Immigration has cemented its rank among the most salient policy issues across Europe over the past decades. In their article “Convergence, capitalist diversity, or political volatility? Immigration policy in Western Europe” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Erica Consterdine and James Hampshire employ an original immigration policy index to capture policy restrictiveness in five European countries between 1990 and 2015. Challenging accounts suggesting that forces of economic globalisation lead to policy convergence beyond governments’ control, Erica and James show that there is little evidence suggesting that immigration policies in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France and Spain have converged. Some of the observed variation in the restrictiveness of immigration policy can be explained by the varieties of capitalism (VoC) characterising these five countries. However, Erica and James show that differences between countries and over time are predominantly shaped by the dynamics of national politics and political parties’ competition for office. Their analysis suggests that “while VoC may set the broad parameters for immigration regimes, both the direction and timing of policy changes appear to be shaped by party competition.”