Foreign Policy and Immigration

Abstract Immigration is an enormously consequential issue area in international politics, both materially and normatively, but it has often been overlooked by traditional approaches to the study of international relations. This chapter positions immigration policy as foreign policy, arguing that decisions about how many and which immigrants a country admits, border control, and efforts to contain and deter migrants abroad, are all best understood as elements of a state’s relationship with the international system. Yet immigration policy outcomes are driven by the actions of a multiplicity of substate actors with diverse interests, from judges and bureaucrats to ethnic lobbies, making immigration policy difficult to understand from a traditional state-centric approach. The chapter highlights how state-level immigration policy is driven by the preferences and structures of these domestic immigration institutions. Furthermore, immigration itself is at odds with a conception of the international system as one of distinct and bounded states, as its defining feature is the permeability of national borders—not just to people, but to their cultures, ideas, assets, and preferences. A foreign policy analysis (FPA) approach to immigration takes seriously both the influence of migrants themselves on the immigration policies of host and origin states, and the impact of immigration policy on migrants’ human rights.