Antje Ellermann
Biographic Data
| ID | 128156 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Antje Ellermann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Antje |
| FAMILY NAME | Ellermann |
| SIGNATURE | ELLERMANN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6701-9051 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 393 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Making immigrants into settlers
This article examines Canadian citizenship guides as state pedagogies that socialize immigrants into a white settler colonial common sense of land, sovereignty, and belonging. Through a critical content analysis of seven federal guides published since 1947 and the 2020 Canadian Orientation Abroad (COA) guide for refugees, as well as interviews with civil servants and personnel involved in their production, we trace how these texts narrate Indigen…
Performing for multiple audiences
Immigration bureaucracies play a central role in immigration governance, yet how they seek to demonstrate accountability beyond formal political oversight remains underexplored. Operating at the intersection of politically sensitive policy domains, non-citizen service provision, and competing demands from multiple societal audiences, immigration departments face distinctive accountability challenges. Comparing Canada, Australia, and the United Ki…
The Education-Immigration Nexus
The Comparative Politics of Immigration
Many governments face similar pressures surrounding the hotly debated topic of immigration. Yet, the disparate ways in which policy makers respond is striking. The Comparative Politics of Immigration explains why democratic governments adopt the immigration policies they do. Through an in-depth study of immigration politics in Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States, Antje Ellermann examines the development of immigration policy from …
Human-capital citizenship and the changing logic of immigrant admissions
As notions of human capital and personal autonomy have become integral to constructions of social membership, we have witnessed the incursion of market mechanisms into many areas of social life. Immigration policy has been no exception to this trend. By tracing policy developments in Canada and Germany, this article examines the extent to which human-capital citizenship has come to shape immigration policy across policy regimes. Examining economi…
Discrimination in migration and citizenship
After decades of scholarly optimism that the immigration reforms that swept across the Global North in the postwar era had ushered in a new age of non-discriminatory migration policy, recent scholarship has challenged this narrative. This Special Issue offers an empirical and normative contribution to this critical turn in migration studies by examining the multiple ways in which immigration and citizenship policy continues to create hierarchies …
The Impermanence of Permanence
This article engages with arguments that contemporary immigration politics is defined by a “loss of settlement” by examining recent developments in Canadian immigration and refugee policy that have made permanent residence less permanent. We suggest that the rise of probationary immigration has been facilitated by horizontal status stratification within groups that were historically marked by relative status equality. In order to examine this cla…
Discrimination and Policies of Immigrant Selection in Liberal States
How should liberal societies select prospective members? A conventional reading of immigration history posits that whereas ascriptive characteristics drove immigration policy in the past, contemporary policy is based on the principle of nondiscrimination. Yet a closer look at the characteristics of those admitted reveals systematic group biases that run counter to liberalism's core moral commitments. This article first discusses liberal states' b…
Do policy legacies matter? Past and present guest worker recruitment in Germany
Immigration policy is shaped by the legacies of the past. Historical legacies create national immigration ideologies that delineate the range of viable policy responses well into the future. Is it the case, then, that policy choices must conform to an immigration ideology even long after its emergence? What is the scope for meaningful policy choice within a legacy's substantive bounds? This article examines the relationship between Germany's lega…
The Rule of Law and the Right to Stay
What moral claims do undocumented immigrants have to membership? Joseph Carens has argued that illegal migrants with long-term residence have a claim to national membership because they already are de facto members of local communities. This article builds on the linkage between illegality, residence, and rights, but shifts the focus from the migrant to the state, and from membership-based arguments to the rule of law. I argue that the rule of la…
When Can Liberal States Avoid Unwanted Immigration? Self-Limited Sovereignty and Guest Worker Recruitment in Switzerland and Germany
Advanced democracies, it is commonly argued, are unable to prevent unwanted immigration because their sovereignty is “self-limited” by virtue of their normative, legal, and economic liberalism. This article challenges this claim by examining a critical test case that is at the heart of self-limited sovereignty arguments: guest worker recruitment in postwar Switzerland and West Germany. The author shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the u…
Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the Liberal State
This article explores the possibility of resistance under conditions of extreme state power in liberal democracies. It examines the strategies of migrants without legal status who, when threatened with one of the most awesome powers of the liberal state-expulsion-shed their legal identity in order to escape the state's reach. Remarkably, in doing so, they often succeed in preventing the state from exercising its sovereign powers. The article argu…
States Against Migrants
In this comparative study of the contemporary politics of deportation in Germany and the United States, Antje Ellermann analyzes the capacity of the liberal democratic state to control individuals within its borders. The book grapples with the question of why, in the 1990s, Germany responded to vociferous public demands for stricter immigration control by passing and implementing far-reaching policy reforms, while the United States failed to effe…
The Limits of Unilateral Migration Control
Despite the recent proliferation of policy initiatives designed to curb illegal immigration, advanced industrialized states have made little headway towards the goal of effective migration control. Examining the case of deportation in Germany and the European Union, this article contends that one of the most fundamental reasons underlying this failure is a unilateral policy bias that fails to take into account two related conditions. First, polic…
Street-level democracy
It is commonly argued that immigration policies in advanced democracies are consistently more liberal than the restrictionist preferences of publics. This study challenges this view by examining the opinion–policy relationship at the stage of policy implementation, rather than legislative choice. Bureaucrats, in fact, regularly encounter local publics who are opposed to the strict enforcement of migration control measures. These pressures, it is …
Coercive Capacity and The Politics of Implementation
Why are some bureaucracies in highly coercive policy fields able successfully to implement controversial policies whereas others bow to political opposition? This article challenges the common argument, based on a principal-agent model, that bureaucratic nonimplementation is the result of the absence of effective legislative oversight. Instead, the article argues that in coercive policy fields where the state imposes significant costs on its targ…
Discrimination in migration and citizenship
After decades of scholarly optimism that the immigration reforms that swept across the Global North in the postwar era had ushered in a new age of non-discriminatory migration policy, recent scholarship has challenged this narrative. This Special Issue offers an empirical and normative contribution to this critical turn in migration studies by examining the multiple ways in which immigration and citizenship policy continues to create hierarchies …
Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the Liberal State
This article explores the possibility of resistance under conditions of extreme state power in liberal democracies. It examines the strategies of migrants without legal status who, when threatened with one of the most awesome powers of the liberal state-expulsion-shed their legal identity in order to escape the state's reach. Remarkably, in doing so, they often succeed in preventing the state from exercising its sovereign powers. The article argu…
Street-level democracy
It is commonly argued that immigration policies in advanced democracies are consistently more liberal than the restrictionist preferences of publics. This study challenges this view by examining the opinion–policy relationship at the stage of policy implementation, rather than legislative choice. Bureaucrats, in fact, regularly encounter local publics who are opposed to the strict enforcement of migration control measures. These pressures, it is …
The Limits of Unilateral Migration Control
Despite the recent proliferation of policy initiatives designed to curb illegal immigration, advanced industrialized states have made little headway towards the goal of effective migration control. Examining the case of deportation in Germany and the European Union, this article contends that one of the most fundamental reasons underlying this failure is a unilateral policy bias that fails to take into account two related conditions. First, polic…
Coercive Capacity and The Politics of Implementation
Why are some bureaucracies in highly coercive policy fields able successfully to implement controversial policies whereas others bow to political opposition? This article challenges the common argument, based on a principal-agent model, that bureaucratic nonimplementation is the result of the absence of effective legislative oversight. Instead, the article argues that in coercive policy fields where the state imposes significant costs on its targ…
Human-capital citizenship and the changing logic of immigrant admissions
