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IMMIGRATION, EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS, AND THE STATE 157 Positive messages from [government] ministers on the economic benefits of labor migration were drowned by the negative messages on asylum. … The public did not, as the government had anticipat- ed, readily tell the difference between an asylum-seeker, a migrant worker or an international student in their neighborhood. (2007: 348, 359) Rather than increasing public support for labor immigration, even if there is a sound labor market policy case, the use of control signals can compound the political sensitivities of labor immigration policy (Anderson 2013). This indicates that employment relations scholarship needs to account for the external gover- nance dimensions of labor immigration policy relating to immigration control as well as the intrinsic connections with internal governance dimensions relating to migrant worker–employer relations. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have examined the connection between employment relations and labor immigration, particularly in relation to the state, whose role in that area has been relatively underexamined within employment relations scholarship. States have many different functions in labor immigration policy. We have dis- tinguished between functions relating to internal governance, which includes regulatory activities that determine where migrants work, their conditions at work, and the terms of their engagement with employers, and those relating to external governance, which includes the many different factors determining states’ immigration selection and control activity. We noted two trends relating to these distinct dimensions of state activity. First, internal governance has increasingly been influenced by unitarist or neo- liberal ideas. This influence is reflected in labor immigration schemes allowing employers significant control over migrant workers without an equivalent level of countervailing power in the form of increased enforcement capacity by the state and/or worker organizations. Second, in terms of external governance, states have shown a growing propensity to assert their immigration control credentials in order to demonstrate their sovereign capacity to regulate migration inflows. Looking at labor immigration through the prism of state legitimation, it appears that states have increasingly sought to use labor immigration to address their accumulation and sovereignty imperatives, motivated in large part by economic and immigration control pressures, and have paid insufficient attention to the impact of these strategies on fairness. 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