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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Globalization, Security, and Border Control
The Question
Threats to state security are sometimes carried on the backs of individuals. And once they cross borders, these threats can wreak harm on destination countries. The Christmas market attack in Berlin in 2016 is a vivid example: a migrant to Germany carried out a terrorist assault against German citizens, on German soil. In December 2016, a Tunisian citizen, Anis Amri, drove a lorry into the Berlin Christmas market, killing twelve and wounding forty-eight (Eddy 2016). One of the deadliest incidents in German history, it brought the connection between migration and terrorism into sharp relief. The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack. Amri was linked to another militant, an Iraqi Salafist who had also made it into Germany. The Berlin attack highlighted the fact that migration could expose the country to infiltration by foreign militants. Amri had indeed crossed international borders several times, initially reaching Italy in 2012 and then Germany in 2015. Furthermore, he had gone through Germany’s asylum system, obtaining papers to remain in the country. Not surprisingly, critics of Germany’s welcoming refugee policies cast blame on Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had in the previous year opened the country’s borders to half a million migrants.
A string of terrorist attacks in recent years has fueled the debate over terrorism and migration control. With each fatal attack on European soil, the migration-terrorism linkage has become more pronounced and states have been quicker to exhort policy stringency. Terrorist events have been publicized widely and the media has been quick to draw attention to target states’ demands for tighter control over borders. After the Brussels attacks in March 2016, the Eurasia Group released a report noting, “Combined, these attacks will increase xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment across the E.U., which has already been rising in light of the E.U.’s ongoing refugee crisis” (Erlanger 2016). The attacks gave ammunition to right-wing leaders in Europe to demand draconian policies. For example, after ISIS coordinated attacks in Paris, France’s far right leader, Marie Le Pen, urged European states to abolish freedom of movement, a cherished pillar of the Schengen regime: “Without borders, neither protection nor security are possible” (Troinanovski and Walker 2015). After the March 22 attacks in Brussels, Mike Hookem, a member of the European Parliament from the UK Independence Party, declared that the “horrific act of terrorism shows that Schengen free movement and lax border controls are a threat to our security” (Erlanger 2016). The common thread in the responses to the attacks was that unmonitored flows of migrants are dangerous and that transnational terrorism warrants greater control over borders.
Clearly, for some European leaders, the knee-jerk reaction to these attacks was to emphasize the dangers of migration—terrorists gain access to European states’ soil—and to then call for tighter border controls. The Christmas market attack vividly exemplifies the connection between transnational terrorism and border and migration policies. Border crossing was at stake in other attacks in Europe, and of course countries outside of Europe have suffered terrorist violence perpetrated by migrants. The Reina nightclub attack on January 1, 2017, in Istanbul, for example, was staged by an Uzbek national. One of the 2013 Boston marathon bombers was a Chechen, and the other was a naturalized American. Regardless of their immigrant status, the perpetrators had crossed borders and migrated to the United States. These events stirred latent fears over lax border control and the vulnerability of migration systems.
Increasingly in U.S. politics, migration and border control have occupied the headlines. The campaign trail to the November 2016 presidential election was littered with polemic and controversy over the need for harder borders. The Trump administration spelled a restrictionist bent in migration policies. Since taking office, Trump has barred travelers from select Muslim-majority countries, limited the number of refugees from certain countries, increased immigration arrests and deportations, and proposed a controversial bill aiming to drastically reduce legal migration (Baker 2017). In 2017, Trump reiterated his campaign pledge to build a border wall and to have Mexico pay for it. Shortly after that, he proposed tougher measures for screening greencard applicants (Kopan 2017). Trump often justifies his demands for a com prehensive tightening of migration and stepped-up border control with references to the terrorism-migration nexus.
We would thus conclude that the specter of terrorism will orient states toward harder borders. We might expect transnational terrorism to universally spur states to adopt tighter policies. Countries vary tremendously in how they control their borders. Some countries have walls; others are calling for walls. Some countries have open visa policies and others do not. What explains the variation in how states monitor their borders? This is the subject of my book. Do security concerns drive border closure? Speculation abounds on this question, but thus far scholars have not marshaled hard evidence to explain the complexities of this relationship. I argue that the answer to this question is not a straightforward yes. For one, not all terrorist events are fatal, and even when they are, they do not elicit the same reaction. For another, very rarely do countries enact wholesale border closure. Border closure is a misnomer because border control is multifaceted. Put succinctly, “immigration and border policy is much more nuanced than terms such as ‘open’ or ‘closed’ can capture” (Rudolph 2006, 27). Also, globalization further complicates the situation. On the one hand, countries need open borders for trade and free flow of workers. On the other hand, open borders have been heavily criticized for leaving countries open to terrorism.
