been uneven in the short period of its existence but has clearly exerted an influence disproportionate to its numerical strength. Most notably, party fringe groups and factions of the Right have succeeded in moving traditional party positions to the right.

Common Trends

Despite major contrasts between the four countries, national political similarities may be more significant. Although it has not always been evident, a central common element has been the direction and shape of public opinion. Across all four, the salience of immigration has most often been low, rising in times of crisis but falling when other issues command center stage—which until recently has been most of the time. As noted in earlier chapters, there are apparent differences in general opinion. Britain, at first blush, stands out consistently for mostly negative opinion; respondents in Germany and France are the least negative, and those in the United States hover around the 50% level of hostility. Those figures, however, exist within a broader evidence base, which displays a host of contradictions in data collected at different times and with differently stated options. In the areas summarized in chapter 5, for example, the most negative responses were recorded by Germany. Perhaps more significantly, despite negative opinions chosen when people are surveyed, the public across all four nations prior to 2013 have generally shown little resistance to policies that facilitated immigrants’ admission and residency within their communities. Responses during times of migration surge have been consistently more negative, but have tended to moderate as crises—even those as serious as those after World War II, and several in the United States since then—abated.

Second, overall acceptance of immigrants increases over time, but events and political activists can provoke abrupt shifts in opinion. Americans expressed alarm with the arrival of Cubans in Miami in 1980; Europeans have had similar responses to surges in 1989–91 and the rush of refugees entering since 2013. When France was suffering from high unemployment (2008–13), net increases in negative opinion, which would not have been predicted earlier, arose, but decreases were observed in the United States and Germany and only minor increases in Britain during the same period.

Given the chronically low salience of immigration issues before 2013, negative opinion might be seen as grumbling without intensity of focus or action, discontent not rising to a level where it might permanently affect policy. More specifically, negative opinion has almost always been linked to the perception that immigrants threaten jobs or weaken the economy, that their cultural differences defy national identity, that they are lawbreakers or, most recently, that they may be especially susceptible to terrorist appeals. Since most of those are the same complaints that have characterized American views of new immigrants over a span of 250 years, it is at least conceivable that hostility will soften if and when the disruptions of 2013 and beyond are resolved. The key term is recent. Fears of new arrivals have consistently faded as they have become longer-term residents, but there is no precedent for situations in which recent comes to mean constant, challenging all patterns and solutions in modern history.

Third, generally negative but not intense opinion has encouraged political leadership to avoid taking strong positions and to avoid openly embracing immigration. Despite a generally more enlightened political environment, immigration issues have been handled in ways mirroring earlier periods. Governments have combined vacillation and non-action with hopes that immigration issues would, like the ideal market, be self-correcting. In much of the discourse, political leaders support reductions in the number of immigrants even as businesses report needs for additional labor. American presidents have stood out for their praise of immigrant contributions, but reform of the system has either been treated as a low priority or stalled in Congress. Most recently, executive actions taken by President Obama to limit deportations to those having committed serious crimes were opposed by opponents in Congress and challenged by several states in federal courts, then reversed by executive orders in the first months of the Trump administration. Whether those new initiatives will be upheld by the courts or modified by Congress is likely to be determined by a combination of labor needs and new definitions of priorities for immigration decisions. A more pronounced paralysis has been evident in Europe, where the EU has been unable to agree on any common policy and members have reverted to the old bromides of closed borders.

Fourth, majority and opposition parties have consistently found themselves internally conflicted around immigration choices. Conservative parties affiliated with business interests have supported keeping labor costs low but objected to the admission of culturally different foreigners who make that possible; parties of the Left have had to rationalize favorable immigration laws to their working-class base. Not surprisingly, all have downplayed immigration issues whenever possible, proposing only limited laws while in power, then opposing similar legislation when they are the out party. As a consequence, political institutions charged with making national policy have been, at best, reactive, delaying decisions whenever possible and responding minimally when crises arise. Evidence of contradictory policies is abundant: British calls for universal access by former colonial subjects followed by years of restrictions; Germany’s thirty-year definition of foreign workers as temporary; French resistance to multicultural identities among immigrants in a free society; America’s welcoming mantra distorted by resistance to refugees and those seeking asylum. Cross-cutting ideological cleavages, regional variations, and volatile public opinion have combined to obstruct rational planning in increasingly gridlocked political systems. In the midst of ongoing avoidance of immigration issues by mainstream parties, groups and their leaders, who would ordinarily have been marginalized, have found platforms. Despite consistent public support in the United States for addressing the status of refugees and the undocumented, supporters of deportation and closed borders have generated enough opposition to create stalemates, effectively jettisoning legislation.

