Citizenship Status Transitions in the Migrant Life Course: A Typology

Existing studies on citizenship show that whether someone naturalizes and when they do so, differs. Additionally, some naturalized immigrants decide to stay, while others move onward to a new country. In other words, in the migrant life course, the question is not only whether someone naturalizes, but also when citizenship is acquired, whether this is done individually or as part of a family context, and how citizenship is placed in a broader migration trajectory. In this paper, we analyze how the various aspects of naturalization, migration and life course events add up to different types or groups of immigrant naturalization. Using Dutch population register data from 1995 to 2015, we apply latent class analysis (LCA) to identify typologies. In a second step, we analyze the compositional variation across those types by introducing several covariates to identify predictors of membership in the immigrant naturalization typologies. In a last step, we perform multi-group LCA to look at possible differences in typologies of cohorts that are facing different naturalization policies. Using longitudinal register data from the Netherlands allows us to include both retrospective on migration background and prospective information on onward mobility.