Fortunately, states have multiple tools at their disposal with which to control borders. How politicians manipulate these various border controls is a careful balancing act between the state’s economy and security. Two of these tools are border walls and visa policies.1 What both instruments share in common is that they allow states to monitor migration upstream—that is, before individuals have crossed borders. In contrast, naturalization and citizenship policies control migration downstream—after individuals have crossed borders (Meyers 2000). Naturalization and citizenship policies deal with longer-term migration while visas and barriers regulate short-term migration. The scholarship on policies for short-term migration is rather thin (Mau et al. 2015). This scarcity of research is all the more glaring when we consider the connections between short-term and long-term migration policies (Koslowski 2009). Visa controls significantly influence longer-term migration patterns, including asylum applications and settlement practices (Czaika and Hobolth 2016).
Visa policies and border barriers differ on one significant component: visibility. Visa policies are formulated behind the veil of bureaucracy and are not directly observable by the public. A country’s citizens are often unaware of which states their own government grants visa waivers to. In contrast, border barriers are readily observable by the public and are high profile. They afford symbolic value, independent of their objective effectiveness in forestalling illegal entry.2 Andreas (2009) contends that high-profile enforcement initiatives are a form of security theater whereby governments demonstrate control without needing to prove the effectiveness of policies. Installing fences are about the spectacle of state authority through which governments signal that the state can defend its borders. Insofar as border instruments perform different functions, we cannot anticipate that states will stiffen policies across the board. Given these differences, the balance between economic and security incentives will depend on the functions that border instruments serve.
The trade-off between security and economic gain has come to light time and again after fatal transnational terrorist events. Politicians face mounting pressure to seal borders after attacks. After the Brussels attacks, for example, criticism turned to the Schengen system, which allows individuals to cross borders within the Schengen bloc of twenty-six countries without passport checks or immigration controls. Some commentators wondered if it should be scrapped and replaced with a tougher system. Despite pressure to seal off borders, politicians must also bear in mind economic security. Responding to calls to reinstate border checks within the Schengen zone, Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group’s president, stressed the possible ill effects of such a move: “There’s going to be a lot of social instability that comes with that. It will tear at the fabric of what we think Europe is. It’ll certainly hurt the economies.” On the flip side, Bremmer further noted, “With Paris, suspending Schengen became a question of national security. Brussels fits into this latter category” (Wang 2016). Politicians are stuck between a rock and a hard place: they know that the economy depends on open borders, but this can create insecurity and increase the risk of terrorism. This leads to the second question that animates the book: How do states balance economic and security interests when crafting border-control policies?
My argument is three pillared. First, I distinguish between global and directed (or targeted) terrorist threats. Terrorism does not translate into blanket policy tightening because threats elsewhere and against others do not ignite fears as acutely as do threats on the state’s own soil and against its own citizens. Second, economic interdependence offsets pressures toward tighter policies. States face the opportunity costs of diminished commerce resulting from tighter policies and fear backlash from partners. Liberal lobbies further stay the government’s hand when it comes to tougher controls. Third, policy change is not uniform because different border-control instruments have varied functions. Take border barriers, for example. Walls assuage fears because they are overt manifestations of state power. They also do so by reassuring domestic audiences that the state can defend its borders. In comparison, visa restrictions may fly under the radar, unless the government enacts them with fanfare. If such differences exist by virtue of how a particular state chooses to control its borders, we cannot always expect terrorism to predict stiffer policies across the board.
The Argument
Terrorist violence does not always result in harder borders. I argue that security incentives dominate policymaking when targeted attacks are the issue. In contrast, economic interdependence effectively tames fears over security when attacks are global. In the face of foreign attacks, economic interests hold sway over policymaking and make for open borders.
