This chapter investigates the precarious arrangements embedded in the systems and processes of migration management across three different country contexts: the UK, Germany, and Australia. The country comparison shows how precarious workplace/worker and societal arrangements have been woven into the systems of migration management (Paret and Gleeson ; Vosko ). The examination employs an historical methodology to show how approaches to migration management create a racialised precarity in the destination country generally; and more specifically in the destination country labour market where different groups of migrant workers are channelled into and toil in the least favourable areas of the labour market. Accordingly, we shed light on the rules underscoring and the implications of the process of migrant worker acceptance, settlement, and integration in a new land and labour market.

We conclude by placing our arguments and findings into the current context of rising political opposition to international migration. One of our central claims – substantiated by a range of empirical evidence – is that migration economically benefits both migrant-sending and -receiving countries. Migrants foster new international capital flows to both their home and host economies, and the remittances they send shield family and friends from negative shocks and help them invest in new assets. Yet in the US and Western Europe, anti-immigration politicians and parties threaten these potential gains. If nativist movements continue to enjoy electoral success and begin restricting immigration, the benefits of global human mobility will be increasingly in jeopardy. Just like every other stage of the migration process, harnessing the opportunity that mobility presents is a politically contingent proposition.

It is no secret that migrant destination countries have become increasingly interested in regulating migrant inflows. We discuss in this chapter some potential tools of migration management suggested by other scholars – notably, border restrictions and fortification, foreign aid, and bilateral trade agreements. We turn the conversation toward a different area of policy: labor market access. We argue that migrant-receiving countries interested in regulating migration can do so by creating temporary labor market access for people from sending countries. Allowing some migrants formal employment opportunities significantly increases the amount of remittances they send home, a financial resource that family members can use to finance their immobility rather than sending additional family members abroad. We use an array of data and empirical specifications to make the case that labor market access increases remittances, and that this increase in remittances reduces subsequent authorized and unauthorized migration to the United States. Our findings suggest that countries interested in managing migration pressures have an incentive to open up more temporary pathways to the formal labor market for migrants.

Chapter 6 dissects the drivers of Tunisian immigration politics before, during and after the 2011 regime change, focusing on the reasons behind restrictive policy continuity in the face of international and civil society efforts to initiate a liberal reform. I show that while foreign policy interests, the role of national identity narratives, and the imperative to secure state power over immigration have remained constants in Tunisian immigration policymaking, the role and weight of domestic factors such as public opinion and civil society activism in public policymaking has fundamentally changed after 2011. Yet, instead of triggering liberal reform in line with the revolutionary spirit, democratization has compelled political elites to put ‘Tunisians first’ and to sideline issues of racism and immigration. Ultimately, the bottom-up and external pressures that emerged after 2011 only led to minor, mostly informal policy changes that have not affected the restrictive core of Tunisia’s immigration regime in the first decade of democratization.

Chapter 4 dissects the origins, drivers and implementation of the 2013 liberal immigration reform in Morocco, which broke with the restrictive rhetoric and policies that Morocco had pursued since the late 1990s. In particular, I examine state formation legacies in migration control, as well as reform drivers within the state apparatus, civil society and the international sphere to show that Moroccan authorities increasingly devise immigration policies within a three-level game – keeping in mind not only domestic and European but also African policy interests. In this context, I demonstrate that Moroccan immigration policy is primarily driven by the monarchy’s foreign policy and domestic regime legitimation goals and that the 2013 reform has been a central tool in fortifying Morocco’s image as a ‘liberal monarchy’ at home and abroad at a moment of regional political turmoil after the ‘Arab Spring’. I also explain how the inconsistent implementation dynamics that mitigate the reform’s impact on migrants’ everyday lives have not jeopardized but reinforced the king’s power position.

Chapter 5 dissects power dynamics among actors involved in immigration policy in Morocco before and after the 2013 reform: the monarchy and administration, international, national, and migrant civil society organizations, as well as international organizations, legal actors, and the private sector. I demonstrate that immigration policy liberalization not only emerged out of Morocco’s autocratic political structures – a dynamic I call the illiberal paradox – but also consolidated them. In particular, I show that the monarchy mobilized the expansion of migrants’ rights, as well as its relations with the administration and an expanding civil society to portray the king as a ‘liberal’ monarch. In this process, legal actors and elected politicians have only played a subordinate role. However, these ‘regime effects’ in domestic politics did not absorb resistances and diverging views within the administration, with actors keeping their room for manoeuvre regarding agenda-setting and policy implementation.

