The Role of Public Opinion in US and Canadian Immigration Policies

Considering that the United States and Canada are neighboring North American countries with fairly similar liberal democratic political cultures, their immigration policies are noticeably different. While US policies prioritize family reunification, Canadian policies favor labor demands and employability. This difference reflects the varying degrees to which the public influences their respective immigration policies. Examining contemporary immigration policies of the United States and Canada, this paper compares the role of public opinion in each, and argues that public opinion plays a more prominent role in immigration policies in the United States than it does in Canada. This observation is due in part to the partisan nature of the US political structure and to the cohesiveness among immigrants, particularly Latinos. Canada, in contrast, favors a policy of multiculturalism that empowers immigrant groups and limits individual groups’ capacity and inclination to dominate policy decisions.     

Pivoting toward Asia: Comparing the Canadian and American Policy Shifts

Both Canada and the United States have “pivoted” toward Asia in their foreign policy over the past decade, although emphases in those pivots differed between the two countries. The former focuses on an economic pivot initially, the latter on a security one. What factors explain these shifts? What was the magnitude of policy change by both? Utilizing some important theoretical works by Charles Hermann, we discuss the factors that appear to have brought about this policy change toward Asia, outline the actions and activities that both countries have initiated toward Asia in the past decade to illustrate the type and magnitude of policy change that has occurred, and compare some areas of political, economic, and military similarities between Canada and the United States toward this region. Finally, we assess the likely future of these pivots to Asia in light of the change in political leadership within both nations.     

Toward an Understanding of Canada’s International Identity

ABSTRACT

This article examines the construction of Canada’s postwar international identity and how that identity continues to influence Canadian foreign policy, especially with the United States. Furthermore, the article illustrates how changes in Canadian policy necessitated by the Trump Administration may impact Canada’s international identity in the future. The article argues Canadian policy makers have consistently constructed an international identity in opposition to the United States and continue to use the US as a reflective tool in shaping their own policy. The first part of the article briefly examines the concept of state identity outlining both type and role variants and their relevance to foreign policy and this is followed in the second part by a discussion of Canada’s postwar international identity.     

Vulnerabilities of Highly Skilled Immigrants in Canada and the United States

Despite similar permanent status immigration categories (Economic, Family, and Refugee), the experiences of skilled immigrants in Canada and the United States are quite different. The point system used to select applicants for the Economic Class in Canada makes skilled immigrants vulnerable to a number of perils after the migrant lands. Foreign credentials and work experience are discounted by Canadian employers, who also impose a discriminatory income penalty on minorities. While previous cohorts of Economic Class migrants may have been warned of these perils via reliable migrant networks, new Canadian research suggests that recent cohorts have no such safety net. This article examines the economic integration experiences of Economic Class migrants in the United States in light of the Canadian experiences. The vulnerabilities reported in Canada do not appear to be transferable to the United States, because immigration policy in the US stresses pre-landing employment commitments via employer sponsorship. Accordingly, prospective Economic Class migrants to the United States do not migrate without first knowing how their credentials and “minority status” will affect employment opportunities. However, for the 85,000 skilled workers admitted to the United States on H-1B temporary visas each year, the perils noted in the Canadian experience are relevant, as are a number of additional concerns.     

Wildfire risk,salience, and housing development in the wildland–urban interface

As wildfires increase in both severity and frequency, understanding the role of risk saliency on human behaviors in the face of fire risks becomes paramount. While research has shown that homebuyers capitalize wildfire risk following a fire, studies of the role that risk saliency plays on residential development is limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the link between wildfire risk saliency and the rate of residential development in wildfire-prone areas, by treating recent wildfires as conditionally exogenous shocks to saliency. Using geospatial data on residential development in Colorado, we show that saliency shocks due to wildfire lead to statistically significant reductions in the rate of new development in wildfire risk zones that last upwards of 5 years, a result that is robust to a number of alternative explanations. We explore the policy implications of these findings, noting that education on fire risks may curtail some but not all of the development in these high wildfire-risk areas due to the rapid growth of development in these regions.     

Comparing Governance and Local Engagement in the St. Marys River Area of Concern

Under the 1987 revisions to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between Canada and the United States, Areas of Concern (AOC) were designated around the Great Lakes to target the remediation of environmental impairments. Local governments have the potential to play an important role in Great Lakes restoration and protection efforts in AOCs, though the scope of their engagement in remediation efforts is not fully understood. This case study investigates the St. Marys River AOC, which spans the border between Canada and the United States. Through the theoretical lens of the ecology of games, the case study explores the strategic choices of local governments to engage in environmental policy networks in Canada and the United States. The case illustrates the importance of intergovernmental aid and collaborative institutions for ongoing environmental remediation efforts and cross-border coordination.     

