Immigration Policy at the Subnational Level In North America: Quebec and Georgia In Comparative Perspective

In recent years, interest has grown in the comparative study of immigration. One major effort to lay the groundwork for systematic comparative analysis, the Mi-gration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), was developed by the British Council and the Migration Policy Group. It is designed to measure and compare immigration policies in European Union (EU) member states, plus Norway, Switzerland, the U.S. and Canada (MIPEX, 2010) at the national level.1 That research identifies seven major policy areas: labor market mobility, family reunification, education, political partici-pation, long-term residence, access to nationality, and anti-discrimination. The short-coming of the index is that it fails to take into account the fact that many of those func-tions, especially in terms of implementation, are under the purview of or at least shared with intermediary and local governments and vary significantly between these units in the same country. Increasingly immigration issues have come to the fore in the pub-lic consciousness and among decision-makers at the subnational level throughout Canada, the U.S., Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
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