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The Limits of Unilateral Migration Control: Deportation and Inter-state Cooperation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Antje Ellermann
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Abstract

Despite the recent proliferation of policy initiatives designed to curb illegal immigration, advanced industrialized states have made little headway towards the goal of effective migration control. Examining the case of deportation in Germany and the European Union, this article contends that one of the most fundamental reasons underlying this failure is a unilateral policy bias that fails to take into account two related conditions. First, policies of migration control directly and substantially impinge upon the interests of foreign governments. Secondly, the cooperation of foreign officials is an essential condition for policy implementation. To the extent that they disregard these basic conditions, then, migration control policies are bound to fail. By examining the implementation of deportation policy, the article illustrates the limited efficacy of control measures that are dominated by the interests of advanced industrialized states to the exclusion of the concerns of foreign governments.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , 2008 , pp. 168 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2008.

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Footnotes

1

The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Social Science Research Council's International Migration Programme that funded the fieldwork this article draws on. For their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article I thank the organizers and participants of the workshop ‘The Refugee in Trans/National Politics and Society’ at the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University.

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