Dr. Vasquez Looks at Immigration Policy and the European Union

A collaborative study of immigration policy and the European Union involving Dr. Paul Vasquez of the UCF Political Science Department and Drs. Gallya Lahav (State University of New York at Stony Brook) and Anthony Messina (Trinity College) was published (online) this fall by the journal Migration Studies.  Using originally collected survey data from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in 1993 and again in 2004, the authors answered the question posed in the title of their article:  “Were Political Elite Attitudes toward Immigration Securitized after 11 September?”  Despite the tragic events of 9/11, they found that overall those attacks did not substantially affect MEP’s attitudes toward the need or desirability of a common European immigration policy.  Additionally, the authors found that support for a common, supranationally-determined immigration policy resulted from MEP’s perceptions that individual European states were ineffective at dealing with the challenge created by political refugees.

The online version of the article that will appear in print in a forthcoming print special issue of Migration Studies dealing with the topic “Public Attitudes toward Immigration in Turbulent Times” can be found at the following site:  http://migration.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/recent