Interestingly, with political leadership and legislatures stymied or reverting to inaction, two institutions have assumed more important roles in guiding immigration policy in these nations. One, with a history of influence below the surface of political conflict is national administration. Cabinet-level departments overseeing immigration have increasingly exercised discretion unusual in major policy areas; delegation of authority has left midlevel agents to interpret national mandates, taking the heat off elected officials but also allowing varied and inconsistent rulings. In the same vein, downloading the resolution of difficult issues—the headscarf issue in France, accommodation of asylum seekers in American states, education for noncitizens in Germany and Britain—has inevitably produced selective enforcement, local biases, and an overall lack of uniformity in implementing national law. In none of the nations studied have national leaders consciously shifted responsibility for immigration policies to other levels of government, and cases that challenged lower-level decisions have tended to bring about the reversal of discriminatory or inconsistent applications of the law. Nonetheless, the pattern is disturbing, as it has allowed national figures to avoid key problems.

The second institution to emerge as critical has been the judiciary and other appellate bodies, including human rights commissions. Guided by constitutions uniformly protective of individual rights, groups as varied as subnational American courts, the National Council in France, and national asylum panels have issued decisions generally favorable to immigrants. However limited immigration programs might have been intended to be, extended consequences and sheer numbers of cases have made appellate courts crucial. Like the experiences of subnational agencies attempting to implement ambiguous policies, court cases highlight the need for strong central authority to define critical immigration laws.

Finally, it is important to note that the most predictable recurring theme of immigration politics in all nations is the primacy of economic needs. In all contexts, the demand by the business sector for labor has outweighed ostensible barriers to immigration, including quotas, promises to limit foreign labor, fears of the pressure such workers may put on local services. Business’s and economists’ claims that crops will go unharvested, factories closed, or services curtailed consistently trump efforts—and policies—to restrict recruitment of labor that is almost certain to become permanent. That pattern, coupled with equally consistent failure to construct comprehensive immigration policies, strongly suggests that whatever the political climate, economic forces will be the prime movers behind whatever actual policies evolve.

The Challenge of Immigration to the European Union

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the refugee crisis that emerged in 2013 has created the most serious challenge to face the European community in its almost-60-year history. Summarizing a United Nations Population Division report in September 2015, New York Times analyst Eduardo Porter described the crisis as an “unstoppable force of demography,” in which twin factors of global drought and unending strife in failed states have combined to drive millions of desperate Africans, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis, and others fleeing violence and geographic disaster to seek new lives in Europe. Accelerated crossings into Greece and Bulgaria show no hint that the flow will lessen, even after European and other nations have pledged billions to support refugees in neighboring states in the region.

A critical question is whether the EU has the political will and resources to provide a unified response. At least two opposing paths present themselves. The first is to follow the lead of several members: resistance and restrictive policies that reintroduce border controls and limit opportunities for admission. Attempts to reinforce external border security and assign quotas for member acceptance of refugees have been minimal or ended in failure; nations bordering Greece have closed borders; Eastern and Central European members have rejected any mandatory quotas; others have created new restrictions on benefits. After terrorist attacks in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, and Nice and local incidents of violence in Germany, public hostility to refugees has increased and a renewed concern about security risks has overshadowed efforts to facilitate refugee resettlement. In this scenario, the reluctance of mainstream parties to support policies of acceptance and integration may lead to an EU with internal variations among its members and the revoking of at least some of the Schengen Agreement’s open borders rules. With no end to war and instability in the Middle East and Africa, that option seems more likely than not.

