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This dissertation offers a theory of international immigration policy. It explains how governments decide how many immigrants to accept; whether to differentiate among various ethnic groups; whether to accept refugees and on what basis: and whether to accept permanent immigration over temporary migrant workers. The dissertation makes several original contributions to the field of immigration policy. First, it constructs a theory of the relative influence of various factors and various political groups on immigration policies. Second, it offers a broad comparative study of immigration policies in Austria, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, and 24 international organizations. Third, it expands on the influence of international relations considerations and wars on immigration policies. Fourth, it initiates the use of quantitative methods in this field. Finally, it advances the use of international political economy theories to explain immigration policies. The dissertation argues that immigration policies are determined by five factors: economic cycles, large-scale immigration of dissimilar composition, wars, foreign relations considerations, and ideological cycles. Policies on different types of immigration, including temporary labor migration, permanent migration, refugees, and illegal migration, are influenced by these factors to a different degree. Immigration policies are generated by an interaction between global trends of the above five factors, structural characteristics of each country, and the countries' preference for permanent or transitory migration. That interaction produces similar, but not identical, immigration policies in the various countries. Global cycles produce most of the variation in immigration policies over time. In contrast, countries' structural factors and preference for permanent or transitory immigration are relatively stable, and they produce the cross-national differences between immigration policies in any given time. Considerations of foreign relations and national security are the main contributors to the liberalization of immigration policy. Wars have a dual impact on immigration policy: on the one hand, they facilitate the recruitment of temporary migrant workers; on the other hand, wars and external threats lead to an association of dissimilar immigrants with external threats, to restrictions on immigration of dissimilar origin, and sometimes to the encouragement of immigration of similar origin.