Despite the centrality of the state to the nature and forms of international migration, it has often been overlooked and under theorised in empirical migration research. When ‘the state’ does feature it is often treated as monolithic, intervening from somewhere outside of ‘society’. James Hampshire's book The Politics of Immigration: Contradictions of the Liberal State pays heed to ‘the now familiar (but still sometimes inadequately realized) injunction to ‘bring the state back in’, and he does so in a way that is both analytically clear and nuanced. Hampshire distinguishes between four constituent features of liberal statehood: representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism and nationhood. These features, he argues, produce different and contradictory pressures with regard to immigration. Crudely, capitalism and constitutionalism tend towards encouraging openness, and democracy and nationhood towards closure. Thus for governments the intractability of immigration policy, the difficulty of getting it right, springs not from poor governance but from the contradictory imperatives of the liberal state. This approach enables him to present an analytical framework that is sensitive to different institutions and histories and enables comparison between states. While his focus is on liberal democratic states, it is not exclusively so. From Syria to Mali, Ukraine to Spain, Hampshire effortlessly manages his examples and case studies. The breadth of coverage is not only geographical, he gives excellent outlines of the arguments of some of the key thinkers in the field, including Christian Joppke, Marc Howard, Gary Freeman and Saskia Sassen. Students who are new to migration studies will find this book an excellent place to start.

Hampshire is clear that immigration dilemmas are not only about numbers (entry controls) but also about rights (post entry controls); however, the openness/closure frame inevitably tends towards a focus on the former. His treatment of migrant stocks is largely restricted to questions of integration and citizenship, that is to migrants who are settled and typically no longer subject to most forms of immigration controls. This means that some important considerations fall out of the picture. For example, while it is true that in general capitalist labour markets tend to favour openness to migrant labour, when it comes to the low waged labour market the comparative advantage of migrants is often precisely that they are subject to immigration controls and do not have the same labour rights as nationals. That is, openness and restriction are not mutually exclusive. Migrant workers, particularly if they are on time-limited visas do not have access to welfare benefit safety nets, they often are not free to change employers or type of employment, and the possibility of visa renewals is dependent on the goodwill of their employer. Documented or undocumented, migrants are subject to heavy constraints. Scarcely surprising then that employers think that foreign workers work harder. Thus putting the state back in means moving beyond seeing immigration controls as simply an on–off switch, but as constitutive of certain types of relations. The openness that is promoted by capitalist employers is a very particular type of openness.

When it comes to democratic pressures for closure The Politics of Immigration: Contradictions of the Liberal State makes the important point that national identity and ‘culture’ are critical elements of anxiety about immigration. But while the anxiety is about the community of ‘us’, it is important to note that these concerns are freighted with assumptions about ‘them’. In the UK at least, the ‘them’ that the polled public is so worried about are very particular types of migrants. ‘They’ are not students, or the highly paid, but rather asylum seekers, low-skilled workers and ‘illegal immigrants’. In short, these anxieties are anxieties about the poor. Hampshire indicates that governments and media do not simply respond to public concerns but actively engage with them and this argument is particularly relevant in the current climate, where hostility to migrants can serve to drown out other social concerns – the problems of welfare, housing and health for example are increasingly treated as matters of ‘unfair’ access to services by foreigners, rather than a crisis for nationals. That is, anxiety about immigration can serve important political purposes that reach beyond immigration.

Given the breadth of its coverage, it seems unfair to ask for more, but there are two areas which the book ignores and which surely deserve a mention. The first is the silence on gender. So while for example he acknowledges the critiques of Marshall, the feminist critiques of Marshall are ignored. While sometimes weak on the state, the study of migration has demonstrated how migration governance and citizenship are heavily inflected by gender, and the implications and fallacies that are concomitant on the abstractions of ‘the migrant’. The second is the question of scale. From the beginning of British polling on the matter, an overwhelming majority of the public has believed that there are ‘too many’ migrants in the UK. Notably however these are not anxieties about migrants at the level of the neighbourhood but at the level of the nation. The city is emerging as a key social space of migrant politics, and in the liberal democracies we find tensions between openness and closure are experienced very differently.