Richard Vengroff: Implementing integration policy

The importance of para-diplomacy as a factor in North America's sub-national governments is well established in the literature. These international interactions between provincial, state and municipal governments in Canada and the U.S. include a wide variety of key policy issues such as environmental regulation, trade promotion, cultural and educational exchanges, energy, and many other areas. Increasingly immigration issues have risen to the fore. Involvement by Canadian Provinces, initially Quebec, but now all of the others, is longstanding and has been primarily motivated by cultural, linguistic and economic considerations and tends to be pro immigration. The reverse is true in the case of many American states, which participate only in refugee resettlement but not the bulk of immigration related decisions and policies. In the last few years states have begun to play a more profound role in this area, culminating in recent restrictive immigration laws in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Utah, Indiana and proposals in other state legislatures. The Migration Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) was developed to measure and compare immigration policies at the national level in EU States, plus Norway, Switzerland, the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan. There has been little real comparative data on immigration policy at the State and Provincial levels where much of the action now appears to be taking place. It is clear that these policies are not uniform, especially within federal countries like the U.S., Canada, Germany and Belgium and even some technically unitary states such the Netherlands, Spain and the U.K. One of the aims of the project, of which this paper is a part, is to help identify indicators and patterns like those in MIPEX, which can be applied to the comparative study of immigration policy in Canadian Provinces, American States and meso-level governmental units around the world more generally...Watch here