Paradiplomacy

Richard Vengroff - Implementing Immigration Policy

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• published: 06 Feb 2013
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Dr. Richard Vengroff, a political scientist specializing in comparative politics (North America and Africa), comparative electoral systems, development administration and management, did his graduate work at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. He is a recipient of the "Ordre National du Lion" (Senegal's highest civilian honor) for his contributions to higher education and development in that country. Dr. Vengroff has lived and worked overseas for over eight of the last 35 years and has conducted field research and been involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of educational and development projects and numerous exchange and linkage programs around the world. He was the campus project Director for a FIPSE funded North American Mobility Grant (UConn, SUNY, U.Laval, Carleton, U of Monterey), PI for the Canadian I-Poll Project of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and a participant in a USIS funded NAFTA faculty exchange research program (University of Calgary). Dr. Vengroff has participated in linkage projects in Estonia, Venezuela, Chile, and Hungary. He has also served as team leader and PI on numerous multi-million dollar AID funded projects in sub-Saharan Africa. 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. In this paper we employ an inductive most different systems approach, initially using case studies of Quebec and Georgia to capture some of the broad range of variation in immigration policy between these units. Immigration policies in Flanders, Scotland and Catalonia are included to provide additional insights. The next step will be to use these indicators to provide a clearer picture of the diversity of immigration policies being applied throughout North America and the success of those programs.