The modern complexity of immigration makes a volume like Understanding Global Migration a welcomed treasure. The editors, James F. Hollifield and Neil Foley, echo Katherine H. Tennis (Outsourcing Control: The Politics of International Migration Cooperation, 2020) when they note that today “it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for states to manage or control migration unilaterally or even bilaterally” (p. 10). As Audie Klotz notes, migrants enter and exit borders continually in the global era, and “these patterns of migration … challenge conventional dichotomous labels of … receiving/sending states” (p. 31). Therefore, an opportunity is undoubtedly available to attempt to make these trends more comprehensible. Towards this timely mission, the co-editors adeptly assemble a diverse interdisciplinary team of outstanding migration scholars to speak directly to the book’s major assumptions and to each other about the varieties of migration. The nineteen chapters consist of original, in-depth case studies with robust empirical data that offer a coherent and comprehensive portrait of global migration across the world’s regions over time.

The book’s impressive collection of separate essays goes well beyond descriptive analysis, and is substantially enhanced by Hollifield and Foley’s insistence on conceptual discipline around a set of common questions. Specifically, can states manage the cross-cutting pressures of “controlling their borders” in a global era? Why do states differ from each other and over time in their approaches to migration regulation? The editors have skillfully streamlined a vast amount of diverse (and original) case studies around one of the most significant academic polemics generated by Hollifield himself in the early 1990s, with his landmark book Immigration, Markets, and States (1992). Applying Hollifield’s long-standing theory of the liberal paradox “between economic openness and political closure” (p. 17) to a wide range of countries, Understanding Global Migration organizes and tests their assumptions about the nature and capacity of states to govern migration through the lens of a ‘migration state’ (see James Hollifield,“The Emerging Migration State,” International Migration Review 38 [2004]: 885-912)—one they explicitly describe to emerge in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, akin to Richard Rosecrance’s trading state of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, driven by economic considerations (The Rise of the Trading State, 1986).

Driven by an inductive conceptual framework of the contemporary migration state, which envisions migration control as core to state function and “vital for national development” (p. 3), the book offers a clear set of propositions that are testable empirically and longitudinally over the rich swathe of cases brought to bear. Spelled out in the Introductory chapter by Hollifield and Foley, this driving logic is based on the predominant type (e.g., garrison, trading, migration) and function of the state in informing migration outcomes. It is premised on five tenets for “understanding global migration.” Specifically, it asserts that the phenomenon: 1) is dictated by the state (i.e., “the state matters”); 2) is historically and comparatively conditioned; 3) is constrained by human rights considerations; 4) leads to greater interdependence; and 5) is positively correlated to economic and human development. Although open to some further qualifications and refining, these five propositions informing Hollifield and Foley’s theory of the migration state are largely compelling and useful.

Regardless of theoretical persuasion about the nature of the ‘migration state’ -- “by definition a liberal” one according to Hollifield (p. 433) -- this framework helps logically organize the book into sections dedicated to Africa, the Middle East and the “Postcolonial” Migration State; Asia and the “Developmental” Migration State’; the Americas, the “Liberal” and Settler Migration States; and Europe, Turkey and the Liberal and “Postimperial” Migration State. This structure refreshingly moves away from the traditional Eurocentric or Western emphases prevailing in the literature heretofore. Uniquely included in this global survey of migration are thought-provoking analyses on some of the most understudied but critical geographical regions of migration today, for example, in the Arab Gulf (Thiollet), Middle East (Tsourapas), North and West Africa (Charbin), Turkey (Adamson), and Southern Africa (Klotz). The individual chapters are not only brimming with detailed precision and nuanced expert observations, but they offer the reader a clear opportunity to assess each empirical case against the editors’ specific analytical framework.

The concise layout of the cases along the typology of states offers a constructive set of talking points, even if at times it risks oversimplification. The editors first proposition, that “the state matters” (p.3), is not a trivial point but warrants some further unpacking in order to avoid a straw-man thesis. Who is the state and how does the state matter? The role of non-state actors, noted by several contributors, suggests that liberal states can leverage a group of private, local, international actors to redress the paradox, and rebalance the equilibrium closer to national interests. Far from undermining the state, these actors have invariably been subsumed or enlisted by it, as in public-private corporatist arrangements of the kafala system in the Gulf region (Thiollet, p. 67), as soft power of diasporas in the Middle East (Tsourapas, p. 85) and Turkey (Adamson, p. 368, p. 380) or as brokers and employers in Southeast Asia (Hirschman, p. 171), and East Asia’s industrial trainee programs (Chung, p. 137).

If, as well documented throughout the text, the migration state can respond to a liberal or illiberal paradox, then what is the value added of the concept, beyond its sine qua non of regulating borders? One may remain somewhat agnostic about the barometer of the migration state, given an uncertainty about what would be its counterfactual. Furthermore, without clear measures of policy goals, it is difficult to infer whether a migration state reconciles the needs of democracy (its peoples) and capitalism (its markets) by ensuring access to migration flows and rights, or has the self-determined sovereign capacity to limit or achieve ‘zero migration.’ Managing immigration requires compromises or trade-offs between diametrically opposed approaches over time. Furthermore, as Adamson notes, we need to understand how “migration management works in contexts beyond liberal democracies in Europe and North America” (p. 367). The notion of management, like “migration governance” as Geddes (p. 461) aptly describes it, locates the state within a multi-level system, and places the European Union as well as the regional economic regimes in South America and North America discussed by Gomes and Martin, respectively, into a more methodical comparative framework.

