Regime type, security and the politics of migration

My dissertation deals with questions of war and peace, fills key gaps in our understanding of globalization and clarifies how and why democracy matters. The dissertation consists of three interrelated but self-contained papers on immigration, emigration, and military manpower policymaking, respectively. I propose a parsimonious explanation of the politics of international migration with broad general applicability. My central claim is that dictatorship and large-scale international security threats lead states to adopt permissive immigration and/or restrictive emigration policies. I conduct two kinds of testing: I examine modern data using econometrics and conduct an analysis of macrohistorical trends in immigration and emigration policymaking over the last three hundred years. My argument explains both contemporary cross-national variation in and marcohistorical patterns of migration policy choices. The statistical findings are original due to a lack of large n cross-national work on both immigration and emigration policymaking. The dissertation makes an important original contribution, as the politics of emigration, immigration policymaking under dictatorship and the links between security and migration have been largely ignored. To the extent these issues are studied, the conventional wisdom is that democracies adopt permissive immigration policies and that immigrants are, especially since the attacks of 9/11, regarded as potential security liabilities. My hypotheses challenge these claims.