In order to unpack this argument, I emphasize that attacks do not trigger the same level of response across all states. Some attacks matter more than others. Much has been written about the discrepancy in the public response to international terrorist events that took place in 2015. Attacks on European soil received greater attention than did attacks in Kenya and Turkey. Whereas European countries lit up their national monuments in the colors of the flags of France and Belgium after the bombings in those countries, terrorist events elsewhere did not evoke the same level of outrage (Ahmed 2016). Commentators speculated that the discrepancy resulted from an empathy gap whereby people identified with victims they viewed as similar. This affinity functioned regardless of geographical distance. For instance, from the perspective of the United States, the London tube bombing on July 7, 2005, was more threatening than the Bali attacks in the same year because the latter incident was culturally distant to U.S. interests. The contrasting public responses to international events also clue us in on a simpler distinction: that between directed and diffuse threats. Violence that is geographically or culturally proximate strikes closer to us. More simple than that, however, attacks in our own backyard and against our compatriots strike closest to us. Terrorism is more likely to produce harder borders if the state’s own interests are involved, that is, if its own nationals are hurt in attacks or if terrorists execute attacks on the state’s own territory. Thus if threats strike close to home, they more readily effectuate policy change.
Terrorist events sow fear and are effective to the extent that they do so. In the absence of fear, violence would not elicit a response from targeted states. Fear affects whether and when governments respond and the shapes that responses take. Threat perception forges the implicit link between terrorist event and policy response (Rudolph 2006).3 Along these lines, scholarship has shown that public perceptions of terrorist violence affect a range of policy outcomes (Huddy et al. 2002; Huddy et al. 2005). Public attitudes toward terrorism affect who comes to power in democracies and, more generally, reshape the political and social climate. Heightened threat perceptions generate support for right-wing parties, who may then enact more draconian policies. These perceptions also correlate with intolerance toward minorities, paving the way to restrictions on civil liberties and the rights of foreigners (Peffley, Hutchison, and Shamir 2015). If we apply these insights to borderand migration-control policies, several effects on policy stand out. First, heightened threat perceptions will translate into greater support for tougher border policies. Scholars have shown that fears and anxieties surrounding terrorism ratchet up support for harsher counterterrorism policies. This support is likely to accompany toughness on border and migration control, especially insofar as controlling borders is couched in counterterrorism terms. Second, electorates may bring to office candidates who are eager to toughen border control. In addition, a fearful public grants more leeway to politicians with a tougher agenda. How terrorism impacts threat perceptions thus affects the shape that border and migration policy takes.
Terrorist events heighten threat perception to differing degrees. Quite intuitively, we would expect terrorist violence occasioned on a country’s own soil to matter more than events that transpire abroad. We might also expect threats to be more salient if a country’s own nationals are hurt. To assess these expectations, I differentiate between global and targeted (or directed) threats. Targeted threats directly imperil state interests by victimizing its nationals and endangering territorial integrity. Attacks on the state’s soil showcase that violent non-state actors can not only cross borders unnoticed but also mobilize and launch attacks within its territory. Transnational terrorist events that transpire on other countries’ soil but hurt the state’s own nationals also incentivize policy stringency. Terrorist incidents executed on a country’s territory or that involve its citizens, even when they occur abroad, strike at the core of state sovereignty.
Table 1 synthesizes these insights, posing threat perception as an intermediary link between the terrorist threat and policy impact. Assaults that victimize citizens and/or transpire on the state’s own territory are both targeted against state interests and expected to have a more pronounced impact on policies. Global attacks are defined as events that transpire abroad and do not involve the state’s own citizens. Such attacks are diffuse and remote; they do not stoke anxiety as cogently as do targeted terrorist events. We also expect attacks abroad to have a moderate impact on policies insofar as personal proximity trumps geographical distance. Incidents within the state’s borders sometimes only involve foreigners, but these events are likely to impel tighter policies simply because of physical proximity. Contrarily, foreign attacks that victimize others’ nationals are geographically and personally remote.
Table 1. Terrorist Events, Threat Perception, and Policy Impact
Why doesn’t terrorism always produce harder borders and tougher migration polices? After all, terrorism is designed to strike fear into the hearts of an audience broader than the immediate victims (Hoffman 1998). By extension, transnational terrorism terrorizes not just the victims or even the targeted populace but the global audience. We might then anticipate that countries gradually toughen policies as they witness bombs go off on other shores. The answer is simple. The effects of global terrorism—violence on other shores and against other peoples—are modest relative to directed terrorism. This makes room for economic concerns to dominate policy. Globalized states selectively guard their borders. They prefer open border policies, as long as threats remain remote.
