Immigration Policies in the Western World: Convergence or Divergence?

So far, it has been virtually impossible to trace general trends in migration policies across a large number of countries due to a lack of data. Various and sometimes contradicting arguments have therefore largely remained untested. While some argue that entry policies have become more restrictive others have observed liberalizing trends over the last decades. There are also unclear expectations concerning the divergence or convergence of regulations. The few existing studies in this field have mostly focused on policy outcome data in the domain of asylum instead of migration policy output data more generally. In this paper data from the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project will be analyzed. The database includes measures on immigration policies from 1980-2010 in all OECD states. Moreover, we are able to distinguish four different immigration policy fields: Family Reunification, Labor, Asylum and Irregular Immigration. We are therefor in the position to systematically analyze the development of migration policies across three decades and to differentiate between various groups of countries and policy domains. We are thereby particularly interested in Europeanization effects. It is still disputed whether there are any converging effects in the field of immigration among EU member states. It has been shown that even within the European Union cooperation in migration policies among member countries is rather inter- than supra-governmental in nature. In some fields, however, there has been extensive collaboration at the level of the European Union. Most prominent are asylum policy and controls at the border of the European Union.