Immigration Policy and National Identity: Two Case Studies in Practice

Abstract

In the last chapter, I argued that different immigration policies rest upon different assumptions about the nature of political community (which are themselves connected with different national identities, particularly with respect to the relationship between politics and culture), and that as a result we should be hesitant to restrict the kinds of immigration policies peoples may enact and pursue, because in doing so we restrict the kinds of political communities they are able to create, inhabit, and preserve. In this and the following chapter, in two different ways, I want to illustrate and reflect upon the important first aspect of that claim, the close connection between conceptions of political community and immigration policies. In chapter five I shall do this at the level of theory; but here I want to begin at the level of practice, of actual policy. This follows roughly the movement of the previous chapter, starting with a more descriptive account and proceeding to a more normative one (not that the two are ever perfectly separate and distinct). So I offer here an examination of two countries, the United States and Germany. This examination should provide us with a more concrete understanding of the close connection between immigration policy and national identity, and thus, I hope, buttress the suggestion made in the previous chapter that any attempt to declare a given policy, whatever it might be, the “correct” one for countries to follow inevitably involves claims about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the cultures and polities, broadly understood, of the countries in question.