Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2014. xvi, 260 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8014-5222-2.
Daily headlines from around the world highlight tension and misunderstanding between immigrants and their host communities. Clearly, the challenges faced by the addition of linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious “others” call for policy responses that at least facilitate peaceful coexistence between groups and at best foster meaningful inclusion of immigrants. Deborah J. Milly’s New Policies for New Residents: Immigrants, Advocacy, and Governance in Japan and Beyond is an important contribution to the literature on immigrant integration, providing a new framework for considering the interplay between civil society groups and different levels of government in responding to the challenges created by the reality of immigrant communities.
While the book is focused on the particular case of Japan, it uses a comparative framework to highlight the processes at work in the making of immigrant policy. Milly compares the cases of Japan, Korea, Spain, and Italy to examine how multilevel governance affects the pathways to achieving immigrant policies. The choice of these four cases is inspired; all four countries have relatively recently switched from being emigration countries to “countries of immigration” while experiencing decentralizing trends in governance. In another refreshing departure from much of the work in this field, Milly breaks free from the regional limitations that characterize much of the comparative work on immigration.
Milly is interested in the interaction between advocacy and governance, allowing her to look at the issue from a different perspective than is normally seen in the literature. She categorizes Spain and Japan as examples of “advocacy-promoting governance” models, while considering Italy and Korea as characteristic of “advocacy-reinforcing governance” and “advocacy-integrated governance,” respectively. This conceptual framework, though interesting and instructive, is also a bit unwieldy; is there a more elegant way to conceptualize the role of civil society groups in setting and shaping policy?
While chapter 1 focuses on setting up this conceptual framework, Milly quickly moves on to the meat of the book: the comparative examination of immigrant advocacy and policy making in these four countries. Chapters 2 through 6 offer an in-depth look at how immigrant policy is made in light of different governance models, various stages of devolution, and different strategies used by civil society groups. For example, in Spain, regional governments, like Catalonia’s, have been the primary locus for immigrant support programs and policies in areas like education and housing, generating policy ideas while securing the input of civil society advocates. Milly’s primary case of Japan highlights the ways that local governments in immigrant-receiving regions worked around the significant challenges of national party division, bureaucratic segmentation, and lack of comprehensive immigration reform to respond to housing, education, and health care challenges in their communities. Italy and Korea prove to follow a different path due in part to the existence of national frameworks that include the possibility for lower levels of government (and civil society groups) to play a role in immigrant integration solutions. In areas like housing and healthcare, Italian localities have responded to local challenges of immigrant integration with creative and collaborative solutions that operate within the parameters set by national policy. Likewise, in Korea, the interaction between new laws facilitating collaboration between non-governmental organizations and local governments to respond to immigrant integration needs led to the emergence of support services for foreign workers run by NGOs with government funding. The case studies are the key to illustrating the argument of the book, bringing to life the complex interplay between governance and advocacy that make up the crux of this book’s argument.
The last two chapters of the book contain Milly’s analysis and conclusions about the impact of economic crises on the creation of immigrant policy in these four cases and the implications of these findings for immigrant-receiving communities and countries around the globe. Milly finds that in Japan, as in the other three cases, a downturn in economic conditions does not significantly affect immigrant integration policy, though shifts in public opinion about immigrants may occur. Spain and Japan, the advocacy-reinforcing governance models in Milly’s framework, continued with pre-crisis plans for immigrant support programs while also instituting “assisted return” policies for newly unemployed immigrants. The economic crisis did not result in “assisted return” programs in the Korea and Italy, but was less of a factor than the political changes that had preceded the crisis in those countries.
The implications of this research are interesting for immigrants, immigrant advocacy groups and local governments in immigrant-receiving communities, suggesting that there are ways to use the tools of democracy at both the national and local level to promote inclusion of immigrants in local decision making. While this research demonstrates that there is an opening for civil society groups to play a role in (especially) local government decision making on immigrant policies, one area that is not explored fully here is the possibility that anti-immigrant groups could exploit the same governance structures and pathways to craft policies that move in the opposite direction.
The conclusions presented in this book have potentially far-reaching implications that can help civil society groups to best craft their strategies for promoting conflict-reducing policies and paths for foreign residents’ meaningful inclusion in national communities.
Betsy Brody
Collin College, Plano, USA