Subnational Immigration Policies and Politics: Towards a 2.0 Research Agenda

In the past 30 years, subnational authorities and regional entities have become increasingly involved in immigration politics and policymaking, dealing with a wide range of issues such as immigrant recruitment, selection, settlement or integration. Despite being this global movement, considerable differences exist between its embodiments between various states, both in Europe and in settler states like Canada, the United States and Australia. The rescaling of immigration politics and policymaking has profoundly changed the landscape of immigration governance. It has given rise to new intergovernmental processes and relationships implying different levels of government, resulting in patterns of collaboration or conflict. Moreover, through this movement, immigration politics itself became visible at the regional, subnational and local scales. Indeed, phenomena like politicisation, populist discourses, anti-immigrant parties or social movements also happen with distinctive features at the subnational level. Consequently, a complete and holistic understanding of the links between migration politics and governance demands that we take into consideration the subnational scale. This paper explores concerns for subnational intervention in politics and governance in the immigration literature. While immigration scholars recognize the need to go beyond methodological nationalism, the field is marked by strong heterogeneity in the conceptualization and measurement of the “subnational”. This paper strives to draw the contours of the particularities of the subnational level in migration studies by answering the following question: what is subnational? Is this unit of analysis special and in relation to what? What are the theoretical and methodological implications of different conceptualization of the subnational? What can be learned from studying and comparing the subnational level, and with what do we need to compare the subnational level to? Empirically, this paper first maps and explores the trends in the literature studying subnational immigration policies and politics. It proposes a meta-analysis of articles published between 2004 and 2019 in Migration Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the International Migration Review, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and the Journal of International Migration and Integration, which are five leading peer-reviewed journals in the field of migration research. Through this overtime analysis, the paper is able to document the variegated interest in studying the subnational level, showing when, where and how the subnational level is studied, and mapping the differences between different world regions. Drawing on those findings, the paper then moves to identifying important gaps in this niche field, and to proposing new avenues for research.