The point of departure for this study of the impact of regime type on immigration policy is a puzzle the author came upon early in her research. Morocco, an authoritarian monarchy with a long history of restrictive immigration, introduced a liberal set of immigration reforms, including two regularization campaigns, in 2013. Tunisia, on the other hand, during its post-2011 “democratic transition” decade, was experiencing a flowering of political freedoms and of citizen involvement in politics, yet it hardened its already restrictive immigration policies. As Katharina Natter discusses, the existing literature suggests that liberal democratic states are expected to have more open and humane policies toward migrants than authoritarian regimes like that of Morocco. Hence, how can we explain what she terms this illiberal paradox—recalling James Hollifield’s liberal paradox (Immigrants, Markets and States, 1992)—that an authoritarian regime may enact more open migration policies than a democratic or democratizing one, like that of Tunisia?
Her argument is that autocracies (represented by the Moroccan case) are able (if they so choose) to implement open immigration regimes more easily than democracies (represented by post-2011 Tunisia) because of the relative freedom they enjoy from the legal constraints and domestic demands that characterize democracies (p. 10) Thus the primary focus of her study is the understudied explanatory power of regime type or the “regime effect” on immigration policy in the Global South (and to be clear, her focus is only on immigration, not on policy toward the emigration of Moroccan or Tunisian nationals abroad). To structure her inquiry she develops a three-fold typology of immigration policy processes: generic processes (the various roles of the bureaucracy); issue-specific processes (the challenges that immigration poses to sovereignty over people and borders as well as to national identity); and regime-specific processes (the centrality of the executive, the role of political parties, the importance of the judiciary). She then devotes five empirical chapters—two to each country plus a single chapter on historical background—to presentations rich with detail about the respective national histories and post-colonial development, a range of state institutions and functions, civil society advocacy, the role of individual policymakers and activists, the impact of international norms and reputational concerns on policymaking, and the gap between announced policies and implementation.
Natter’s research spanned a decade, with extended periods of time spent in the field engaged in archival work, participant observation, and interviews with a range of policymakers, civil society activists, as well as international and diplomatic actors. The result is a work that not only offers a wealth of new empirical detail, but which also provides fascinating insights into the many-faceted roles of the bureaucracy and bureaucrats, civil society institutions and their activists, as well as national identity in the construction and implementation of immigration policy in these two North African states.
That said, a number of elements deserve discussion. First, I think the author overstates the argument for why these two North African countries constitute a particularly good choice or pairing for this study. By the author’s own admission, the number of immigrants in Morocco has been and remains quite small (some 86,200 in 2014), raising questions about the actual domestic stakes involved in immigration policy and reform, regardless of regime type. In Tunisia, the numbers have also remained small (only 53,500 in 2014), unless one counts Libyans, some 500,000 —5% of the Tunisian population (p. 153)—many of whom fled in the wake of the disintegration of the Qaddafi regime. Yet, as Natter explains, for politico-historical reasons, these Libyans were not formally considered immigrants and were welcomed. Might this not then count as evidence of a more liberal policy in a democratizing Tunisia, thus challenging her characterization of its policy as more restrictive?
In addition, it is perhaps understandable in a work that has as its starting point the “regime effect” that external variables would receive less attention than domestic ones, but the coverage that is included of international organizations, international norms, and foreign policy makes clear the problem of attempting to attribute so much explanatory value to regime type alone. More striking is the almost total absence of economic variables whether domestic, regional or international.
Further, while Natter’s treatments of the multifaceted political processes that affect the formulation and implementation of immigration policy are carefully researched and extremely rich empirically, they are also quite dense. This density, combined with a general lack of weighting of the examples to make clear what is most important for our understanding and for the building of her argument, can lead a reader to occasionally lose her way.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Chapter eight, where Natter summarizes the many important insights the comparison has generated. Her overarching conclusion is that it is not really regime type, but instead security imperatives—the need to legitimate the regime and protect state sovereignty—that largely dictate immigration policy. However, she then presents the many variables she has explored in the course of her research and which she has determined to have some impact on the formulation and implementation of immigration policy, but without a discussion of an order of hypothesized or demonstrated importance. Thus, even for someone who has never been a fan of parsimony, the list of variables is quite long: the size of the immigrant presence in comparison to the overall population; the degree of domestic politicization of the immigration issue; the various categories of immigrants and the role that racism may play in their reception and treatment; the symbolic rather than actual weight of policy changes; the fluidity in implementation at the margins that often exists as a result of lack of clear directives from the center. She also considers multiple variables associated with historical legacy, regime reputation, and national identity.
Finally, and to return to the initial categorization of Tunisia as a democracy as opposed to the authoritarian Morocco, more attention in a study focusing on regime type should have been devoted to hypothesizing the difference between immigration policy in a consolidated democracy versus a state involved in an apparent democratic transition. While no study can cover events up to the date of publication (in this case, 2023), since mid-2021 Tunisian President Kais Saied has in fact been gradually dismantling the democratic gains of the 2011 Tunisian revolution. Natter could not have been expected to anticipate all of this, but she could have included an update or reconsideration of the initial puzzle and her argument the light of Tunisia’s clear and increasing authoritarian turn.
These concerns notwithstanding, the author has provided wonderful insights into the functioning of the Tunisian and Moroccan states, exposed a host of potential drivers of immigration policy, and problematized the place of regime type in the hierarchy of variables shaping this policy. Just as important, she has challenged the usefulness of the Global North-Global South binary in thinking theoretically, not only about immigration policy, but also about broader challenges to state sovereignty and security.
