Citizenship Rights for Immigrants in the West and Beyond

Previous analyses of citizenship rights for immigrants in Western Europe between 1980 and 2008 have shown that rights tended to become more inclusive until 2002, but stagnated afterwards while there was no evidence for cross-national convergence. National political opportunity structures could best explain changes over time: growth of the immigrant electorate led to expansion, but countermobilization by right-wing parties slowed or reversed liberalizations (Koopmans, Michalowski, Waibel, AJS 2012). To what extent, however, do these findings and explanations extend to a global scale? Based on a dataset of currently 29 countries in North America, Oceania, Africa, Latin-America, the Middle East, and Asia we test some of our previous as well as new explanations against a wider variety of cases and we also include new explanations, such as democracy & civil liberties, Western culture, national wealth, and military security. Preliminary results point to democratic spillover as one explanation in the sense that countries that grant rights to native citizens tend to extend rights to immigrants. Results also suggest that some historical legacies of diversity (settler country; colonial power) matter, others not (multinational empires; native ethnic diversity). I.e., only if historical diversity experiences are related to migration do they have positive effects on immigrant rights.Net of democracy, membership of supranational organizations, Western culture and security threats have no significant effects and economic globalization and GDP have no effect either on the extension of immigrant rights.