The Politics of Coalitions for High-Skilled Immigration Policies in Europe and North America.

This paper carries out a comparative analysis of high-skilled immigration (HIS thereafter) policies in advanced industrial countries and seeks to explain differences in countries' policies in terms of openness towards HSI. I take from the traditional partisanship approach that political parties will pursue policies consistent with the preferences of their major constituencies. However, I divide labour into high- and low-skilled workers and capital into high- and low- skilled sectors and propose the following hypotheses. 1) If the constituency of the Left is strong among high-skilled workers, then I expect the Left to be against HSI. If the constituency of the Left is strong among low-skilled workers, then the Left should be guardedly supportive of HSI. 2) If the Right's constituency is made up to a large extent of high-skilled capital (businesses and employers), then I assume that the Right will be more supportive of HSI than the Left.I argue that divergence between advanced industrial countries' HSI policies continues, even if national governments display converging policy goals for more open HSI in order to fill labour market shortages at the high-skilled end. The shift toward greater HSI liberalization is visible in most countries, but it is not going on to the same extent or at the same rate. No consistent HSI position of left and right parties exists cross-nationally because different coalitions between sectors of high-skilled labour, low-skilled labour and high-skilled capital take place. I present several country examples to analyze different HSI outcomes by portraying the preferences of actors that are aggregated in various coalitions and intermediated by different institutional constraints (such as labour market organization and electoral system) across advanced industrial countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]