"“Strangers at the gate” was the alarmist cry heard in the wake of 1989 and all that. “The Economist” (March 15, 1991) showed a ramshackle border guardhouse being overrun by a giant US bursting with all sorts of foreign-looking (and strangely cheerful) characters. Such hyperbole has since disappeared, partially as a result of tightened procedures for asylum across Western states. But there still seems to be a gap between a restrictionist control rhetoric and an expansionist immigration reality. An influential comparative volume of immigration control argues: “[T]he gap between the “goals” of national immigration policy . . . and the actual results of policies in this area (policy “outcomes”) is growing wider in all major industrialized democracies.” Why do the developed states of the North Atlantic region accept more immigrants than their general restrictionist rhetoric and policies intend? The phenomenon of unwanted immigration reflects the gap between restrictionist policy goals and expansionist outcomes. Unwanted immigration is not actively solicited by states, as in the legal quota immigration of the classic settler nations. Rather, it is accepted passively by states, either for humanitarian reasons and in recognition of individual rights, as in asylum-seeking and family reunification of labor migrants, or because of the states’ sheer incapacity to keep migrants out, as in illegal immigration."