The second path would see at least a majority of EU members supporting the leadership of its most powerful nations to combine acceptance of large numbers of immigrants with stricter rules—of admission vetting, of asylum requirements, of deportation mandates, of waiting periods for family unification, even of charges to immigrants to support their residence. Some moves in this direction have been made by Angela Merkel’s government, even as it has been undermined by political opposition. For Merkel and the EU, finding a balance between internal security and both the humanitarian and economic cases for accepting refugees is compelling. A Europe whose natural population is slated to decline even with the addition of several million immigrants will, at least in the foreseeable future, need to craft rational economic policies that can be supported by a wary public.

Refugees as the New Normal in Immigration

Both Europe and the United States have struggled to control borders in the face of massive, unplanned surges in immigration. The United States initiated one response with the 1985 act linking amnesty for undocumented immigrants to reinforced borders and stiff penalties for employers who continue to hire those without papers. Having managed massive population movement from Russia and Eastern Europe after 1989, the European Union initiated common policies by tightening external borders at the same time that it removed internal controls (1995). At the same time, Britain, Germany, and France began to rationalize immigration policies by consciously calibrating qualifications to meet national needs. By 2005, all four had succeeded in accommodating both refugees and increasing numbers of highly skilled immigrants, demonstrating impressive adaption to changing circumstances.

Still, neither the United States nor Europe was prepared for the surge in refugees or the prospect of continuing pressures after 2010. The numbers have been staggering. In addition to 4.7 million refugees and six million internally displaced Syrians, two million Iraqis and another million Afghanis filled camps and facilities abroad; 25% of Afghanis and 40% of Nigerians claim to want to emigrate; millions more have left or are likely to leave their homelands in Africa. Asylum procedures have proven inadequate to handle applicants. And efforts by destination nations to encourage migrants to return or not make the journey could hardly have persuaded them in times when successful migrants were sending more than $33 billion in remittances to their homelands by 2015. The United States continues to be a destination worthy of increasingly dangerous journeys made by similar migrants—those fleeing violence and poverty in nations unable to control gang rule and corrupt institutions of governance and law enforcement—but could not summon the resolve to enact comprehensive legislation defining legitimate procedures for asylum or measures that would assist security and reform programs in Central America.

EU guidelines make it clear that refugees recovered from European waters are entitled to enter Europe, but they have not been adapted to confront the realities of unmanageable numbers arriving by sea from Turkey. A March 2016 agreement for the EU to provide Turkey with 3 billion Euros to support refugees either seeking to enter Europe or having been denied opportunities to apply for asylum was fraying months later, after a foiled coup attempt in Turkey brought severe government reactions, subsequently denounced by EU leaders. Member states have resorted to invoking the 2003 Dublin Resolution, which stipulates that asylum applications must be processed in the nation first entered. As noted earlier, all three European nations studied here have been unable to win support for refugees in the face of the growing strength of right-wing parties who insist that “being on an overloaded boat is not an admission ticket to the EU” (Der Spiegel, April 15, 2014).

There is ample evidence in the refugee surges since 2013 to indicate that this form of unsolicited and frequently uncontrolled immigration will continue to outpace mechanisms for dealing with it. As the EU attempted but failed to reach agreement on either admission procedures or how to incorporate refugees as immigrants in member societies, many states moved to adopt restrictive national laws. Hungary defied international rules to detain asylum seekers; Macedonia shut down charitable relief groups; Greece refused to address inhumane conditions in overcrowded refugee camps; France continued to raze Roma settlements and deny Roma children admission to local schools; Poland, Austria, and others tightened borders with EU nations; Belgium authorized deportation of legal resident immigrants for suspicion of engagement in terrorist activity or seen as posing a risk to security, without criminal conviction or even involvement of a judge. Even in the Netherlands, long known for welcoming minority groups, popular support for the extreme nationalist candidate Geert Wilders created major fears that the 2017 election would follow British and American patterns legitimizing conservative stands on immigration. Wilders’ party gained only five parliamentary seats and control of 13% of the body, precluding it from any role in a governing coalition, even as its supporters claimed growing support for their positions in other parties. French and German elections later in the year would provide additional clarity as to whether anti-immigrant parties have peaked or pose a continuing challenge to European governments’ ability to govern. In this context it is remarkable that neither the EU nor any of its member nations have articulated policies which directly address refugees as a continuing component of immigration law.

