Political Science Speaker Series Lecture: Richard Vengroff

Political Science Speaker Series Lecture:

Implementing Immigration Policy: Provinces and States in Comparative Perspective

 Richard Vengroff
Professor of Political Science, Kennesaw State University
Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut
Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, Carleton University

 Thursday, February 7, 2013 • 2.30 pm • A602 Loeb

Dr. Richard Vengroff, PhD, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, specializes in comparative politics (North America and Africa), comparative electoral systems, development administration and management, He is a recipient of the “Ordre National du Lion” (Senegal) and currently a Fulbright visiting Research Chair at Carleton U. He is the author, of over 100 scholarly publications. His current research is devoted to issues of Canadian and Quebec politics, comparative immigration policy, para-diplomacy, development management, democratic governance, decentralization, and privatization.

Abstract

In recent years immigration policy has become a highly salient issue in most western democracies. Governments and parties in some countries have risen and fallen based on this issue. Both Canada and the United States are actively engaged in attempting to revise their basic immigration policies. Increasingly immigration issues have risen to the fore at the sub-national level as well Involvement by Canadian Provinces, initially Quebec, but now all Provinces and Territories, is longstanding and has been primarily motivated by cultural, linguistic and economic considerations and tends to be pro immigration. The reverse is true in the case of many American states, which participate only in refugee resettlement but not the bulk of immigration. In the last few years states have begun to play a more profound role in this area, culminating in recent restrictive immigration laws in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Utah, Indiana and proposals in other state legislatures.

In fact, immigration policy at the State and Provincial levels appears to be where much of the action is taking place. It is clear that these policies are not uniform, especially within federal countries like the U.S. and Canada. One of the aims of the project of which this paper is a part, is to help identify indicators and patterns, which can be applied to the comparative study of immigration policy in Canadian Provinces, American States and meso-level governmental units around the world more generally. In this paper the author employs an inductive most different systems approach, initially using case studies of Quebec and Georgia to capture some of the broad range of variation in immigration policy between these units. Then these indicators are employed to provide a clearer picture of the diversity of immigration policies being applied throughout North America and the success of those programs.