Justin Gest

Comparing Immigration Policies: An Overview from the IMPALA Database

This paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically the most or least restrictive toward admissions. The data also reveal trends toward more complex and, often, more restrictive regulation since the 1990s, as well as differential treatment of groups, such as lower requirements for highly skilled than low-skilled labor migrants. These patterns illustrate the IMPALA data and methods but are also of intrinsic importance to understanding immigration regulation.

Measuring and Comparing Immigration, Asylum and Naturalization Policies Across Countries: Challenges and Solutions

Academics and policy makers require a better understanding of the variation of policies that regulate global migration, asylum and immigrant naturalization. At present, however, there is no comprehensive cross-national, time-series database of such policies, rendering the analysis of policy trends across and within these areas difficult at best. Several new immigration databases and indices have been developed in recent years. However, there is no consensus on how best to conceptualize, measure and aggregate migration policy indicators to allow for meaningful comparisons through time and across space. This article discusses these methodological challenges and introduces practical solutions that involve historical, multi-dimensional, disaggregated and transparent conceptualizing, measuring and compiling of cross-national immigration policies. Such an approach informs the International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) database.

A randomized controlled design reveals barriers to citizenship for low-income immigrants

Significance We provide a randomized test of policy interventions that address barriers to naturalization for low-income immigrants. We find that offering fee vouchers doubles the naturalization application rate among low-income immigrants, but nudges often used by service providers did not increase applications among fee waiver-eligible immigrants below the poverty level. Our results help guide policy efforts to address the problem of low naturalization rates. The current high fees prevent a considerable share of low-income immigrants who desire to become Americans from submitting their applications. Lowering the fees should therefore increase naturalization rates and generate long-run benefits for new Americans and their communities. However, the poorest immigrants face deeper challenges to naturalization that are not easily overcome with the low-cost nudges we tested. Citizenship endows legal protections and is associated with economic and social gains for immigrants and their communities. In the United States, however, naturalization rates are relatively low. Yet we lack reliable knowledge as to what constrains immigrants from applying. Drawing on data from a public/private naturalization program in New York, this research provides a randomized controlled study of policy interventions that address these constraints. The study tested two programmatic interventions among low-income immigrants who are eligible for citizenship. The first randomly assigned a voucher that covers the naturalization application fee among immigrants who otherwise would have to pay the full cost of the fee. The second randomly assigned a set of behavioral nudges, similar to outreach efforts used by service providers, among immigrants whose incomes were low enough to qualify them for a federal waiver that eliminates the application fee. Offering the fee voucher increased naturalization application rates by about 41%, suggesting that application fees act as a barrier for low-income immigrants who want to become US citizens. The nudges to encourage the very poor to apply had no discernible effect, indicating the presence of nonfinancial barriers to naturalization.

Roots of the Radical Right: Nostalgic Deprivation in the United States and Britain

Following trends in Europe over the past decade, support for the Radical Right has recently grown more significant in the United States and the United Kingdom. While the United Kingdom has witnessed the rise of Radical Right fringe groups, the United States’ political spectrum has been altered by the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump. This article asks what predicts White individuals’ support for such groups. In original, representative surveys of White individuals in Great Britain and the United States, we use an innovative technique to measure subjective social, political, and economic status that captures individuals’ perceptions of increasing or decreasing deprivation over time. We then analyze the impact of these deprivation measures on support for the Radical Right among Republicans (Conservatives), Democrats (Labourites), and Independents. We show that nostalgic deprivation among White respondents drives support for the Radical Right in the United Kingdom and the United States.

The white working-class minority: a counter-narrative

This article contributes a counter-narrative about white working-class people in the USA and the UK. It argues that the systematic and social disempowerment of white working-class people is creating a new minority group. I begin by clarifying the occasionally nebulous definition of “working-class white” communities. I then describe the concept of “post-traumatic cities” – exurbs and urban communities that lost signature industries in the mid- to late-twentieth Century and now provide the setting of working-class white peoples marginalization. Next, I outline the more conventional moral, economic, and demographic narratives that depict the condition of working-class white people. Putting into conversation diverse literatures addressing socioeconomic inequality, minority politics, and political behavior, I then exhibit how (1) systemic, (2) psychological and rhetorical, and (3) political forces compound to institutionalize the marginalized social position of white working-class people in the USA and the UK. In the end, I argue that these forces yield a disempowered social and political status that demands the attention of minority politics scholars and alters the way we conceptualize minorities.

