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Featured Review
| Aristide R. Zolberg. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation with Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 658. $39.95.
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| The politics of immigration control thrives in a milieu of crisis. The belief that new forms of immigration bring unprecedented challenges to social welfare, national identity, and security and thus demand new forms of regulation has framed immigration debates in the United States for well over two centuries. But beneath the tumultuous surface, the most striking feature of any historical account of migration politics is the untiring monotony of the arguments. No matter how sophisticated the econometric methods, sociological models, and cultural critiques have become, the basic positions remain numbingly familiar. Urgency and newness is the leitmotif of these debates. But it is a leitmotif that erases rather than recalls past themes, making possible an infinite succession of high dramas that neither build on nor resolve past conflicts. |
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Aristide R. Zolberg has written what will probably stand for many years as the most comprehensive account of immigration politics in the United States since the colonial era. It is largely a synthesis of secondary literature, but only the most diligent reader of that literature will recognize all of the themes brought together here. While much of the book acknowledges the ever-recurring debates, crises, and political tactics, Zolberg still manages to invest the story with a sense of historical development by plotting the narrative along two themes: the creation of institutional trajectories that shaped the possibilities of later policies and enforcement, and an analysis of the shifting political coalitions of "strange bedfellows." This latter theme helps to reframe the repetitiveness as a story of the complexities of interest politics and debates over national identity in a liberal state. It also provides an excellent hook from which to explain the origins and effects of certain policies in their historical contexts. |
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A third and less successfully developed theme is the attempt to place U.S. immigration policy in a "global perspective." In a series of articles, Zolberg has promoted an "external perspective" that understands the history of migration control as part of an international system rather than merely from the perspective of a single nation. But that is not a project undertaken in this book. The global perspective is largely framed in familiar terms of foreign policy and unilateral concerns about national status and security. And even these issues are mentioned only occasionally over the course of the book rather than as an integral part of the narrative. This is very much a nation-centered history. |
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In the broadest sense, this book is an assertion that politics matters. It matters both in the sense of long term structures and institutions and in the contingent choices and struggles of day to day politics. Unfortunately, this perspective is not explicitly articulated and its significance may well elude the casual reader. In other articles, Zolberg has argued against sociologists and economists who insist that politics and border control have little impact on the organization of migration and may even be epiphenomena of more fundamental socio-economic processes. In this book, those debates are relegated to the footnotes and a few stray comments. The only secondary literature that Zolberg directly addresses is writings from the 1950s on nativism and mass psychology. In contrast to the "psychopathological" approach to understanding anti-immigrant legislation, Zolberg insists that immigration policy and attitudes must be placed in a concrete context of institutions and political processes (p. 7). This choice of an outdated foil mirrors some of the limitations of this book. Zolberg does not offer the kinds of systematic comparisons and multivariable analyses that will convince sociologists and economists of the relative importance of politics over structural processes. Even from a softer analytical perspective, he often overreaches in his claims about the effects of politics and policy. But this book nonetheless remains an unparalleled account of the ebb and flow of migration politics that must be taken into account if a sophisticated understanding of the relationship of migration and control is ever to be achieved. |
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