Sealing off borders may enhance security, but it is costly. Consider visas, for example. Governments use visa requirements to monitor flows and deter unwanted travelers. The flip side, however, is that visa restrictions impose burdens on legitimate business and dampen tourism (Neumayer 2011). The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, estimated that visas dampen bilateral trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) by 25 percent. The same study also added that the United States would stand to gain $90–123 billion in annual tourist spending if it eliminated all travel visas (“Europe’s Response to the Paris Attacks Is Different This Time” 2015). Consider border fences. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 authorized 700 miles of fence to be built along the U.S. border with Mexico. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spent over $2.4 billion between 2006 and 2009 on 670 miles of the U.S.-Mexico fence. The United States spent $341 million in 2017 just to maintain the existing fence. And in September 2017, President Trump asked Congress to allocate an additional $1.6 billion toward building a 1,900-mile wall (Nixon 2017).
Costs are not restricted to the actual price tag on the border instrument. Stringent border controls “place governments on a collision course with easy trade, which is central to sustained expansion and integration of the global economy” (Flynn 2000, 58). Stringent controls run counter to liberal principles that are integral to reaping the benefits from benign flows. After 9/11, for example, the United States pushed forward illiberal measures that limited the rights of foreigners and immigrants (Flynn 2003). The Patriot Act is a case in point. These measures were controversial not only because they defied the tenets of liberalism but also because of their deleterious economic effects. Illiberal measures may impede desirable migration flows by undercutting incentives to migrate or by pushing existing migrants to exit the country (Czaika and Haas 2013). Stiffer policies are also not feasible long term because of downstream and lasting economic losses. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the United States toughened its border-control efforts. As a direct consequence of border closure, cross-border traffic in the area covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) slowed to a crawl in the weeks following the September 11 tragedy. The United States faced immediate economic losses from its border crackdown. These losses resulted directly from the logistical hurdles of border closure. There are also downstream and lasting economic repercussions. Such measures can put a dent in cross-border exchange by temporarily relocating trade. They can also anger commercial partners and hurt diplomatic ties and even elicit overt backlash from trade partners. In sum, at the dyadic level, we expect economic interdependence to render states reluctant to close their borders.
Globalization and Borders
The foregoing discussion underscores that globalization engenders open borders. Globalists take the argument further, however, by proclaiming that globalization will wipe out international borders (Ohmae 1990, 18). Some scholars even claim that cross-border mobility signifies the retrenchment of state powers and the weakening of territorial authority (Sassen 1998; Strange 1997). While globalists’ assertions of a borderless world seem exaggerated, there is some evidence of freer movement across borders. There is support for both sides of the debate on the costs and benefits of maintaining borders in a globalizing world. Since World War II, more and more states’ citizens enjoy visa-free travel. Mau et al. (2015) refer to the visa-waiver programs as the global mobility regime. The global mobility regime is certainly expanding, but it’s also lopsided in privileging a select number of countries. While only 20 percent of the world’s population benefited from visa-free travel in 1968, in 2010, that number surpassed 35 percent. Global migration has also risen considerably, reaching 244 million migrants in 2015, a 41 percent increase from 2000. These numbers seem impressive. Nevertheless, the world’s population grew at a faster rate than that of the migrant population. Hence, the global migrant pool as a ratio of the world’s population is still modest. In fact, the ratio has remained fairly steady since the 1960s, hovering at around 3 percent (Czaika and Haas 2015).
Trade and financial flows have grown more rapidly than labor flows. States’ policies partially explain the lag: we know that even economically liberal states retain restrictions on legal migration (Hollifield 1992, 516). Moreover, when states have loosened controls, they have done so selectively. Mobility rights have increased for a subset of countries—primarily citizens of advanced Western democracies (Mau et al. 2015; Neumayer 2006). Western democracies tend to have disproportionate passport power in terms of the number of countries their citizens can travel to without a visa. When it comes to their migration policies, however, Western states are not the most open. For instance, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada rank among the top three countries in terms of passport power; however, these same countries are not among the most liberal in terms of their visa policies toward other countries.4 The limited scope of the global mobility regime means that aside from a select subset, countries still encounter steep visa hurdles. In other words, borders continue very much to matter where human mobility is concerned: “Anyone who thinks differently should try landing at a Sydney airport without an entry visa or go to France and apply for a job without a work permit” (Freeman 1998, 93).
