The Comparative Politics of Immigration

Scholarship on the politics of immigration has increased impressively among political scientists and scholars of comparative politics. The books analyzed in this review all synthesize and, in their own way, build upon the literature that has evolved over the past two decades, addressing questions at the core of this literature or posing new questions. Perhaps most important, each takes a comparative approach to the politics of immigration, focusing on post-World War II immigration policies in Western Europe; variations in immigrant conflict among different immigrant groups, across localities and cross-nationally; differences in citizenship policy among countries at similar levels of development and changes in well-established policies over time; and the connections between naturalization policy and naturalization rates and the historical relationship of colonizing, noncolonizing, and settler countries with immigrant populations.