On the Concept of Rights Differentiation: Binary and Token Forms

Can political theory evaluate the justice of differentiated rights without first adequately identifying what counts as rights differentiation? Contemporary migration regimes allocate markedly different bundles of legal rights to migrants, and a growing literature asks whether such differentiation can be justified on grounds including democratic values and territorial presence (Song, 2016, 2019), equal citizenship (Blake, 2003; Lenard & Straehle, 2012), social membership (Carens, 2013), and migrants’ agency (Ottonelli & Torresi, 2012, 2019, 2022). Recent conceptual work has organized these debates around four distinct but complementary normative mechanisms—discretion, acquisition, equality, and consent (Olsthoorn, 2025). This paper argues, however, that a prior conceptual problem remains: existing accounts identify the phenomenon of rights differentiation too narrowly. I argue that rights differentiation along the lines of citizenship takes two analytically distinct but cumulative forms. Binary differentiation allocates different rights according to whether individuals possess the citizenship of the receiving state. Token differentiation, by contrast, allocates different rights among individuals who equally lack receiving-state citizenship according to the particular citizenship they possess. Contemporary migration regimes routinely combine these mechanisms: migrants’ rights to territorial admission, residence, employment, social benefits, settlement, and naturalization can vary substantially according to their particular citizenship. Yet normative political theory has overwhelmingly conceptualized rights differentiation through the binary citizen/non-citizen distinction. The resulting concept is therefore extensionally incomplete and provides an inadequate basis for normative assessment. I use methodological nationalism (MN) to diagnose this conceptual limitation. Existing critiques identify MN with nation-state-centred assumptions that structure social and normative inquiry (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002, 2003; Chernilo, 2007, 2011; Dumitru, 2014; Sager, 2016). I argue that its influence here takes the form of conceptual deformation: by structuring rights differentiation from the standpoint of the receiving state, the prevailing concept makes the possession or absence of that state’s citizenship analytically salient while obscuring hierarchies generated by migrants’ particular citizenships. Conceptual reconstruction thus also illustrates how conceptual analysis can identify and correct the effects of MN within normative political theory. Finally, I demonstrate why this reconstruction matters normatively. Incorporating token differentiation makes existing assessments more complete by bringing migrant–migrant rights hierarchies within their normative scope, but it can also qualitatively improve those assessments. In differentiated egalitarian accounts, for example, it changes the baseline against which the egalitarian effects of rights differentiation are evaluated (Song, 2016, 2019) and reveals how citizenship-differentiated opportunity sets condition assessments of migrants’ agency (Ottonelli & Torresi, 2012, 2022). For uniform egalitarianism, it exposes a consistency problem for theories condemning enduring citizen–migrant hierarchies while leaving comparable hierarchies among non-citizens unexamined. These implications extend beyond egalitarianism to the discretion, acquisition, and consent models identified by Olsthoorn (2025). The paper therefore advances a broader methodological claim: a more adequate conceptualization of rights differentiation enables more complete normative assessment and can qualitatively improve the evaluation of contemporary migration regimes.