Open Borders Versus Inclusive Citizenship? The Relationship between Entry and Membership Regimes across Institutional Contexts in 20 Democracies 1980-2010

In political theory, there is a widespread assumption that in liberal democracies immigration restrictions are necessary for inclusive citizenship. Some empirical analyses corroborate this view: they find certain trade-offs between the openness of territorial admission and immigrant rights or inclusive citizenship. This Paper further investigates these hypotheses by asking the following question: How are the openness of admission regimes and the openness of citizenship regimes related, and what accounts for variations in this relationship across and within immigrant-receiving democracies? Against the background of general hypotheses about the relationship of admission/openness and rights/citizenship, I consider various arguments about how the openness-rights relationship as manifested across labor immigration programs may vary across different socio-economic and political institutions such as welfare regimes and power-sharing structures. Juxtaposing identity-based and rational-calculus-based micro-foundations, this leads to competing expectations. I then go on to explore whether these arguments are also plausible for a more dynamic perspective of policy feedback, examining the relationship between admission regimes and citizenship regimes more generally across countries and within countries over time. Based on various datasets and statistical models, my empirical analysis tests these hypotheses. Among other things, I show that under certain conditions the association between the openness of admission regimes and citizenship regimes can become positive. This finding questions the assumption that there is a consistent trade-off between territorial admission and inclusive citizenship for immigrants, at least in affluent immigrant-receiving democracies.