Open borders versus inclusive citizenship? From Trade-Off to Boundary Politics

Political theory and empirical research often assume that there is a trade-off between openness in immigration and inclusiveness in citizenship. My alternative account claims that the association between what I conceptualize as Immigration Regime Openness (IRO) and Citizenship Regime Inclusiveness (CRI) depends on the politicization of immigration in terms of nativist party support and issue salience as well as its changing meaning for party politics across time. When immigration is politicized in periods after significant historical events and crises that prime cultural and security concerns, the politics of immigration and citizenship align along a new globalization cleavage that pits nativists seeking closure against cosmopolitans seeking openness in both territorial and membership boundary-making. This is what I call boundary politics. It should manifest in a positive correlation between IRO and CRI. When immigration is not politicized, IRO and CRI are driven by distinct logics and should therefore not be systematically associated. I test these claims by combining quantitative analyses across 23 democracies 1980-2019 with evidence from three case studies. Corroborating most propositions of the boundary politics framework, the findings not only advance our empirical understanding of the context-dependent association between immigration and citizenship politics, but also bear important implications for the long-standing normative debate on the topic. Most importantly, they can rejuvenate theoretical efforts going beyond the widespread trade-off assumption, which this paper relativizes.