Extending Hospitality? History, Courts and the Executive

While many consider court involvement in immigration matters a given, in liberal nation-states, there is actually a substantial degree of variation. This chapter revisits two “critical junctures” in the early immigration histories of Canada and Germany to show that institutions and policy legacies are not just historical backdrop, but actually shaped the strategies of political actors, subsequent institutional configurations, and policy options for long periods of time, thereby revealing unintended consequences, as well as alternative paths that the involvement of the courts (and other actors) could have taken.