Luxembourg as an Immigration Success Story

"Fetzer's book is an illuminating, exhaustive, and highly instructive account of Europe's most conspicuous immigration success story. In skillfully framing the politics of immigration and immigrant incorporation in Luxembourg within a European context, Fetzer underscores the enduring value of understanding both a single country case and its regional setting."-Anthony M. Messina, Trinity College "Although non-citizens make up two-thirds of its work force and more than 40% of its resident population, Luxembourg has been largely free of the xenophobic politics and anti-immigrant violence that plague its neighbors. Fetzer presents a much-needed and highly persuasive explanation of this European anomaly, one that is multi-faceted and highlights the combined effect of the country's high levels of affluence and economic equality, its low levels of unemployment, poverty, and residential segregation, its lack of a colonializing past, the cultural similarities between most immigrants and natives, the corporatist politics of its welfare state, the pro-immigration consensus of its elite and, last but not least, its size."- David Cameron, Yale University Once again, Joel Fetzer delivers a rigorous and highly insightful expose of the immigration polemic. This time, he turns the puzzle on its head by investigating one of the uniquely successful and much neglected case studies in the immigration literature. A must-ready for any comparativist who wants to consider the best the EU has to offer in terms of its migration dynamics. --Gallya Lahav, State University of New York, Stony Brook

The literature on comparative immigration policy is full of studies of policy disasters. Such works show policymakers what to avoid, yet those individuals responsible for formulating and implementing immigration laws often lack examples of what they should be doing instead. That said, although about 64 percent of the labor force and 44 percent of the population of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is composed of non-citizens, public support for immigration is the highest in the European Union outside of Scandinavia, anti-immigrant violence is rare, and no politically influential anti-immigrant, far-right political party exists. Luxembourg as an Immigration Success Story: The Grand Duchy in Pan-European Perspective, by Joel S. Fetzer, provides an in-depth examination of Luxembourg's impressive success in this particular arena. Based on personal interviews with Luxembourg's government officials, immigration scholars, ordinary immigrants, and human-rights activists. Fetzer first documents the Grand Duchy's praiseworthy integration of the foreign-born, and then compares Luxembourg's situation with that of other European Union countries in order to test corresponding explanations for this success. The study concludes that Luxembourg's enviable experience with immigration can be primarily explained by its robust economy, relatively egalitarian income distribution, cultural similarity between native Luxembourgers and the predominately Portuguese and Italian immigrants, low levels of residential segregation, and pro-immigration consensus among the country's leaders.