Silent citizenship: the politics of marginality in unequal democracies

The aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis has seen a renewed focus on the costs of economic and political inequality for democracy. Where levels of inequality are high, many citizens no longer feel that they have an effective voice in the democratic process. And, when high levels of inequality persist, these feelings of marginalization are entrenched: the perception that the democratic process is unresponsive to the needs and concerns of vulnerable citizens reinforces their unwillingness to participate. The result is an underclass of silent citizens who are unaware of public issues, lack knowledge about public affairs, do not debate, deliberate, protest, or hold office, and, most fundamentally, do not exercise their voice in elections. The goal of this special issue of Citizenship Studies is to investigate the relationship between silence and citizenship. We ask: What does silent citizenship mean in a democracy? The answer is almost entirely taken for granted in empirical and normative scholarship: silence indicates a lack of voice and a deficiency in democratic citizenship, a sign of citizens’ exclusion from democratic politics through lack of opportunity, resources, confidence, or competence (Gray 2014). Silent citizenship, on this predominant view, is evidence of a dangerous disconnection from democratic politics – one that is best solved by devising new ways to mobilize citizens’ voices. Yet, while silent citizenship can and does indicate democratic deficits, three problems undermine the view that deficits are the only reason for silence in the developed democracies. The first is that empirical findings are split on its conclusion: in-depth studies of disadvantaged groups confirm that while silent citizens might decline to voice their preferences at the polls, they do have preferences and these differ substantially from those who vote and who get elected (Gilens 2009; Leighley and Nagler 2014; Page and Jacobs 2009; Standing 2011). For example, silent citizens are more likely to favor government action on climate change, income inequality, universal healthcare, and public education (Bennett and Resnick 1990; Wlezien and Soroka 2011). Of those who did not vote in the last election in the United States, a majority reported feeling that their elected representative did not speak for them (Blais, Singh, and Dumultrescu 2014). A second problem with standard interpretations of silent citizenship has to do with the changing character of political participation across the developed democracies. Citizens

Model International Mobility Convention

People are as mobile as they ever were in our globalized world. Yet the movement of people across borders lacks global regulation, leaving many people unprotected in irregular and dire situations and some States concerned that their borders have become irrelevant. And international mobility—the movement of individuals across borders for any length of time as visitors, students, tourists, labor migrants, entrepreneurs, long-term residents, family members, asylum seekers, or refugees—has no common definition or legal framework. There does exist a well-established refugee regime based on the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Additional Protocol, both implemented by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). As the nature of conflict has changed in recent decades, however, this regime has shown strain and weakness. Today there are more than sixty-five million displaced persons in the world, a level not seen since World War II. Mixed flows of labor migrants and refugees fleeing for safety and economic prospects have created a crisis in the asylum-seeking process. Those forced to

Law as an Agent of Social Transformation: Trends in the Legal Regulation of Migration

The movement of people around the globe is at once an inevitable concomitant of scientific and social development and a site of tremendous contest. The technological advances that feed globalization have facilitated exponential growth in both regular and irregular migration, as people cross borders in search of economic opportunity or security. The overall percentage of people on the move may have remained relatively stable, but the sheer numbers are astonishing. For example, in 2013 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR, 2014) recorded over 51 million refugees and ‘persons of concern’ displaced by war or other catastrophes. The phenomenon of modern migration has fostered a process of internationalization within and between states. Within states, it has fuelled endless debates about the burdens attending immigration in any form. Do migrants make jobs or take jobs? Do they offer protection against an ageing population or do they put strains on scarce public resources in areas such as education, health and housing? Do they enrich societies with their diverse cultures or do they cause harm by congregating in ghettos that spawn crime and social unrest? Migration also affects relations between states — and not just because crossing borders obviously implicates (at least) two countries.

Pro- and anti-system behavior: a complementary approach to voice and silence in studies of political behavior

Theories of participation and non-participation are largely unable to capture and distinguish anti-system behavior, which ranges from deliberate silence to political violence. To better understand and measure these diverse forms of citizen participation, and to distinguish these from forms of alienation and marginalization, this article builds a new model of anti-system behavior in a way that facilitates the development of empirically observable variables and hypotheses. To do so, I draw upon sociological approaches to alienation – which examine intensities of rebellion and contestation – and combine them with the standard political scientific approach – which examines intensities of engagement based on resources. The problem, I argue, is that each approach only partially explains the motivations behind aberrant political behavior in modern democratic systems; they are in fact two sides of the same coin. I consider three cases of apparent silent citizenship: Muslims in Western Europe, Roma in Eastern Europe, and white working-class people in North America and Europe.