Saturday, March 15, 2014
Forum (Omni Shoreham)
Recently, scholars begun to pay much more attention to the exclusionary power of immigration regulations at the subnational level. This interest has been kindled either by growing subnational level activism or by the federal level consciously empowering lower levels of government for the purposes of enhancing control over immigrants. A number of scholars consider this development to be reflective of a broader shift towards a neoliberal, “marketized” governance of immigration that promotes subnational and even private actors as being better suited to ensure the economic competitiveness of would-be immigrants in the global “battle for brains”. However, recent developments in other federations underline that not all federations are experiencing such similar degrees of subnational activism or purposeful “downward” shifting. Germany, this paper argues, shows a centralizing trend instead. A closer look at the division of labour in the regulation of immigration there demonstrates that subnational actors early on possessed signficant immigration regulation powers, calling into question assumptions of a “federal government hegemony.” Strangely, both devolution and centralization have raised similar concerns regarding non-citizen rights and the focus of immigration policies towards economic competitiveness, yet the comparative lessons are far from clear, making this a particular intriguing development for scholars of immigration and comparative politics. The paper will first analyze the German case and then explore what lessons can be learned from placing it in a comparative context with other federations paying particular attention to the diverging role of courts and other legal actors in the process.
