ABSTRACT
Migration control is a fundamental expression of the state’s monopoly over the legitimate means of coercion (Weber 1979). By regulating the movement of non-citizens across national borders, states set and enforce rules on who can reside within their territory, and defend the national welfare against individuals who may pose a threat. While at the heart of statehood, the politics of migration control is marked by high levels of political conflict. In making immigration policy, state actors face difficult trade-offs between competing societal interests and values. Migration scholars have identified the restrictionist immigration preferences of the public as the key source of regulatory pressure bearing on the state (Freeman 1995; Money 1999). At the same time, civil actors who stand to lose from the imposition of migration controls face strong incentives to mobilise and use the openness of democratic institutions to forcefully assert their claims. In identifying these anti-regulatory interests, scholars have
argued that their political clout is sufficiently overwhelming to undermine the capacity of liberal states to effectively exercise their sovereign powers of migration control (Hollifield 1992; Cornelius et al. 1994; Freeman 1995; Joppke 1998). This study provides a two-fold challenge to these claims. Firstly, I argue
that the preferences of the public are more nuanced, and not as consistently restrictionist, as the literature generally assumes. As policies move from legislation to the stage of implementation, public attention shifts from the purported benefits of migration control to its high human costs. I argue that once confronted with concrete and, by necessity, harsh policy consequences, the public will be sympathetic to calls by immigrant advocates for a more compassionate approach to enforcement. And, just as public preferences are shaped by the distinct political dynamics characteristic of different policy stages, so are the incentives of state actors. Importantly, public attention to the human costs of enforcement threatens to undermine the capacity of immigration bureaucrats to implement their legislative mandates. At the same time, and in a second departure from the literature, this account presents evidence from the case of Germany which suggests that bureaucrats have responded to these constraints by adopting enforcement strategies that have strengthened their capacity to implement contested measures and resulted in administrative decisions that are more restrictionist than public preferences. This analysis of bureaucratic capacity examines the use of the state’s most
heavy-handed weapon of migration control: deportation, the forceful removal of non-citizens from the national territory. This means of migration control has been virtually ignored by the literature.1 I consider that, because of its heavy-handedness, deportation is particularly vulnerable to political contestation, and so presents a profound challenge to the state. It is a ‘least likely’ case for state capacity. Should we discover evidence in favour of state capacity, this would suggest that the findings would likely also hold in other areas of migration control. Similarly, among the various stages of the policy process, the arena of implementation – which constitutes similarly uncharted territory in the study of migration control2 – presents a crucial test of state capacity. The vast ‘deportation gap’3 that is evident across advanced democracies cannot be accounted for by inadequate legal instruments of control, but rather by the lack of implementation of existing legal provisions. It follows that only by studying the politics of implementation can we realistically gauge the scope of state capacity. The first part of this study engages the existing literature on the role
played by the public in shaping the politics of migration control. It proceeds by outlining a set of key propositions that depart from these claims in important ways. The second part empirically tests the argument by studying the implementation of deportation policy in Germany. The conclusion assesses the significance of these findings for our understanding of the state’s capacity for migration control.
