Julie R. Watts points to what she calls an unlikely alliance: Labor unions and employers, which one might assume are inherently opposed on immigration issues, are actually allied in promoting moderately open immigration policies. Watts unravels this apparent puzzle by looking at three main cases, France, Italy, and Spain, with the United States serving as a secondary case analyzed in the conclusion. Her findings are drawn from union literature, media reporting, and interviews. She argues that globalization has been the main driving force behind the shift in labor-leader attitudes toward immigration, which converge with employer preferences. Globalization, according to Watts, has made immigration inevitable. Greatly improved transportation and communications networks have facilitated the crossborder movement of people while undermining state controls, and economic restructuring has enhanced both the demand for immigrant workers and the incentives to move. Recognizing these new realities, labor leaders have pragmatically chosen to try to protect and work with, rather than reject, immigrants. She then argues that the unlikely alliance that has emerged between labor unions and employers has been a major impetus propelling the emergence of more open immigration policies.

The great merit of this clearly written and refreshingly concise book is that it provides us with one of the only studies that attempts to develop a systematic comparative argument about why unions prefer more open immigration policies. Indeed, the only other comparative book on this topic that I know of is Leah Haus's Unions, Immigration, and Internationalization: Changing Coalitions in the United States and France (2002). Both books, it seems, build on Haus's earlier article “Openings in the Wall: Transnational Migrants, Labor Unions, and U.S. Immigration Policy,” (International Organization 49, [no. 2, 1995]: 285–313).

Immigration Policy and the Challenge of Globalization is most useful for understanding how labor unions think about and deal with the issue of immigration in changing times. The many interviews with labor leaders are particularly illuminating. The book, however, has a number of shortcomings that unfortunately distract from its overall contribution. Some readers may not find the book's main empirical puzzle—labor union support for moderate immigration policies—all that puzzling. Watts tells us that the conventional wisdom is that organized labor opposes immigration, and that her research reveals that the conventional wisdom is wrong (p. 4). However, it is not clear who disagrees with her on this point (and no proponents of the “conventional wisdom” are cited). Least surprised will be knowledgeable observers of European politics, where unions have long been more pro-immigrant than their American counterparts. A more interesting question, touched on too briefly in the book, is why American unions have become more open to immigration later than their counterparts in Western Europe. Watts emphasizes overall convergence in labor union preferences across the cases, but greater variation could have been teased out and explained with a more detailed comparative analysis of the U.S. and European experiences. Some interesting reflections and tentative conclusions on the American case are offered in the final chapter (which substitutes for a real conclusion to the book).

A basic weakness in the book is that the case selection limits the analysis and creates some problems for the argument. A central question that Watts seeks to answer is why labor unions changed from having restrictive to more moderate immigration policy preferences. But continuity more than change is the defining feature of two out of the three main cases examined (Spain and Italy). As is well documented in the book, Spain and Italy developed immigration policies only in the 1980s, and union preference for moderate policies has remained fairly constant since then. In other words, these two cases do not tell us much about changing preferences. In this regard, the French case works much better as a test of the argument. Watts argues that the underlying force driving preference change is “globalization” (which is not explicitly defined, and seems to encompass many independent variables wrapped up into one). One potential problem for this type of argument in the French case is that the initial shift in French union rhetoric and action took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after labor leaders came to recognize the increasingly active and vocal role played by immigrants in the social protests of 1968 (p. 117). Not surprisingly, labor leaders also wanted the state to take the recruitment of immigrant labor away from employers, and to have more direct union oversight of the process (p. 56). It is not sufficiently specified how this directly ties in with a globalization argument, especially since the author dates major economic and technological transformations that are part of globalization as starting later in the decade (p. 6).

Moreover, even if one accepts the argument that globalization is the underlying force driving preference change, it is not always clear how and how much these preferences actually translate into policy change. Although Watts acknowledges that it is impossible to show a direct causal connection, and her cases show varying degrees of complexity, she nevertheless insists that “a pattern of increasing openness in immigration is evident when the immigration preferences of labor leaders are translated into action” (p. 126). The difficulty of more clearly specifying the causal mechanisms makes such a claim problematic. Also, with control over immigration matters moving from the domain of individual states toward intergovernmental and European Union institutions, translating the preferences of national labor unions and employer associations into EU-wide policies becomes even more complex. Watts appropriately devotes a chapter to tracing these important shifts to a wider EU policymaking arena, but the implications for union and employer influence at the EU level is only touched on in a few pages.

The claim that Italy, Spain, and France have embraced moderately open immigration policies is itself overstated and misleading. Watts develops a useful scale to measure various dimensions of immigration policy, which she says demonstrates an overall convergence toward more openness. However, the evidence she presents (nicely summarized in the graphs on pages 34, 42, 50) actually suggests more of a mixed picture than a clear trend. In France, for example, immigration policy is not more open than it was in the early 1980s. And in Italy, the overall openness of immigration policy is about the same as it was in 1991.

Finally, to claim that moderately open immigration policies are being embraced glosses over the harsh reality that for the vast majority of the world's inhabitants, it is extraordinarily difficult to enter Western Europe—legally or illegally, temporarily or permanently. And in some areas of immigration policy, such as the asylum system (which is not measured, even though it has been a mechanism for immigrants to gain access to European labor markets), the trend has been toward much tougher restrictions. It is precisely because the front door remains largely shut, after all, that the smuggling of people in through the back door is such an enormous clandestine business. Watts stresses that states lack the capacity to control immigration. However, lack of political will is also involved, and among the major beneficiaries are employers who often prefer unauthorized workers because they are cheaper, more compliant, easier to dispose of, and harder for unions to organize. And on this difficult issue, labor leaders and employers remain foes more than allies.