Relatedly, the editors’ wise appeal to comparative and historical contexts in their second proposition is prudent, though the conceptual markers of transition remain somewhat vague. Beyond the descriptive claims, it is difficult to precisely pinpoint where the migration state begins and ends, when it becomes the garrison or trading state, and why the illiberal post-colonial migration states begin to resemble the “liberal settler” or “postimperial” ones over time. The informative chapters on the developing migration states in East Asia (Chung), Southeast Asia (Hirschman), and India (Saddiq), like the highly detailed historical analyses of the “settler” American state (Tichenor; Foley) and Canadian cases (Triadafilopoulos and Taylor) cogently capture the “path dependent” trajectory of nation-state formation in explaining contemporary migration dynamics. Clearly, the dissolution of imperial states or colonial states, and the establishment of citizenship rules in the aftermath of “exogenous shocks” (Lucassen, p. 395) highlights the critical import of demographic considerations (Hirschman, p. 155), as well as nationality and citizenship goals (Tichenor). These core demographic and cultural interests are much more important than economic considerations, according to Foley, and may explain why “many Americans today live with a sense of cognitive dissonance about who they are” (p. 233).

These conclusions suggest that the priorities of states in reconciling their liberal paradox are largely determined by their timing and approaches to national integration. In this respect, the migration state framework may gainfully borrow from Aristide Zolberg’s diachronic perspective of migration regulation (“Patterns of International Migration Policy: A Diachronic Comparison,” in Minorities: Community and Identity [1983], ed. C. Fried, pp. 229-246). In contrast to a chronological sequence presented by the editors vis à vis migration control, Zolberg’s envisages state policies to be embedded in a world order that is historically conditioned by demographic exigencies and nation-state building. In this diachronic interpretation of migration regulation, the emphasis on functional levels of national development offers migration scholars the opportunity to compare the independent stages of each state’s migration experience, and to identify some key similarities between post-colonial states with liberal migration or post-imperial states as they are constrained by a new global anarchy in the post-Cold War period. In this sense, the differences between imperial, colonial, developing, or settler states in resolving their migration goals are less about the nature of the state, and more about the experiences of the national state (Tichenor, 213). As prominent scholars like Rogers Brubaker have argued about citizenship regimes, significant comparative differences stem from the historical experiences and causal direction of nation – state formation (i.e., did the nation/s form the state or vice-versa?; see Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, 1992). Perhaps the inclusion of such cases as Israel or Russia in the book’s survey, would highlight the indispensable role of demographic considerations—a critical variable currently missing in the book’s four-dimensional migration matrix of economics, rights, culture, and security (see figure 1.2).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to validate the editors’ third set of assumptions that human rights are central to the migration state in the post-1945 period. Given the “exceptional” pauses in migration and asylum during the protracted COVID period and beyond (e.g., Article 42 in the United States), Chung’s assertion that “sweeping immigration restrictions … and the corrosion of … protections for migrant, refugees, and displaced populations” now exist “in almost every country of the world” (p.147) is undeniable. Rights-based considerations seem to be substantially dwarfed compared to security concerns even in the most seemingly liberal migration states of North America. Hazan’s description of the growth of Mexico’s detention centers, as a result of pressures from North and Central American states, as well as breaches in family reunification practices, bolstered by massive family separation policies, and draconian deportation cases without due process (pp. 317-18) in the United States, bespeak more of humanitarian crises than the sanctity of human rights.

In the same rights-compromising spirit, the resurrection of national borders among the European Union Schengen member-states of late accurately “demonstrates limits on the reach of EU powers,” as Geddes astutely notes (p. 465). Such backsliding by member states over relocation of asylum applicants during the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe undoubtedly questions how far the so-called migration state has come from the so-called garrison state, privileging security functions at the expense of rights and economic interests. Here, the editors may be open to reconsidering the historical specificity of the migration state, as Hollifield in his solo chapter on Europe claims that “regional integration reinforces the trading state and acts as a midwife for the migration state” (p. 435).

The ubiquitous assumption of a global order that differentiates post-World War II and contemporary migration from the earlier periods of a garrison state also overlooks a dramatic shift already distinguishing today’s migration control dynamics. Hollifield and Foley tentatively allude to this development. They claim that “the COVID-19 pandemic calls these liberal trends into question, changing the trade-offs involved in managing migration and mobility, as states move to close their borders, to stop mobility in its tracks to tighten migration and citizenships policies, and to roll back the rights of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers” (p. 6). The editors admit that “these developments are the biggest challenge to the international liberal’ order since the 1930s, and the Second World War” (p. 6). While these public health challenges associated with international human mobility are correctly identified as palpable “threats to the security of states” (p. 6), they undermine the dramatic global geo-political transformations wrought by the fall of the Iron Curtain since the end of the Cold War.

