Description
The study of global migration governance typically entails practical governance architecture, or the lack thereof. When norms of migration governance are examined, it is usually to account for practical governance. For instance, transnational ideas like ultra-nationalism have been used to explain the migration policies of Donald Trump and Viktor Orban in the United States and Hungary, respectively, while neoliberalism has been associated with migration regimes of Justin Trudeau and David Cameron in Canada and Britain, respectively. Yet, ideologies need not be associated with tangible policies to govern since norms proscribe and prescribe behaviour, and because their constituted attitudes as well as the expressions of these attitudes can shape system / societal outcomes (e.g., shape citizens’ reception of immigrants and immigrant integration) independently of tangible policies. Therefore, with evocative insights from Europe, North America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, this paper argues that three global trends currently anchor the global normative governance of migration, which is increasingly anti-immigrant. First, is the ongoing normative convergence between the global left and right, both of which are increasingly skeptical and cynical about immigration, thereby preventing a viable counter-normative project that anchors pro-immigrant predilections in the contemporary era. Second, is the liberalization of norm production or the fact that an increasingly large number of ‘elite citizens’ are able to condition what people consider as acceptable behaviour, attitudes, or dispositions independently of official policies. Third, is the real-time global diffusion of ideas that facilitates the transfer of ideologies and ideas from one location to both near and very distant places, thereby increasing the scope of whose attitudes can be influenced, from where this could happen, and who has the capacity to do so. Consequently, the paper argues that in the absence, and independently, of tangible governance mechanisms, global ideologies currently govern migration across national borders in contemporary society.
