Is continuing migration to Western Europe a sign that state sovereignty is under siege? The story of postwar migration to Western Europe has been told many times before: After the initial process of invited labor migration in the fifties and sixties, states ended their guest-worker programs but were not able to stop migration itself. On the basis of human rights principles—particularly regarding family reunification and refugee protection, laid down in international conventions and enforced by domestic and European courts—migration not only continued but even increased. Particularly the so-called asylum crises of the 1990s, first in Germany and later in Britain, have left many actors and observers with a stereotypical image of a powerless state facing a world of increased mobility. Domestically, migration is also a cause for social unrest and political opposition and has given populist parties in several countries a fertile ground for electoral gains. This leads to what is often seen as a paradox: While immigration poses a problem for states in terms of societal governance, these states have continued to permit immigration.

Anthony Messina forcefully debunks this stereotypical picture of postwar migration to Western Europe and concludes that “the declining sovereignty thesis is largely exaggerated and unsubstantiated by the facts” (p. 244). By contrast, in the wake of exogenous events, such as the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the ensuing refugee crises, states may have been faced with “order-destabilizing events” but they have also eventually made the necessary policy adjustments, as in the case of the German amendment of the Basic Law in 1992, which allowed for a fast-track asylum procedure and the rejection of manifestly unfounded applications. Moreover, as Messina argues mainly on the basis of the British and German cases, administrations have much more room to control unwanted immigration, and constitutional and judicial constraints can be more easily circumvented than is often assumed to be the case within the so-called liberal state thesis. Finally, when looking at the role of the European Union, states may cede some decision-making power to supranational institutions, but only as much “as is necessary to achieve the policy objectives they cannot otherwise accomplish by acting unilaterally” (pp. 238–39).

This book is important because of its comprehension, empirical richness and theoretical depth. There is no comparable single volume that comes close to presenting a comprehensive account of 60 years of immigration politics in Western Europe, including policy development at the level of the European Union, with the same richness of empirical material and depth of analysis. Too often work in this field is either of a descriptive, legal, or historical nature, and thus merely informative rather than analytical. Or it is of a normative and critical nature, which makes academic debate sometimes look more like an exchange of worldviews than a critical discussion of empirically testable propositions. Messina, by contrast, presents us with a wealth of empirical puzzles, alternative theories, and empirical material that often partially supports, but also partially undermines, existing explanations.

In fact, if one shortcoming would have to be mentioned, it would be that there are probably too many debates that the book aims to address. This is a problem, not so much because Messina's views on some problems are more convincing than on others but, first of all, because the core puzzle of the book (why states have accepted immigration) would have deserved further elaboration. For example, at the theoretical level, the author nicely presents some existing accounts (in the Introduction and in Chapter 4), but then fails to set out a more synthetic account that can be tested empirically. By implication, the conclusion of the British and German case study on immigration and state sovereignty—arguably the core of the book—remains limited to a somewhat disappointing review of the shortcomings of these existing explanations. Insofar as there is a more positive account—and although not presented very elaborately there clearly is one—Messina's argument that “it is politics” (p. 11), rather than economics, humanitarian concerns, or external pressures, remains undertheorized and never fully avoids the appearance of being tautological (political decisions that are political).

Chapter 3 on the growth of anti-immigrant parties and how to assess its implications stands out, not only because it distracts somewhat from the overall argument but also because the analysis as presented is not very convincing. The distinction between objective and subjective opposition to immigration, where Messina draws on work by Rachel Gibson, is unclear and problematic (where do objective concerns change into subjective anxieties?), and also not very systematically connected to the five types of anti-immigrant parties that he distinguishes, and the almost 40 selected groups that are presented in Table 3.1 and discussed throughout the chapter. How the central conclusion of this chapter—that only “some” anti-immigrant groups threaten domestic politics “under very specific political circumstances” (p. 95)—contributes to the overall argument of the book remains unclear.

The final word, however, should be one of praise. Not only does the book bring together the work of one expert who has published on the politics of immigration in Europe for more than 20 years, but foremost it is also an ambitious attempt to synthesize some of the key debates in the literature on migration control, anti-immigrant politics, integration problems, and immigrant political participation and to test the empirical validity of some classic notions concerning how states have dealt with these phenomena and why they have done so. It is a major work that will be a standard reference in the coming years.