As notions of human capital and personal autonomy have become integral to constructions of social membership, we have witnessed the incursion of market mechanisms into many areas of social life. Immigration policy has been no exception to this trend. By tracing policy developments in Canada and Germany, this article examines the extent to which human-capital citizenship has come to shape immigration policy across policy regimes. Examining economi…
Discrimination and Policies of Immigrant Selection in Liberal States
How should liberal societies select prospective members? A conventional reading of immigration history posits that whereas ascriptive characteristics drove immigration policy in the past, contemporary policy is based on the principle of nondiscrimination. Yet a closer look at the characteristics of those admitted reveals systematic group biases that run counter to liberalism's core moral commitments. This article first discusses liberal states' b…
When Can Liberal States Avoid Unwanted Immigration? Self-Limited Sovereignty and Guest Worker Recruitment in Switzerland and Germany
Advanced democracies, it is commonly argued, are unable to prevent unwanted immigration because their sovereignty is “self-limited” by virtue of their normative, legal, and economic liberalism. This article challenges this claim by examining a critical test case that is at the heart of self-limited sovereignty arguments: guest worker recruitment in postwar Switzerland and West Germany. The author shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the u…
The Rule of Law and the Right to Stay
What moral claims do undocumented immigrants have to membership? Joseph Carens has argued that illegal migrants with long-term residence have a claim to national membership because they already are de facto members of local communities. This article builds on the linkage between illegality, residence, and rights, but shifts the focus from the migrant to the state, and from membership-based arguments to the rule of law. I argue that the rule of la…
The Impermanence of Permanence
This article engages with arguments that contemporary immigration politics is defined by a “loss of settlement” by examining recent developments in Canadian immigration and refugee policy that have made permanent residence less permanent. We suggest that the rise of probationary immigration has been facilitated by horizontal status stratification within groups that were historically marked by relative status equality. In order to examine this cla…
Do policy legacies matter? Past and present guest worker recruitment in Germany
Immigration policy is shaped by the legacies of the past. Historical legacies create national immigration ideologies that delineate the range of viable policy responses well into the future. Is it the case, then, that policy choices must conform to an immigration ideology even long after its emergence? What is the scope for meaningful policy choice within a legacy's substantive bounds? This article examines the relationship between Germany's lega…
Coercive Capacity and The Politics of Implementation
Why are some bureaucracies in highly coercive policy fields able successfully to implement controversial policies whereas others bow to political opposition? This article challenges the common argument, based on a principal-agent model, that bureaucratic nonimplementation is the result of the absence of effective legislative oversight. Instead, the article argues that in coercive policy fields where the state imposes significant costs on its targ…
Street-level democracy
It is commonly argued that immigration policies in advanced democracies are consistently more liberal than the restrictionist preferences of publics. This study challenges this view by examining the opinion–policy relationship at the stage of policy implementation, rather than legislative choice. Bureaucrats, in fact, regularly encounter local publics who are opposed to the strict enforcement of migration control measures. These pressures, it is …
The Limits of Unilateral Migration Control
Despite the recent proliferation of policy initiatives designed to curb illegal immigration, advanced industrialized states have made little headway towards the goal of effective migration control. Examining the case of deportation in Germany and the European Union, this article contends that one of the most fundamental reasons underlying this failure is a unilateral policy bias that fails to take into account two related conditions. First, polic…
States Against Migrants
In this comparative study of the contemporary politics of deportation in Germany and the United States, Antje Ellermann analyzes the capacity of the liberal democratic state to control individuals within its borders. The book grapples with the question of why, in the 1990s, Germany responded to vociferous public demands for stricter immigration control by passing and implementing far-reaching policy reforms, while the United States failed to effe…
Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the Liberal State
This article explores the possibility of resistance under conditions of extreme state power in liberal democracies. It examines the strategies of migrants without legal status who, when threatened with one of the most awesome powers of the liberal state-expulsion-shed their legal identity in order to escape the state's reach. Remarkably, in doing so, they often succeed in preventing the state from exercising its sovereign powers. The article argu…