U.S. immigration laws have been more specific, authorizing 70,000 refugees to be admitted annually, but that number is distributed among all regions and officially only allows a few thousand from any one country. In the first nine months of the 2014 fiscal year, more than 150,000 arrived from Central America alone. An anti-trafficking law passed in 2008 guaranteed full immigration hearings for unaccompanied minors from nations other than Mexico, but INS offices were unable to meet that obligation. Even after committing to accepting 10,000 Syrians in 2015, U.S. agencies managed to place fewer than 1,800, and the total by the fall of 2016 was still only 10,000. The Obama administration pledged to increase that number to 110,000 in 2017, amid growing resistance in Congress to accept that goal. In fact, one of the Trump administration’s first executive orders was to suspend admission of immigrants or refugees from seven (later reduced to six) African and Middle Eastern nations enmeshed in civil strife and to halt admission of all refugees to allow review of existing guidelines and vetting procedures. Although the president also called for a new immigration policy based on skills and employability, he avoided any mention of refugees, the overwhelming source of applicants for admission internationally.

The patterns of crisis avoidance are uncomfortably clear. EU governing bodies have had refugee issues on the agenda since 1997 but have been unable to gain support for a common or even an emergency policy. Conventions on treatment of asylum seekers have been on the books for years with little funding for anything beyond enforcement of border laws. In the United States, a Congress historically inclined to avoid long-term planning was quick to condemn both the administration’s failure to deter refugees and its executive actions to protect hearing rights, but tabled all bills responding to the crisis. The highest international authority, the UN High Commission on Refugees, has issued alarming annual reports but received scant response from either national governments or the UN as a whole. Just as governments have historically shown little resolve in dealing with immigration directly, they have avoided the reality of refugee migration as a new normal. As the American president noted in the summer of 2014, border security is not the real issue. Although illegal entry without detection continues to plague efforts to control immigration, the larger, epic problem is people appearing at borders and asking for help. Until governments address that issue, resolution cannot follow.

Constructing Immigration Policies: Lessons Learned for Facing New Realities

Immigration Lessons

Immigration has rarely been an issue confined to one location, one time, and one solution, and this analysis suggests that nations are increasingly responding to similar immigration experiences. Four stand out in in defining contemporary challenges.

The first rule of major migrations is that they follow disruption. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, industrial revolutions and wars led to massive relocation; famine and regional strife created smaller but still significant movement. By the end of the twentieth century, new waves of internal violence, popular uprisings, and even instances of genocide, combined with climate and other natural threats to traditional homelands, raised the specter of widespread and continuous migration. Ethnic and religious conflicts have emerged as prime movers in creating failed states, leading to massive displacements in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. As long as instability exists, it will trigger population movement.

Second, the conflicts leading to emigration continue to be regional but have expanded the reach of their impact, causing maximum stress to neighboring nations and frequently spreading their concerns and their refugees to distant continents. What has given the crises of the twenty-first century a more foreboding dimension has been their frequency and increased impact. In the twentieth century, two decades passed between two major wars in Europe, and postwar recovery has taken more decades, creating relatively long periods of calm. Since 2000, the pace of unrest and technology-aided mobility has accelerated, increasing both regional conflagrations and the numbers of people fleeing them. Many refugees are likely to belong to repressed minorities, poor and dissimilar from both the societies they are fleeing and those they seek to enter. Not surprisingly, an important corollary of the changed pace and increasing numbers of distressed areas has been the difficulty of distinguishing between those fleeing ethnic conflict and those using refugee channels to launch violence abroad. A formerly limited phenomenon has become a major concern for receiving nations. At its extreme, it has spawned efforts by American state governors as well as national leaders to refuse settlement of refugees. Echoing in louder volume earlier fears of Catholics or Asians, the twenty-first-century tragedy of refugees has added huge barriers to accommodation of the displaced in the United States.

That said, a third reality is that despite enormous increases in displaced populations, emigration and immigration are still relatively selective processes. Historically their numbers have never amounted to large percentages of sending or receiving nations (less than 15% in the U.S. and Europe), they have represented myriads of different groups over large expanses of territory, and none has approached either the critical mass or the level of activism necessary to become nationally influential. Three of the four nations studied here (France, Germany, the U.S.) saw below-average changes in the foreign-born population between 2001 and 2011, even as all claimed increasing immigration pressures. Overall, immigrants have managed—with government support in most nations—to maintain some cultural identity while settling into productive economic roles. It still remains mostly true that successor generations improve their economic status within or outside the ethnic enclaves of their parents.