Incomplete Sovereigns: Unpacking Patterns of Indigenous Self-Governance in the United States and Canada

ABSTRACT

In the early 1970s, both the Canadian and United States federal governments introduced modern land claim agreements as a first step forward in the states’ recognition of Indigenous goals for self-determination. Since then, both the United States and Canadian federal governments have incrementally expanded their recognition of Indigenous rights to include Indigenous goals for political self-determination. Yet, despite the fact that both countries began implementing broadly similar policies at approximately the same time, the degree to which Indigenous political and economic self-determination has been realized varies considerably both within and between the two countries. The variation in Indigenous self-governing power and authority suggests that the policy shift towards Indigenous self-determination is incomplete and has faced important barriers to implementation. This paper investigates two key aspects of this variation in Indigenous self-determination in the United States and Canada: (1) institutional histories embedded in geography, and (2) the temporal nature of policy frameworks. I argue that the full realization of Indigenous self-determination has been shaped in different ways and, ultimately, is limited by the intersection of embedded institutional legacies and federal political dynamics.     

Trumping foreign policy: public diplomacy,framing, and public opinion among middle power publics

Even as the world’s sole superpower, the United States requires the cooperation of other states to achieve many of its foreign policy objectives. The President of the United States thus often serves as ‘Diplomat in Chief’ in public diplomacy efforts to appeal directly to publics abroad. Given Donald Trump’s antagonistic approach to foreign relations and widespread lack of popularity, what are the implications for support for US policy among publics abroad – particularly among middle power states allied to the US? While previous research on public opinion relying on observational data has found that confidence in the US President is linked to support for American foreign policy goals, the mechanisms at work remain unclear. Using original data from survey-based experiments conducted in Canada and Australia, this article seeks to clarify the effect of ‘presidential framing’ (presenting a policy goal as endorsed or not endorsed by Trump) on attitudes toward key policy issues in the Canada–US and Australia–US relationships. Results point to a negative ‘Trump framing’ effect in Canadians’ and Australians’ trade policy attitudes, but such an effect is not observed in other policy domains (energy policy in Canada, and refugee policy in Australia).     

Balancing Preservation and Logging: Public Lands Policy in British Columbia and the Western United States

Both the United States and Canada have made fundamental changes in their policies regarding natural resources. The province of British Columbia made major revisions to its forest policy in the earlyto-mid-1990s; in the western United States, policy efforts have been stymied by conflicts between state and federal officials and between conservationists and resource developers. The different structures of federalism in the two countries result in two different approaches to policymaking that are discussed here. However, the ultimate test of natural resource policy, I argue, should be their consistency with the goal of sustainable ecosystems and preservation of biodiversity. From the perspective of ecological science, neither country has been particularly successful in policymaking for public lands and for logging in particular. Both nations have failed to give priority to protecting old-growth forests and largely have rejected the idea that ancient forests are much more valuable than simply sources of timber     

Urban Indians: Patterns and Transformations

For centuries American Indians have been an object of Western fascination. All too often this fascination has been an invented view of Indian people. This is especially evident with the recent movement of Indians to urban areas within the United States and Canada. Not only has this movement been ignored by society in general but it has also received almost no comment in the geographical literature. In this analysis the complex character of urban Indian communities is sketched, a variety of interpretations of these communities is outlined and the implications for planning and public policy are examined. The recent emergence of Indian organizations provides an innovative alternative for planning and public policy—cultural planning for urban redevelopment.     

Policy Coherence and Component-Driven Policymaking: Arctic Policy in Canada and the United States

This research extends theorizing about the implications of political environments to the content of policy areas. We consider the case of Arctic policy in Canada and the United States as an example of what we label as component-driven policymaking. We show how the lack of a clear constituency and the lack of a stable policy subsystem for the Arctic create a policy environment for which the politics of particular issues dominate Arctic policymaking. The result is a policy space labeled Arctic policy that lacks policy coherence. We suggest that similar features of component-based policymaking help explain limited policy coherence for a variety of policy areas such as policies for children, families, rural areas, urban areas, and women in the United States.     

Federalism and Entrepreneurship: Explaining American and Canadian Innovation in Pollution Prevention and Regulatory Integration

Conventional wisdom provides an increasingly strong endorsement of far-reaching decentralization and delegation of authority to bureaucratic agents as the most likely mechanisms to attain such central environmental policy goals as pollution prevention, cross-media regulatory integration, and development of reliable measures of environmental outcomes. Canada would appear an unusually fertile context for such Innovation, given its far-reaching deference to individual provinces and their environment ministries in environmental policy. Comparative analysis of select sub national governments in Canada and the United States suggests that the states in general are far ahead of their provincial counterparts in most of these areas of innovation. Despite all the opprobrium heaped on the American environmental policy system, a combination of federal policy tools and state policy entrepreneur ship appear to contribute directly to this innovation in some states and are almost completely absent in the Canadian system. These findings suggest a need for careful study of the mix of intergovernmental policy tools and principal-agent relations most likely to realize desired environmental policy goals.     

Public and Private Policy Change: Pension Reform in Four Countries

This article offers a comparative, qualitative analysis of the changing nature of—and relationship between—public and private old age pensions in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Japan. Stressing the impact of institutional legacies on policy change, the article explains why these countries have taken contrasting paths toward the restructuring of public and private pension policies. The study finds that the four countries fall into two distinct clusters. On the one hand are Canada and the United States, which have essentially witnessed policy drift toward a greater reliance on private savings. On the other hand are Britain and Japan, which have reshaped their pension systems largely through legislative revision. The last section explains the differences between and within these two country clusters. The article concludes that institutional forces explain the distinctive policy patterns between the two country clusters but that it is necessary to bring in other factors (i.e., demographic aging, union density, and the role of ideas) to account for differences within each of these clusters.     

