Open Borders vs Inclusive Citizenship? The Politics of Associating Immigration and Naturalisation Policies

Contrasting the widespread assumption that the openness of immigration policies and the inclusiveness of citizenship policies are negatively associated, this paper argues that the two policy areas follow an increasingly convergent logic as they become a defining feature of a new socio-cultural dimension of political conflict that has emerged in recent decades – the globalization cleavage. Covering 23 Western democracies from 1980 to 2010, quantitative panel regression analyses of a combination of novel and partly original datasets demonstrate that the politicization of the immigration and citizenship in terms of issue salience and far-right party support explains both spatial and temporal variation in the statistical association between the openness of borders and the inclusiveness of citizenship. The finding of this immigration-citizenship-politicization nexus offers important insights that speak to both normative political theory and empirical political science.