Perhaps more vivid evidence against globalists’ prognostications of a world without borders is the recent trend toward fencing borders. Since the fall of the “iron curtain,” new border barriers have cropped up, and they have done so at an accelerated pace. From 1945 until 2013, states built sixty-two new fences, and they built forty-eight of them after the end of the Cold War. More recently, the war in Syria and resulting outpouring of refugees into Europe have spurred EU member states to fortify their borders (Batchelor 2015). As a result, non-EU citizens now face tougher hurdles to enter the European Union. This has led to concern that European consensus on the freedom of movement is beginning to show cracks. While terrorism is not the sole reason why states erect border barriers, fears over security in general certainly serve as a politically expedient justification for building walls and fences. President Trump, for example, lists a host of security threats including crime, narcotrafficking, and illegal migration in pushing for the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico. Yet, in most cases, politicians sincerely believe in the necessity of a fence as well as in the effectiveness of a barrier in blunting the terrorist threat. Democratic leaders tout fences as security enhancing and necessary for the protection of the country against external threats. In no other context is the security link more pronounced as when politicians can point to terrorism as a concrete and formidable threat and the border wall as a panacea against that threat (Jones 2012a, 2012b). For example, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed concerns about ISIS infiltration of Jordan when trumpeting a new fence along Israel’s border with Jordan. Netanyahu underscored that the wall is necessary, noting, “We must be able to stop the terrorism and fundamentalism that can reach us from the east at the Jordan line and not in the suburbs of Tel Aviv” (“Netanyahu” 2014).
In sum, globalists’ claims that we are headed toward a borderless world do not find much support. Borders may matter less for some types of flows, but for people, they continue very much to matter. We may speculate that non-state threats, or the “globalization of informal violence,” is the culprit (Keohane 2002). Globalization has negative externalities such that the transport and communication technologies that facilitate benign flows empower threatening actors as well. Globalization increases states’ vulnerability to non-state threats. Just as goods and money are now able to traverse larger distances in a shorter amount of time, so are individuals. If threats are carried on the backs of individuals, then more remote threats have the potential to traverse greater distances to reach target states. With globalization, perforated borders stand to endanger states’ security. Non-state actors can wield large-scale violence, previously the preserve of states’ militaries. These actors can surmount the gap in capabilities they face vis-à-vis states through surprise, secrecy, and shock. The growing menace of non-state actors demands that we rethink our assumptions about geographical space as barriers. Coincident with the rise of non-state threats, globalization also makes possible dangerous alliances, for example, as evidenced by the crime and terrorism nexus (Dishman 2005). As non-state groups forge links across borders, they are further able to capitalize on globalization.
Thus it is not surprising that states lean toward restrictionism when it comes to human mobility. The preceding discussion leads us to expect that border controls are here to stay, even among liberal states. These trends may only lend circumstantial evidence on the domineering influence of security fears, however. In order to gain granular traction on how states balance economic and security objectives, we need to narrow the analytical focus by examining the impact of a specific type of security challenge: transnational terrorism. The impact of economic objectives may remain unclear, as I argue, if we look at states’ overall economic openness. Although the European Union has been castigated as “fortress Europe” (Finotelli and Sciortino 2013), economic liberalism is its mainstay. Hence, it is misleading to expect economic liberalism as a philosophy, or economic openness as grand strategy, to directly influence migration- and border-control policies. To better capture the effect of economic incentives, we need to look at ties between states and analyze how these ties in turn affect policies toward commercial partners. This perspective takes inspiration from economic interdependence theory in arguing that economic ties affect how states seek security.