A corollary of this reality is that surges as well as normal admissions of immigrants have rather closely reflected labor market needs. Unemployment percentages may be higher for some new entrants, but in the larger picture are either similar to those of national workers or lower. Immigrants continue to accept jobs that nationals reject, or jobs that the national labor supply cannot fill, a pattern that is a result of both low national birth rates and dynamic economies. Ultimately, the need for labor will force immigration policies to recruit rather than restrict workers, and rationalize their decisions in terms acceptable to the societies which employ them.

The refugee surges of 2013 and after, of course, have been far larger than earlier immigration waves, making it more understandable that governments have been struggling to create effective responses. It is also easy to see why those governments have tended to follow historic patterns, suggesting that official policies will almost certainly continue to be ad hoc and inconsistent. Over time, market demands have led to large flows of labor; pressure for family unification has been entirely predictable; and governments have consistently treated each situation as an unanticipated crisis. Although the most recent surges have exceeded almost all historical examples, continuation of the plight that engulfs large regions of the world makes it foolish to hope for a gradual return to normalcy. What will almost certainly be required is the political will to confront problems with realistic programs designed to ease absorption, rather than the futile hope that any nation can isolate itself from the issue. In the 2017 political climate that prospect appears unlikely, at least in initial reactions. In each of the four nations studied here, existing party structures have been threatened by anti-immigrant movements whose leaders have been emboldened to create new parties focusing almost exclusively on immigrants as threats to security, the economy, and national identity. Despite lacking comprehensive policy programs, they have thus far succeeded in drawing support from existing parties without offering credible capabilities to govern.

It has to be noted that while public wariness and hostility have abetted anti-immigrant parties’ success in blocking comprehensive immigration programs in Europe, dysfunction in the United States cannot be attributed wholly, if at all, to public opinion. In 2015, almost three-quarters of the public supported legalization of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, but Congress failed to take up the bill passed in the Senate, or offer an alternative. Failure to address pressing issues exists across a wide array of policy areas, suggesting that immigration will continue to suffer from inattention caused more by structural breakdowns than ideological or public fervor. The end result of unaddressed policy issues, however, is the same as in polarized Europe.

Fourth, it is empirically clear that public opinion is highly susceptible to both first impressions and provocative claims made by prominent leaders and groups. Both have been observed over long periods of history in the United States and during the 70-year period in Europe since 1945. The Pew Research Center reported disapproval by the majority of Americans of the admission of Hungarian refugees in 1958, Indochinese in 1979, and Cubans in 1980. Cross-nationally, two interesting patterns emerge. The first is that initial hostility is often correlated with inaccurate information about immigrants, especially that they take jobs, live off welfare, and raise crime rates, but also that they are overrunning the host nation. Transatlantic Trends surveys in 2014, for example, revealed that in all four nations, respondents who were not told the actual percentage of immigrants in the country were more likely to believe there were too many (by a large margin in Britain and the U.S., smaller in France and Germany). The second is that, over time, residents in all four nations have come to live with, work with, and generally accept most immigrants. The Gallup Poll revealed that the percentage of Americans favoring pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants had risen from 59% in 2007 to 65% in 2015; Brookings Institution surveys in 2015 reported that over half (51%) supported the U.S. decision to accept additional refugees. Still, opposition can spike when leading political figures dramatize the issue. A lingering reason for wariness is almost certainly the perception that immigration is out of control. In all, small but vocal numbers have joined parties of the Right in attributing bad economic conditions and loss of national identity to foreigners, contributing to current stalemates across Europe and the United States. As Gallya Lahav observed in 2013, the “value of mass attitudes is in their capability of being politicized by elites who can then convert issues such as immigration or security and translate them onto the political agenda” (244). In all four nations, the result has been a level of dysfunction harmful to any resolution of the issue.