Potential Focusing Projects and Policy Change

Why do policies change dramatically? Most prominent theories and many empirical studies of policy change address that question with attention to external shocks to policy systems or focusing events. These shocks or events are usually described as unplanned, unpredicted jolts such as global crises or natural disasters. I assert a role for focusing projects. These planned activities continue traditional priorities in an issue but do so to a degree perceived as excessive by enough people to shatter seemingly stable policy systems. I then propose a theoretical framework to explain the varying impacts from such projects. The framework uses two dimensions: one that accounts for the mobilization of pro‐change forces and one that assesses policy learning by members of pro‐status quo coalitions. I examine this framework in the context of changes to dam‐building policies in four diverse political settings: United States, Australia, Canada, and China. I find intriguing similarities between the focusing projects in these different contexts but also considerable variation in the extent to which they produce policy change.     

American and Canadian Environmental Federalism; A Game-Theoretic Analysis

To understand why environmental federalism is different in Canada and the United States, one might begin with the initial strategic realities that faced the Fathers of Canadian Confederation and the Framers of the Constitution of the United States. This essay examines federalism from a game-theoretic point of view, to integrate and expose the rational properties of the decision to federate and the logical entailments of that choice for environmental policy within two specific strategic contexts. Specifically, I suggest that American environmental federalism has arisen in response to the strategic reality of a Prisoner's Dilemma, while Canadian environmental federalism can be analyzed as an effort to regulate confrontations within a game of Chicken. In addition to the analysis of each federated structure, evidence from five case studies demonstrates the usefulness of games to the study of comparative federalism     

Trade and culture: the ongoing debate

ABSTRACT

The debate over how to reconcile trade liberalization with cultural policy is a long-standing one. There is great variation in how countries have navigated this debate. Furthermore, evolving individual policy approaches show noteworthy dynamism, largely in response to domestic politics, shifts in the international trading system and technological developments. This special issue explores different approaches to the trade and culture debate across geographic space, as well as the evolution across time through analysis of six cases – Canada, the European Union, South Africa, Latin America, the United States and China.     

The collapse of British foreign policy

British foreign policy has tried to balance between the United States and continental Europe for the past half-century, with an unambiguous commitment to a special relationship with Washington and an ambiguous commitment to European integration. New Labour has followed its predecessors in this, claiming that Britain can act as a bridge between America and Europe, or as a pivot around which transatlantic relations turn. In the wake of the Iraq war, deepened scepticism in Washington about whether close European cooperation is in America's interest, and scepticism across continental Europe that Britain can or should act as a privileged interlocuteur, have undermined both ends of the bridge on which British foreign policy claims to rest. The end of US commitment to Atlanticism, together with post-Cold War divergence between US and European interests and values, should have led to a shift in British priorities towards closer cooperation with other major European states and-from that shared perspective-an attempt to reconstruct a more balanced transatlantic relationship. The EU presents a sadly weak framework for such a strategy; but Britain's domestic debate, in which this government-like its predecessors-has allowed a Eurosceptic press to shape the language of foreign policy, has made it more difficult for any government to change direction. Recent government speeches on foreign policy, however, suggest that ministers still cling to the illusion that Britain has a 'unique' position between Europe and the United States.     

Bush/Harper? Canadian and American Evangelical Politics Compared

Religion and politics remain very complex issues in both Canada and the United States, and ripe for caricature and overstatement. While a Canadian Christian Right has arisen and finds some affinity with the Harper government, we should not assume that Canada will see anywhere near the visibility and influence of the American Christian Right. There is also some evidence of a new, more moderate American evangelical political presence, especially at the dawn of the Obama presidency, although we should be careful not to overstate this either. Differences between Canada and the United States may not be quite as large and clear-cut as they once were when it comes to evangelical Christians and politics, but the role of religion in public life and politics remains distinctly different in the two countries.     

The American national interest and global public goods

Since the end of the Cold War, Americans have been divided over how to be involved with the rest of the world. In the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks, the debate between those who favour a unilateral foreign policy and those who advocate a multilateral approach has been brought to the fore in American politics and the media.
In this article, Joseph Nye proposes a conception of the American national interest grounded in multilateralism. He argues that, although the United States remains the world's leading power, it cannot act alone to solve global problems such as transnational terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and global warming. Although the United States is the only country in a position to take the lead in protecting 'global public goods', such as an open international economic system and international stability, it will maintain its current predominance only if it works to establish international consensus on issues of global importance.     

Paved With Political Intentions: The Impact of Structure on the National Park Services of Canada and the United States

The structural allocation of decisionmaking power between political authorities and career civil servants influences agency policy behavior. I propose and examine this argument in the context of the national park service agencies of Canada and the United States. Centralization of power to political authorities increases agency attention to electoral concerns such as visitor service. Empowerment of careerists enhances attention to long-term agency goals such as preservation of natural resources.