Immigration Phobia and the Security Dilemma
Russia, Europe, and the United States

This book shows that 'immigration phobia', or excessive anti-migrant hostility, is widespread globally.

Mikhail A. Alexseev (Author)

9780521849883, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 November 2005

294 pages, 18 tables
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.532 kg

'… What Alexseev has been very successful in doing is - apart from producing an excellently written book - providing scholars of international relations, migratory movements and security studies with a wealth of information and insights onto the deeper patterns behind a sheer incomprehensible logic … ' Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

Immigration phobia is a paradoxical global phenomenon: neither theories that link conflict to symbolic and realistic threats, nor the 'contact hypothesis' can systematically explain intense anti-migrant alarmism and exclusionism toward marginally small migrant minorities. Through a careful comparative study of immigration attitudes in the Russian Far East, the EU, and the United States, this book is the first to demonstrate that concerns about national identity and economic interests associated with migration are themselves ignited by a unique perceptual logic of the security dilemma. Regression analysis and case studies trace support for expulsion of migrants to human yearning for pre-emptive self-defense under uncertainty. Alarmism and hostility arise from ambiguities about immigration consequences and migrants' motivations. Framing migration as a national security problem is therefore logical, but counterproductive. The book instead recommends managing migration through economic incentives and new institutions at the global, national, and local level.

1. Immigration phobia and its paradoxes
2. The immigration security dilemma: anarchy, offensiveness, and 'groupness'
3. The two faces of socioeconomic impact perceptions
4. In the shadow of the 'Asian Balkans': anti-Chinese alarmism and hostility in the Russian Far East
5. Who's behind 'Fortress Europe'? Xenophobia and anti-migrant exclusionism from Dublin to the Danube
6. Los Angeles ablaze: anti-migrant backlashes in the nation of immigrants
7. Immigration and security: how worst-case scenarios become self-fulfilling and what we can do about it.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Comparative politics [JPB], Sociology & anthropology [JH]