Finally, it should be noted that for all four nations, the disconnect between anti-immigrant claims that immigrants displace native workers and burden public services and evidence to the contrary is significant. Virtually all economic analyses conclude that over time immigrants not only contribute more in productivity and consumption than they receive in benefits, but are critical to each nation’s future economic health. Without continued or even increased immigration, each faces labor shortages and an imbalance between workforce contributions to retirement accounts and income for retirees benefiting from them. Business and industry leadership, influential forces in all, are likely to press whatever government is in power to recognize that issue and respond with policies they may well have rejected in campaigns. How governments reconcile previous hostility with current economic realities will test both their political adaptability and the strength of their systems to adjust to the changing global environment described extensively in this volume.

Constructing a Future of Positive Immigration

One important but often overlooked variable in the immigration equation is what appears to be a dearth of prominent immigration advocates. The histories of the nations studied here are replete with examples of resistance and discrimination but relatively sparse in evidence of support from highly visible leaders. Historic aversion among political leaders, combined with more general public wariness or indifference, delayed eventual acceptance with few dramatic battles but multiple scars borne by immigrants. Across nations, the successes that immigrants have achieved have most commonly been on their own.

To be sure, those who actually favor policies to increase immigration have provided consistent support and funding for progressive policies. The 2016 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine stated unequivocally that immigrants were responsible for a net benefit of over 50 billion dollars annually in the 1990–2010 period. The American National Chamber of Commerce, coalitions of employer organizations, a large number of small but dedicated national and local organizations assisting immigrants, and respected foundations have produced extensive research and lobbied for positive immigration policies, and their influence has to be seen as significant. At the same time, more visible public campaigns by protest groups and anti-immigration political figures often overshadow those efforts with campaigns based on fear and public resentment of foreigners. Although the numbers in any given location are rarely large, it is important to remember that scale and intensity matter. Small numbers may indicate small levels of support, but can easily generate attention disproportionate to their actual role in the overall population. It is ironic that anti-immigrant groups with few solid supporters and even fewer members have been able to influence majority parties, while the foreign-born who constitute larger proportions have not yet created a competing force. That situation reflects the reticence of ethnic groups to call attention to themselves in environments still filled with suspicion. Two future courses have to be seen as likely. The first is that ethnic groups, especially those with large numbers of citizens, will emerge as potent political forces. Some such change has already begun to appear in the United States—in the increasing numbers of Hispanic candidates in elections and the increasing numbers of voters, in demonstrations supporting legalization of the undocumented, in pressure by African and Middle Eastern associations to expand the admission of refugees, in civil suits brought by Muslims against alleged discrimination by government and businesses. Respected organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the UN High Commission on Refugees, and Amnesty International have increased their advocacy of immigrant causes, raising the profile of human rights issues and bringing the weight of their reputations to increase awareness of immigrants’ plight. Demographic shifts raising the profile of immigrant groups will occur later in a Europe with smaller entrenched generations, but are inevitable given population movement and higher birthrates among ethnic minorities. Hispanics will soon constitute critical voting blocs in the United States, North Africans in France, South Asians in Britain, and Middle Easterners in Germany—all increasing the likelihood of greater ethnic political involvement.

The second likely change is a natural corollary of the first. Political parties, recognizing the decisive electoral force immigrants represent, will move to gain their support, and immigrant candidates will increase their representation. Small but significant change has already appeared in the United States as the Hispanic caucus has gained political stature and increasing numbers of minorities are finding employment at all levels of government. European governments solicit input from immigrant leaders, and national as well as EU commissions oversee programs and problems specific to those minorities. Even if the motives for such change are rooted in basic electoral math, they portend futures in which the interests of new nationals will be raised and heard in American and European governments.

In a world where change will become the norm and rejection of change the exception, defining new ways to adapt will be essential to effective nations and international unions. Homogeneous populations may be the goal of regimes attempting to construct monolithic states, but the experience of the West suggests how unrealistic such an objective is. Speaking of the American immigration challenge in 1996, David Kennedy concluded that the present might echo, but could not replicate, the past. Recalling that previous generations had scorned newcomers but assumed the patriotism of their children, Kennedy posited a future in which the path to an integrated society would have to be “more clever than our ancestors were but also less confrontational, more generous, and more welcoming than our current anxieties sometimes incline us to be” (1996). That challenge could well be the rallying theme for all nations striving to become productively diverse societies.