Existing Explanations of Migration and Border Policies
Previous studies have not adequately analyzed the trade-offs between trade and security with borders while also accounting for the differences in policy options for border control. My work is the first to do both of these things at the same time and evaluate hypotheses based on this framework on a grand scale. Migration policy remains woefully undertheorized in international relations (IR) scholarship. Where theoretical accounts exist, the bulk of the literature studies migration flows rather than policies. When scholars have turned attention to migration policies, they have analyzed the policies of single countries rather than adopting a comprehensive framework. Existing work employs a case study design, engages in discourse analysis, or is normative in orientation. Discourse analysis provides an incomplete picture insofar as there is a gap between rhetoric and practice. The prevailing approaches to migration policy form a comparativist lens, highlighting its domestic underpinnings. A cursory survey of the literature shows that economic and cultural arguments dominate scholarship.
Comparative political economy informs us that firms generally support open migration policies while labor does not. Domestic coalitions on both sides form in response to the fiscal and distributional economic effects of migration. A popular perspective draws on the Heckscher-Ohlin framework to argue that the owners of scarce resources stand to lose from open policies and thus will trumpet protectionism (Hiscox 2006; Scheve and Slaughter 2001). A related perspective refines the factor endowment model to maintain that owners of mobile resources will advocate economic openness. At the center of both perspectives is the view that commerce bifurcates society, simultaneously creating protectionist and liberal stakeholders (Hollifield 2000). Liberal lobbies anticipate revenue loss in the event of retaliation by trade and financial partners. Accordingly, winners from economic liberalization champion sustained liberalization and open-border policies. Migration policy may be conceived as client politics whereby the openness of migration policy depends on the relative strength of these lobbies (Freeman 2001). Liberal lobbies have an organizational advantage because the benefits of open migration are concentrated, but the costs are diffuse. In contrast, opposition to migration is omnipresent, yet poorly organized. Additionally, to the extent that trade and migration are complementary (Rudolph 2008), we would expect pro-trade lobbies to join forces with those in favor of open migration policies. As such, anti-immigration lobbies find it more difficult to mobilize and pressure the state to maintain protectionism (Freeman 1995). Insofar as liberal lobbies carry the day, we would expect the domestic-level mechanisms to support the state-level argument.
The economic perspective is strictly premised on labor market effects of migration and ignores that unlike other factors of production, labor comes with sociopolitical consequences (Zolberg 1987). This insight has inspired a separate strain of comparative literature, which draws on the cultural effects of migration to explain policies. Migration may stoke cultural insecurities by undermining societal cohesion and challenging the boundaries of what defines a nation (Teitelbaum and Weiner 1995; Waever et al. 1993). Particularly if migrants carry starkly different normative templates, their codes of conduct, belief systems, and self-identities may clash with the host state’s way of life (Collier 2013). Homogeneous host societies find accommodating cultural diversity particularly challenging, also because for these countries, the concept of nationhood is ethnic rather than civic. Such societies are hermetic, inflexible, and predisposed to opposing cultural diversity. In contrast, settler states built on significant waves of immigration at historical junctures—such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia—base citizenship on civic principles and hence have an easier time reckoning with dissimilar migration (Brubaker 1992). The cultural perspective thus expects countries to pursue restrictive policies in an effort to preserve a coherent sense of nationhood or, more generally, to buoy cultural security. It also maintains that states that are more ethnically homogeneous and states that lack a tradition of migration are inclined toward stricter migration and border controls.
Arguments drawing on comparative politics to explain why states pursue open or closed migration and border-control policies illuminate the domestic underpinnings of policies. However, they cannot tell us much about how interstate dynamics affect migration policies. For example, we know from comparative political economy which actors forge pro- and antimigration lobbies. But we do not know if these actors compel governments to attune liberalization toward economic partners. This is where theories about bilateral trade and commercial dependence have merit. From a comparative economic perspective, closed migration policies are rooted in the domestic economic consequences of labor flows. This perspective does not shed light on how economic factors interact with other facets of state grand strategy. As part of its grand strategy, a state conjointly seeks economic, geopolitical, and cultural security (Rudolph 2005). The cultural perspective tells us that nativist lobbies exploit ethnocentric sentiment to fuel cultural insecurities and galvanize people against open migration policies. But we know less about whether the economic ties between states temper domestic cultural insecurities. Moreover, the subfield of IR has rich scholarship on territoriality and borders and a wealth of theories to draw upon in tying interstate dynamics to migration policies. Yet it has not adequately leveraged this literature (Gavrilis 2008a; Rudolph 2003). IR scholars’ oversight is surprising in light of the fact that international migration has assumed center stage in policy debates in the past few years. As Adamson stresses, “International scholars and policy makers are finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the relationship between migration and security in a highly interconnected world defined by globalization processes” (2006, 165–167). Hence, the topic of migration control provides fertile ground for theorizing from the international relations lens.
