Wednesday, 29 January 2014
The Political Sociology of Regional Variations: Family Immigration in North America, Europe, and East Asia
MAD Kolloqium with Kristin Surak
Though grouping states into regions is common in the social sciences,
explicit attempts to understand what regions are and why they help us
predict political outcomes have been rare. This paper contributes to a
political sociology of regional variation by focusing on an area of
policy that is likely to be increasingly important in developed
economies: international migration, and specifically, the migration of
families. To do so, it examines the history of family reunion policy
formation in three different geographic regions of migrant-receiving
states: North America, Europe and East Asia. Each of these regions has
shown different policy patterns and outcomes regarding family migration,
despite similar levels of economic development and liberal political
institutions. In other words, knowing which region a migrant-receiving
state is in helps predict what its family immigration policy will look
like. Our analysis shows that regional variation is not explained by the
presence or absence of particular independent variables typically
associated with immigration policymaking. Rather, a combination of
historical sequencing, critical junctures, and channeled learning has
yielded different policy paradigms that explain the durable patterns of
difference.