Globalization Backlash: Migration Policy Gets Restrictive

Abstract

Canada enacted similar measures, although the timing was sometimes different, and the policies often took the form of an enormous drop in or even disappearance of large immigrant subsidies rather than of outright exclusion. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there was not one big regime switch around World War I from free (and often subsidized) immigration to quotas, but rather an evolution toward more restrictive immigration policy in the New World. Attitudes changed slowly and over a number of decades rather than all at once. What explains this evolution in immigration policy? A number of candidates have been nominated: increasing racism, xenophobia, widening ethnicity gaps between previous and current immigrants, more immigrants, lower-quality immigrants, the threat of even lower-quality immigrants, crowded-out native unskilled workers, rising inequality, greater awareness of that inequality by the powerful (informed by activist urban reformers), and greater voting power in the hands of those hurt most-the working poor. The goal of this chapter is to identify the fundamentals that might underlie changes in immigration policy, distinguish between the impact of these long-run fundamentals and the determinants of short-run timing, and clarify the differences Downloaded from