There are a handful of scholars who have recognized the scholarly void and taken a comprehensive perspective. Rudolph (2003) argues that trading states’ migration policies tend to be more liberal given external geopolitical threats, as was the case during both world wars. The relationship reverses in the absence of external threats, where the absence of a common enemy means states can afford tougher policies. Rudolph’s work offers one perspective on when economic interests matter the most: when geopolitical threats compel states to value economic security and trigger a rally effect, thereby overriding concerns over cultural insecurity. Peters (2017) offers another perspective. She argues that globalization initially predicted open migration policies because of strong pro-migration lobbies. Deindustrialization and offshore mobility of firms shrank the pro-Immigration lobby. She maintains that these factors are why globalized states now pursue strict migration policies. Both perspectives highlight that material considerations matter. For Peters, the current wave of globalization fails to exert a liberalizing force on migration policies because the domestic pro-migration lobby shrank as states moved production offshore and technological development blunted the demand for foreign labor. For Rudolph, globalization may fail to produce open policies in times of relative peace—absent an external common aggressor. In this scenario, threat perceptions turn inward and host states become preoccupied with cultural rather than economic insecurity.
Rudolph and Peters show that globalizing has varied effects on states’ migration policies. But neither work tells us much about how non-state threats—and informal violence wielded by these actors—influence migration-control policies. My argument points to a different reason why economic incentives may have limited impact on open-migration policies. Economic models stipulate that states engage in cost-benefit analysis when deciding how open borders should be. Fears affect policy through an appeal to emotion rather than strict cost-benefit analysis. This suggests that states deviate from strict cost-benefit analysis when policies then reflect these fears (Friedman 2011; Mueller 2005). Coupled with weak lobbies, emotional decision making should further winnow support for open migration.
Theoretical Anchor
My book speaks to debates about the role of borders and territoriality in states’ pursuit of sovereignty. Territoriality and borders occupy a venerable and important role in IR scholarship; this lends a solid theoretical foundation when generating empirical implications about borders. Nonetheless, when IR scholars have studied borders, they have done so by looking at the role of borders in conflict (Huth 1996) or cooperation (Simmons 2005). Conflict scholars examine why states clash over the location of borders. Cooperation scholars explore how borders can function as effective institutions facilitating cross-border trade. Neither perspective tells us much about how states manage their borders. Common to both perspectives is that territorial demarcation is a given. Agnew refers to the unquestioning acceptance of demarcation as the “territorial trap,” noting that mainstream IR “assumes implicitly that a state is a fixed territorial entity operating much the same over time and irrespective of its place within the global geopolitical order” (1994, 54). The territorial trap handicaps our understanding of how states manage borders in the face of non-state threats. An important consequence of globalized informal violence is the emerging role of borders as perimeters of defense against intrusion by non-state threats. While scholars underscore that non-state actors can exact considerable damage (Keohane 2002; Salehyan 2008b), scant attention has been paid to whether these concerns do in fact alter how states manage their borders. By looking at transnational terrorism, I shift attention to how states manage their borders in the face of such threats. This book also asks scholars to reconsider territoriality in international relations.
The territorial trap is underpinned by realism’s contention that sovereignty is predicated on territorial exclusion. As an early voice in classical realism, Morgenthau defined sovereignty as “supreme legal authority of the nation to give and enforce law” (Morgenthau 1978, 4). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geopolitical thinking mirrors realist thinking and stresses that geography plays a pivotal role in state security (Starr 2006). Within its borders, the state monopolizes the legitimate use of force. Borders delimit the bounds of states’ policing and lawmaking authority. In a similar spirit, the modern state has appropriated the legitimate means of movement (Torpey 2000a; Torpey 2000b). Dating back to the turn of the twentieth century, the passport is a relatively new invention. In previous centuries, individuals could traverse boundaries unencumbered by the need for documentation. The passport and the visa regime allow the modern state to monitor movement across its borders (Salter 2003). The realist perspective contrasts sharply with liberalism on the role of borders. Liberals view borders primarily as institutions that regulate and facilitate cross-border exchange (Simmons 2005). Whereas realists emphasize territorial sovereignty, liberals stress managing and monitoring flows across borders, or what Krasner (1999) has dubbed interdependence sovereignty. Territorial sovereignty requires the exclusion of external actors; in contrast, interdependence sovereignty turns on “the ability of public authorities to control transborder movements” (Krasner 1999, 9).
