"The politics of immigration in liberal democracies exhibits strong similarities that are, contrary to the scholarly consensus, broadly expansionist and inclusive. Nevertheless, three groups of states display distinct modes of immigration politics. Divergent immigration histories mold popular attitudes toward migration and ethnic heterogeneity and affect the institutionalization of migration policy and politics....I begin by discussing those characteristics of immigration politics found in all liberal democracies. I then investigate the distinctive modes of immigration politics in the three subsets of Western democratic states with distinctive immigration histories. I conclude by considering whether these three patterns will persist or how they might change as a result of future migration pressures and the further institutionalization of immigration politics and policies in Europe." Comments by Rogers Brubaker (pp. 903-8) and a rejoinder by the author (pp. 909-13) are included.

"The politics of immigration in liberal democracies exhibits strong similarities that are, contrary to the scholarly consensus, broadly expansionist and inclusive. Nevertheless, three groups of states display distinct modes of immigration politics. Divergent immigration histories mold popular attitudes toward migration and ethnic heterogeneity and affect the institutionalization of migration policy and politics....I begin by discussing those characteristics of immigration politics found in all liberal democracies. I then investigate the distinctive modes of immigration politics in the three subsets of Western democratic states with distinctive immigration histories. I conclude by considering whether these three patterns will persist or how they might change as a result of future migration pressures and the further institutionalization of immigration politics and policies in Europe." Comments by Rogers Brubaker (pp. 903-8) and a rejoinder by the author (pp. 909-13) are included.

How much variation is there in immigrant incorporation policies and practices across the Western democracies? Concluding that the effort to capture variation in typologies of incorporation schemes is likely to prove both futile and misleading, I propose a radically dis‐aggregated perspective that conceives of incorporation as the product of the intersection of migrant aspirations and strategies with regulatory frameworks in four domains — state, market, welfare, and culture. Because some but not all of the regulatory institutions in these domains were created with immigrant incorporation in mind, national incorporation frameworks are not fully cohesive, are constantly changing, and at best can be described as belonging to a handful of loosely connected syndromes.

National welfare states are compelled by their logic to be closed systems that seek to insulate themselves from external pressures and that restrict rights and benefits to members. They nonetheless fail to be perfectly bounded in a global economy marked by competition, interdependence, and extreme inequality. This article explores the consequences of transnational flows of labor both for the status of migrants who move to welfare states and for the viability of welfare states themselves. The consequences of migration for the fiscal and political stability of welfare states are discussed, and it is argued that migration has contributed to the Americanization of European welfare politics. It is concluded that the relatively free movement of labor across national frontiers exposes the tension between closed welfare states and open economies and that, ultimately, national welfare states cannot coexist with the free movement of labor.

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A vigorous tradition in comparative politics argues that national policymakers develop characteristic and durable methods for dealing with public issues, that these can be linked to policy outcomes, and that they can be systematically compared. More recently, a number of scholars have suggested reversing the direction of causality, claiming that the nature of political issues themselves causes the politics associated with them. This policy sector approach implies that there should be cross-national similarities in the way issues are treated, whatever the styles particular nations adopt. The two approaches need to be integrated into a common framework built around a research strategy that investigates policymaking within specific sectors across multiple national cases. Such an approach can transcend the often sterile debate over whether the policies of nations are unique or are converging by seeking to explain how the nature of issues structures the variation among the policies of nations.

This article explores the impact of symbolic and instrumental variables on European Union opinion on immigration and asylum. Using Eurobarometer surveys from 1988 to 2000, descriptive and multivariate statistics are employed to measure the impact of prejudice, ideology, attitudes towards the EU, unemployment, economic conditions, migration flows, and individual-level demographic characteristics on measures of attitudes towards immigration policy and foreigners. Although standard demographic factors are associated with the dependent variables in the manner expected, there are less compelling or inconsistent effects of individual or macro-level economic variables. The best predictors of immigration positions are attitudinal variables including political ideology, prejudice and evaluations of the EU.

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