Though Hollifield and Foley consistently acknowledge the changing prospects triggered by the COVID public health crisis, they seem to underestimate the critical juncture of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (and others), which formally elevated migration control to national security, cemented the global war on terror, and paved the way for some of the most restrictive regimes in modern history. A clarification of “normal times” (p. 9) therefore would provide more direction than the perhaps not coincidental claims made about migration states up until the 1990s, when Hollifield’s first groundbreaking book first appeared.

Indeed, the type of a liberal post-imperial or post-colonial world that emerged within the confines of embedded liberalism of the post-World War II period had notably changed by the end of the Cold War. Institutionally consolidated by the aftershocks of September 11, regulatory cooperation around protectionism features more like embedded securitism today than embedded liberalism. These developments are bolstered by Tichenor’s conclusions that American state capacities to restrict the entry and rights of immigrants have grown significantly towards a “national security state” (p. 229). To this point, Lucassen’s historical analysis boldly (and correctly) argues that “the migration state” that is posited by the editors has analytical utility only until the 1990s, when security and culture superseded rights and markets in determining policy (p. 409). This temporal re-reading is important, as it raises questions about the nature of globalization itself. That is, to what degree does the global order of interdependence that the editors aptly describe offer different states an opportunity to stem migration rather than constrain it or “unilaterally” limit states from controlling their borders? Since control does not necessarily happen at borders, as Klotz (p. 32) importantly notes, one can infer from the excellent documentation of the authors that social actors, private and public institutions like employers, recruiters, business (Klotz, p. 66-67), or international nonstate actors (Tsourapas, p. 93) relied on remote control (Tichenor, p. 206), well before the post-World War II period, to “limit immigration when it was especially motivated.” As Sadiq concludes from his analysis of India’s developing migration state, the resolution to the liberal paradox across the board is trumped by concerns over national security. Given the security dictates of the post-Cold War period, globalization can empower the state by enlisting a slew of gatekeepers to share the liability and costs of control (see Lahav and Messina, Immigration, Security and the Liberal State: the Politics of Migration Regulation in Europe and the United States, 2023).

Finally, the editors’ assumption that migration promotes greater interdependence is a valuable reminder for students of IR. States can use migration tools to penetrate or influence other states, either through diasporas (as well captured by Adamson’s chapter on Turkey and the EU), or in other regional economic regimes like Mercosur or NAFTA and CAFTA-DR (detailed by Gomes and Martin, respectively). While these “neighborhood” arrangements illuminate the critical transnational effects of migration policy decisions, they also beckon researchers to consider the myriad ways that globalization can stem mobility and enhance state control, to satisfy national publics and especially backlash. According to Tsourapas, the interconnected nature of the modern world has not only benefited democracies, but now authoritarian states in the Middle East, for example, have developed innovative tools to extend their influence (p. 89). Adamson makes similar observations about migration governance in her insightful description of Turkey’s strategy of “leveraging the diaspora as a resource that could be utilized as a tool of state economic and lobbying power in order to increase Turkey’s presence and influence in Europe” (p. 374), and to decrease (or silence) protest at home. Clearly, the changes wrought about by migration itself have altered “the political landscape of liberal-democratic states” as well (Triadafilopoulos and Taylor, p. 293).

On the whole, these critiques do not reduce the significance of this volume in advancing a serious cross-national project with bold claims that have been admirably open to each contributors’ rejection or correction. To the contrary, the book promises to generate a vibrant discussion which will engage scholars of migration for generations to come. The rich details of individual cases coupled with an accessible theoretical framework makes this co-edited volume a uniquely valuable resource for political scientists and IR specialists, whose agenda Tsourapas perceptively notes, has been long neglected (p. 81). But it is an indispensable read for all students of migration and human mobility, as well as for those interested in the nature of the state in a global order. Understanding Global Migration is at its best when it highlights the vast and intricate diversity of experiences historically though, as suggested by some authors, the overarching concepts the editors advocate may be of only limited analytical utility in simplifying this diversity of experience. Ultimately, the difficulty of bringing all migration experiences from around the world into a coherent framework is a monumental task. Understanding Global Migration succeeds in most respects, even if not completely satisfying those scholars whose normative interpretations of the state in a global age are based more on its reinvention of secure borders and its retreat from human rights.

We live in a time when the immigration policy equation relies on a delicate balance between rights, markets, security demographic, and cultural preservation. Managing migration in a post-Cold War era of heightened physical insecurity therefore can be facilitated by globalization, and promote protectionist state capacities through surveillance technologies, information systems, and new actors, whose incentives to sort human mobility add a new dimension to the security-based coalitions that may also maximize control. In this case, “switching cause and effect” as Klotz (p. 32) wisely muses may mean that Hollifield and Foley’s formula and variables (e.g., markets, rights, culture, security) remain the same, while the weight of the variables change.