The book’s analysis also sheds light on a second debate between globalists and security scholars. To summarize the debate, the material benefits of transnational exchange in an increasingly globalized economy have led many observers to anticipate the erosion of state territorial control and ultimately the obsolescence of state borders. The security externalities of globalization, however, point to the opposite expectation: harder borders. To date, no one has attempted to reconcile these propositions. This debate remains unresolved also because it ultimately rests on an empirical question of how globalization affects border politics. The book addresses this controversy by expanding economic interdependence theory beyond its conventional boundaries, which are limited to questions of conflict and cooperation. An extensive scholarship addresses how economic incentives can restrain states from using militarized force (Oneal and Russett 1997; Oneal and Russett 1999; Russett and Oneal 2001). We know much less about how economic ties influence how states seek security when faced with nontraditional threats.
Border and migration control is an ideal testing ground for studying how economic and security incentives influence policies because this is one policy domain where both types of incentives intersect (Rudolph 2005). In contrast, for example, other policy domains may be about maximizing primarily one objective. Trade policy concerns economic security. Counterterrorism is about physical security. Migration and border control are about both in that states simultaneously pursue economic and security objectives in their grand strategies.
Globalization scholars assert that commerce inspires policy liberalization because economic interests override security incentives in state grand strategy (Rosecrance 1986). Some might go even further to say that globalization imposes a golden straitjacket on states, rendering unilateral policies infeasible (Friedman 1999). This perspective is limited, however, because it does not account for economic ties between pairs of states but rather expects trading states to have open borders. This limitation underwrites the enduring clash between the expectations of globalization and security scholars. Economic interdependence theory suggests that economic ties between states constrain policies. The constraining effect grows with the relative strength and salience of such ties. I propose a similar argument and maintain that asymmetric interdependence in particular creates a push for softer policies toward trade partners. To illustrate, Canada and Mexico are disproportionately dependent on commerce with the United States; bilateral trade comprises a higher proportion of overall trade and of gross domestic product (GDP) for both states than it does for the United States. This asymmetric dependence compelled Canada and Mexico to oppose a border clampdown in the wake of 9/11. Commerce also creates stakeholders that advocate for open borders. Transnational firms and commercial interests were vocal in opposing the thickening of borders within NAFTA.
These debates anchor the broader implications of the book’s three interrelated findings. First, I show that states harden borders against origin countries whose nationals have conducted attacks against their own interests in the past. This is a targeted rather than universal policy response; in other words, states targeted in terrorist attacks do not exhibit a blanket response but tighten up policies against only a subset of countries. Second, trade and capital ties render states less eager to harden borders against the citizens of commercial partners, regardless of previous attacks. Third, the identity of victims matters in conditioning states’ policy choices. States factor in attacks against other similar countries and treat these events as striking closer to their own interests. This effect is evident in the European Union whereby attacks on the European continent compel states to tighten up their borderand migration-control policies, regardless of whether their own citizens were hurt in such attacks. These findings yield support for both sides of the debate. I argue that borders continue to matter, but they take on the role of a shield against transnational threats rather than traditional, military threats. The argument refines realist insights on borders as a hard shell against the militaries of other states. My argument also upholds the liberal perspective, however, by showing that economic ties soften policies and reduce the likelihood of fortified borders.
I show how the insights from economic interdependence encompass state behavior beyond the decision to engage in militarized disputes. The book demonstrates that parallel to their effects on conflict behavior, material incentives shape how states cope with transnational terrorism. The insights in this book would thus appeal to scholars interested in how security and economics intersect. The empirical results should cause students of economic interdependence theory to be cautiously optimistic: as long as violence does not transpire in the state’s own backyard, commerce prohibits policy tightening. However, even distant terrorist events that harm the citizens of the state inspire policy tightening. In other words, they are regarded as occurring in the proverbial backyard.
