Drawing Structure and Agency into the Theoretical Debate of Immigration Control

Research on immigration control expanded severely in the last few decades, but this strand of political analysis has remained insulated from the main debates in the discipline, like the duality between structure and agency. Five main theories of immigration control were developed to explain the continuous development of immigration against the background of public hostility to this phenomenon (Messina, 2007). Nonetheless, some European states demonstrated the capacity to reverse the intensity of particular and undesired inflows throughout the 2000s and early 2010. Following this trend, recent research on immigration control has been oriented towards the evaluation of policy effectiveness rather than its overall effects on immigration (Czaica and Haas, 2013).  However, the available immigration theories are most suited to explain the host states’ inability to control immigration rather than to enhance understanding of the variations observed on policy effectiveness. To overcome this problem, this paper will draw the structural and agency duality into the theoretical debate over the ability to control immigration. The paper will develop a review of the main theories of immigration control according to this duality, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Building upon these theories, this paper will propose an innovative and integrated research paradigm that addresses the dialectic relationship between structure and agency in order to evaluate the effectiveness of immigration policy. The paper will discuss the advantages of this integrated approach to support qualitative analysis of policy effectiveness as well as its potential limitations.

Keywords: Structure and Agency, Immigration theories, qualitative analysis