Search

Despite a rich literature on the factors influencing the public opinion on immigration, less is known about the top-down effects of political parties and policies on the public's preferences in this domain. We analyse in this paper the impact of political parties' positions and of immigration policies on citizens' attitudes toward immigration. We are interested in the effects of public policy understood both in terms of policy regime, that is, country specific regulations on immigration, and policy outcomes, such as the stocks of immigrant population. The results we obtain, based on data covering twenty-three European countries during the period 2002–2011, point to the existence of top-down influences on citizens' immigration attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationships between the migratory policies of the EU countries with more experience of immigration and their national political cultures. It focuses on France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It then looks at Italy, a relatively new country of immigration, which, with 3,000,000 legal immigrants, has become the fourth country of immigration in Europe and the first in the Mediterranean basin. In its final part it highlights the incipient process of 'communitarisation' of the immigration policies of EU countries in the last decade. This process, which has already entailed a significant convergence of their migratory policies, is expected to continue after the recent enlargement of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]