Book Review: The Politics of Immigration Beyond Liberal States: Morocco and Tunisia in Comparative Perspective

Guest post by Siyu Luo. Siyu is a post-doctoral researcher at Fudan University, China. She obtained her PhD in Criminology from the University of Manchester, UK. Her research examines irregular Chinese migration in the UK and irregular migration in China.

Review of The Politics of Immigration Beyond Liberal States: Morocco and Tunisia in Comparative Perspective by Katharina Natter (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Although 44% of international migrants and 86% of refugees live in the Global South (p.6), theories of migration policies have long focused on the immigration policies of North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and to a lesser degree, Japan (see the collection edited by James Hollifield et al.), thereby leading to what Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas calls ‘methodological Western-centrism’, that is, ‘the naturalisation of the Western liberal democratic state [as] the natural and exclusive units for comparative studies’. Defying methodological Western-centrism, Katharina Natter’s book provides valuable insights into the dynamics of immigration policymaking in Morocco and Tunisia.

In the opening paragraph, Natter engages the reader by raising ‘an empirical puzzle’: theories suggest that liberal democracy has a built-in tendency to liberalize immigration policy and autocracy tends to pursue restrictive immigration policy, so why is it that Morocco, an autocratic regime, enacted a liberal immigration reform, while Tunisia, a democratizing regime, pursues restrictions on immigration? In 2013, following a decade of restrictive policies on immigration, particularly from Western and Central Africa, Morocco enacted a sudden liberal reform, regularizing more than 50,000 migrants and asylum seekers and improving migrants’ access to education, healthcare and labour markets. By contrast, after the 2011 democratic revolution, Tunisia continued to construct immigration as a security issue and carried on practices of arbitrary detention and expulsion, as well as administrative hassling and racial violence, particularly against Western and Central African migrants, despite the initial links between migrants’ rights and the revolution.

To address the question, Natter analyses the dynamics of immigration policymaking in Morocco and Tunisia from five theoretical approaches (chapter 2). First, the political economy approach highlights the role of domestic socio-political-economic interest in shaping immigration policy. Second, the institutionalist approach reveals state institutions’ different and potentially conflicting interests in the making and implementation of immigration policy. Third, the historical-culturalist approach examines the intrinsic links between nation-building histories and immigration policies. Fourth, the international relations approach stresses that immigration policy is interwoven with foreign policy and diplomatic interests. Fifth, the globalization approach focuses on the implications of international human rights norms on immigration policy.

Drawing on the theoretical approaches and on rich interview data with policymakers and stakeholders in Morocco and Tunisia, Natter convincingly resolves the ‘empirical puzzle’. She argues that the top-down liberal reform in Morocco was primarily driven by King Mohammed VI’s vision to showcase the Moroccan monarchy as a ‘liberal monarchy’ and thereby bolster the regime’s domestic legitimacy, diplomatic interests, and international image (chapter 4). In Tunisia, by contrast, the democratic transition shifted the political imperatives from gaining external support to winning elections, and this, in turn, changed the rationale behind immigration policymaking from paying lip service to the European agenda on migration to catering to the nationalist demand of ‘Tunisians First’ (chapter 6). Overall, ‘immigration liberalization in Morocco was a strategy for authoritarian consolidation, while in Tunisia the continuity of immigration restrictions has been a safeguard for democratization’ (p.78). Based on the contrasting cases of Morocco and Tunisia, Natter proposes an ‘illiberal paradox’: an hypothesis that ‘autocracies can open their immigration regimes more easily than democracies if they wish to do so because of their relative freedom from legal constraints and restrictive domestic demands’ (p.10) (see also this 2018 article by Natter).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gaps between immigration policy in discourse, on paper, and in practice, as Mathias Czaika and Hein de Haas identified, exist in both Morocco and Tunisia. In Morocco, immigration policy is characterized by ‘a constant duality’ (p.106) of integration discourse towards ‘deserving’ migrants and exclusionary measures against ‘the undeserved’—those who fail to satisfy the criteria for regularization and newcomers from Western and Central Africa (chapter 5). In Tunisia, democratization increased the involvement of parliament members, state institutions, and civil society in policymaking, thus introducing competing rights claims and consequently paralyzing an immigration reform (chapter 7).

By comparing Morocco with Tunisia, Natter argues that immigration policy always has to accommodate diverse institutional agendas, civil society claims, diplomatic interests, international norms, and legacies of nation-building, to a varying extent (chapter 8). Thus, despite their ostensibly contrary immigration policies, Natter identifies the underlying similarities, including the instrumentalization of immigration, racialized categorization of immigrants, symbolic politics of immigration, immigration governance adhocracy, in both Morocco and Tunisia, and in autocracies and democracies generally (chapter 8). Beyond the cases of Morocco and Tunisia, the broader objective of the book is to ‘serve as a starting point for consolidating theory-building on immigration policymaking across the Global North/South divide’ (p.227).

The book appealed to me as my research interest lies in immigration policymaking in China, an emerging destination country of immigration (see the book edited by Angela Lehmann and Pauline Leonard). It provides me with a useful analytical lens to understand the dynamics of China’s immigration policy, particularly from the angle of geopolitical considerations and inter-institutional dynamics. Furthermore, as Natter identifies in Morocco and Tunisia, it is Black migrants who are problematized and even demonized in public and political spheres in China, despite their relatively small population compared to Japanese, South Koreans, and whites. Overall, I highly recommend Natter’s book to policymakers, practitioners, and scholars in the field of migration and border control. For those are interested in immigration regimes beyond the Global North, I would like to recommend more works, to name a few, Diego Acosta Arcarazo and Luisa Feline Freier’s article about South America,  Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas’ comparative study of Spain and Malaysia, and Hélène Thiollet’s research on Gulf countries.

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