Racism, migration and the state in Western Europe: a case for comparative analysis

This paper offers a framework for the comparative analysis of international migration into Western Europe since 1945. It identifies "the migration of four analytically distinct categories of person which highlights the role of the state in the reproduction of the imagined community of nations. That role is carried out in the context of a more general process of the regulation of scarcity, in the course of which people are simultaneously included in and excluded from the hierarcy of economic, political and ideological positions in the nation-state. Of special interest is the content of the processes of signification and categorisation that are generated in the inclusionary and exclusionary processes. The countries selected for analysis are France, the Netherlands and Britain."