When Can Liberal States Avoid Unwanted Immigration? Self-Limited Sovereignty and Guest Worker Recruitment in Switzerland and Germany
Advanced democracies, it is commonly argued, are unable to prevent unwanted immigration because their sovereignty is “self-limited” by virtue of their normative, legal, and economic liberalism. This article challenges this claim by examining a critical test case that is at the heart of self-limited sovereignty arguments: guest worker recruitment in postwar Switzerland and West Germany. The author shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the u…
The Rule of Law and the Right to Stay
What moral claims do undocumented immigrants have to membership? Joseph Carens has argued that illegal migrants with long-term residence have a claim to national membership because they already are de facto members of local communities. This article builds on the linkage between illegality, residence, and rights, but shifts the focus from the migrant to the state, and from membership-based arguments to the rule of law. I argue that the rule of la…
Do policy legacies matter? Past and present guest worker recruitment in Germany
Immigration policy is shaped by the legacies of the past. Historical legacies create national immigration ideologies that delineate the range of viable policy responses well into the future. Is it the case, then, that policy choices must conform to an immigration ideology even long after its emergence? What is the scope for meaningful policy choice within a legacy's substantive bounds? This article examines the relationship between Germany's lega…
The Impermanence of Permanence
This article engages with arguments that contemporary immigration politics is defined by a “loss of settlement” by examining recent developments in Canadian immigration and refugee policy that have made permanent residence less permanent. We suggest that the rise of probationary immigration has been facilitated by horizontal status stratification within groups that were historically marked by relative status equality. In order to examine this cla…
Discrimination and Policies of Immigrant Selection in Liberal States
How should liberal societies select prospective members? A conventional reading of immigration history posits that whereas ascriptive characteristics drove immigration policy in the past, contemporary policy is based on the principle of nondiscrimination. Yet a closer look at the characteristics of those admitted reveals systematic group biases that run counter to liberalism's core moral commitments. This article first discusses liberal states' b…
Human-capital citizenship and the changing logic of immigrant admissions
As notions of human capital and personal autonomy have become integral to constructions of social membership, we have witnessed the incursion of market mechanisms into many areas of social life. Immigration policy has been no exception to this trend. By tracing policy developments in Canada and Germany, this article examines the extent to which human-capital citizenship has come to shape immigration policy across policy regimes. Examining economi…
Discrimination in migration and citizenship
After decades of scholarly optimism that the immigration reforms that swept across the Global North in the postwar era had ushered in a new age of non-discriminatory migration policy, recent scholarship has challenged this narrative. This Special Issue offers an empirical and normative contribution to this critical turn in migration studies by examining the multiple ways in which immigration and citizenship policy continues to create hierarchies …
The Comparative Politics of Immigration
Many governments face similar pressures surrounding the hotly debated topic of immigration. Yet, the disparate ways in which policy makers respond is striking. The Comparative Politics of Immigration explains why democratic governments adopt the immigration policies they do. Through an in-depth study of immigration politics in Germany, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States, Antje Ellermann examines the development of immigration policy from …
The Education-Immigration Nexus
Making immigrants into settlers
This article examines Canadian citizenship guides as state pedagogies that socialize immigrants into a white settler colonial common sense of land, sovereignty, and belonging. Through a critical content analysis of seven federal guides published since 1947 and the 2020 Canadian Orientation Abroad (COA) guide for refugees, as well as interviews with civil servants and personnel involved in their production, we trace how these texts narrate Indigen…
Performing for multiple audiences
Immigration bureaucracies play a central role in immigration governance, yet how they seek to demonstrate accountability beyond formal political oversight remains underexplored. Operating at the intersection of politically sensitive policy domains, non-citizen service provision, and competing demands from multiple societal audiences, immigration departments face distinctive accountability challenges. Comparing Canada, Australia, and the United Ki…
Immigration (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Immigration policy (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Political economy (9 works)