The Introduction makes the case for rethinking the politics of immigration across political regimes and for leveraging immigration policy as an analytical lens to explore the inner workings of modern states. I start by sketching the empirical puzzle that motivated the book - the fact that Morocco’s authoritarian regime has enacted a liberal immigration reform, while immigration policies have remained restrictive throughout Tunisia’s democratic transition. I then embed the empirical puzzle in the broader political science debate around the ’regime effect’, which suggests that democracy and autocracy give rise to specific immigration policy processes and outcomes. To pave the way for theory-building, I introduce a three-fold typology of immigration policy processes that systematizes insights into the ‘regime effect’ and distills commonalities and differences in immigration politics across the democracy/autocracy divide. Lastly, I outline the research design and methods adopted to trace immigration policy processes in Morocco and Tunisia and provide an overview of the empirical and theoretical contributions of each chapter.

Chapter 8 systematically compares immigration politics in Morocco and Tunisia and brings to the fore some striking continuities and parallels across democratic and autocratic contexts. I show that the state’s imperative to ensure its legitimation and sovereignty drives some of the key similarities in Moroccan and Tunisian immigration policymaking, such as the tendency to safeguard state power by creating exemption regimes or enacting changes informally. I also demonstrate that histories of state formation and official national identity narratives are key to understanding contemporary immigration politics in both countries. Lastly, I tease out how Morocco’s autocratization and Tunisia’s democratization affected the role, weight and interactions of state apparatus, civil society and external actors in immigration policy over the twenty-first century. I show that while the power of the executive and the weight of domestic political and civil society actors seem sensitive to a ’regime effect’, bureaucratic and international policy dynamics around immigration seem largely unaffected by political regime dynamics.

Chapter 3 dives into the contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia. I introduce immigration policy developments in Morocco and Tunisia against the backdrop of both countries’ political regime dynamics. In particular, I provide concise accounts of Moroccan and Tunisian state formation trajectories and national identity narratives, as well as focused overviews of immigration and emigration patterns and policies from the early twentieth century until the end of 2020, including Morocco’s and Tunisia’s treatment of migrants during the first year of COVID-19. This offers the empirical backbone for the book.

Chapter 7 dissects power dynamics among actors involved in immigration policy in Tunisia through the 2011 regime change: democratic state institutions and the administration; CSOs and migrant associations; international organizations, legal actors, and the private sector. I show how democratization affected immigration policy processes in ambiguous ways and explain why the increase in citizens’ political freedoms and civil society activism has not spilled over into more openness towards immigration. After 2011, policy processes became more inclusive, as the role of Tunisia’s parliament and civil society was strengthened. However, democratization also brought inter-actor dynamics to the fore that put a break to immigration reform plans, such as turf wars within the administration or governmental volatility. At the same time, the democratic transition has only partially affected immigration policymaking, as dynamics of international norm adherence and the ambiguous role of employers in Tunisia’s largely informal economy remained relatively unaffected by the regime change. In this context, political elites opted for restrictive policy continuity instead of translating migratory experiences and democratic ideals into liberal immigration reform.

Chapter 2 offers a first systematic attempt at rethinking immigration policy theories across political regimes. I map dominant theories of immigration policymaking - namely political economy, institutionalist, historical-culturalist, globalization theory and international relations approaches – and reflect on their relevance for understanding immigration politics across the democracy–autocracy spectrum. In doing so, I draw on my in-depth case studies of Morocco and Tunisia, the rich scholarship on immigration policymaking in the Global North and Global South, as well as broader comparative politics, international relations and political sociology literature on power, politics and modern statehood. Hereby, I seek to stimulate future comparative research and systematic theorizing of immigration politics.

The Conclusion returns to the book’s central ambition: to leverage the contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia for more systematic theory-building on immigration politics beyond the liberal state. I summarize my key empirical and theoretical propositions and reflect on how they contribute to research on Moroccan and Tunisian migration politics, theories of immigration policy, and broader comparative politics, international relations, and political sociology scholarship. I also reflect on the most promising avenues for consolidating theory-building on immigration policymaking across the Global North/Global South and democracy/autocracy divides in the future. In particular, I hope to inspire readers to question the analytical power of binary categories such as democracy or autocracy for theorizing political processes, and to mobilize immigration policy as a lens to research political change and the inner workings of modern states.

Chapter 1 provides the contextual background for the rest of the monograph. It retraces patterns of immigration into Morocco and discusses how processes of bordering securitised the presence and movement of people profiled as ‘sub-Saharan migrants’. I reconstruct the tightening of borders in the Western Mediterranean, highlighting the efforts undertaken by European countries to prevent the irregular movement of people and the border externalisation process which accompanied such a project. I discuss the involvement of Moroccan authorities in the bordering and militarisation of the Western Mediterranean, outlining the main developments that occurred in the domestic migration policy strategy. The end of the chapter provides an overview of the actors involved in the aid industry.