Attractive States, Desirable Migrants: Examining Immigration Promotion Policies

Political science’s engagement with the study of immigration policies has focused, for the most part, on understanding restrictionism or the processes that led countries to liberalize their treatments of foreigners. Doing so, the discipline’s theories and concepts fail to account for another group of empirical realities: the ways states work to promote themselves as permanent or temporary immigration destinations and facilitate the mobility of immigrants designated as “desirable.” These activities are different from the regulation of labour migration and from the implementation of status allowing third-country nationals to work (e.g. visa or blue card), since they involve the active promotion of opportunities available in a state and they create unique mobility pathways to help “sell” states to a subset of potential immigrants. So far, work considering this dimension of immigration policies and politics lacks unified concepts and theories, rendering comparative work difficult. Foundational work from the discipline has tended to focus on highly privileged or skilled individuals as well as to consider processes by which migrants recruited by states are incorporated, with little attention to how they are recruited in the first place. Moreover, most of the research on immigration promotion and marketing has been produced by geography and sociology, which has reinforced a lack of attention to the role played by states, instead of non-state actors and migration industries. This workshop will take stock of contemporary empirical patterns and contribute to the development of foundational tools for the study of immigration promotion by political science.

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1: What are contemporary ways in which states attempt to promote themselves as immigration destinations?
2: How to theorize the forces driving the development of immigration promotion actions ?
3: Who are the “desirable” immigrants targeted by state promotion, and how such categories have been developed ?
4: What are the political consequences of immigration promotion efforts in receiving and sending countries?
5: How do actors that usually favour immigration restrictionism react to immigration promotion activities ?

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