Immigrant Economic Rights in the European Union

Abstract

Economic rights in many EU member states no longer distinguish between citizens to non-EU immigrants. How do these non-EU immigrants respond to expansive economic rights? This chapter argues that providing rights below citizenship improves the psychological, political, and social lives of non-EU immigrants within the EU. Combining cross-national surveys with policy indicators, I find that immigrant access to the labour market and social assistance are powerful tools for immigrant integration both above and below citizenship. Specifically, immigrants with equal opportunities to citizens in the labour market appear more satisfied with democracy, government, and their lives overall. Further I find immigrants who are eligible to receive welfare assistance without incurring additional penalties for future citizenship are more likely to naturalize. Together these findings suggest policy inclusion can perpetuate future immigrant integration, providing a clear policy agenda for EU member states committed to promoting non-EU immigrant integration. 

EU member states, over the course of two decades, have steadily extended economic rights once reserved for citizens to non-EU immigrants. Since 2007 alone, twenty-one EU countries have increased non-EU immigrant access to economic benefits including employment access, educational grants, housing assistance, social security, and broader welfare benefits (Solano & Huddleston, 2020). Although EU citizens benefit from economic rights in virtue of the non-discrimination principle,¹ the decision to provide non-EU citizens with economic entitlements is largely left up to individual member-states, generating substantial variation where non-EU immigrants can make economic claims on their state of residence.² How do these non-EU immigrants respond to expansive economic rights? Can providing non-EU immigrants with rights below citizenship foster political, psychological, and legal inclusion?

This chapter addresses these questions, advancing our understanding of non-EU immigrant³ incorporation as occurring both above and below citizenship. Immigrant integration contains multiple facets, assessing a wide range of experiences and abilities immigrants possess within their new society (see e.g. Harder et al., 2018). To wit, this chapter brings evidence to bear on the effects of economic rights on immigrant integration from both the institutional and migrant perspective, specifically addressing the psychological, political, and social aspects of immigrant integration. First, I explore how immigrant economic rights shape individual perceptions of one’s political and social lives. Second, I consider how these same rights predict integration at the institutional level via naturalization.

The sum total of the results reveal that economic rights enhance the psychological, political, and social lives of non-EU immigrants within the EU. Earlier access to the labour market, for example, corresponds with greater satisfaction with democracy, government, and life overall. Further although welfare appears in some instances negatively associated with integration, I find strong evidence this relationship is moderated by citizenship policy. That is, immigrants who can receive social assistance without incurring additional barriers to integration (i.e. policies which prolong or prohibit the naturalisation of immigrant welfare recipients), are more likely to enjoy the formal benefits of citizenship status. Moreover, this collective evidence provides a clear agenda for EU member states committed to enhancing immigrant integration: provide immigrants with economic rights.

The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I offer a brief discussion of immigrant economic rights within EU member states. Next, I discuss these policies in relation to immigrant integration from both individual and institutional perspectives. I take care here to outline the varied perspectives of immigrant integration below and above citizenship and their relationship to economic rights. After describing the theoretical expectations, I introduce my analytical strategy, describing the data, identifying the measures, and presenting the results for my two studies independently. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications and suggestions for future scholarship.

1 The Economic Rights of Migrants

What economic rights are granted to third country immigrants in the EU? Although the EU can advocate, promote, or ensure EU citizens are provided equality of economic rights, no such formal protections exist for much of their non-EU migrant communities.⁴ This consequently leaves decisions of the type, kind, and scope of economic rights for third country nationals regardless of long-term resident status up to the discretion of national governments, causing considerable variation across the continent (Könönen, 2018).⁵ Some states, for example, ensure non-EU citizens have immediate access to labour market sectors (e.g. Spain, Czechia), where others preserve employment sectors or the labour market as a whole for their citizens (e.g. Slovakia, France). Others too offer non-citizens equality of access to welfare and social security assistance – ensuring non-citizens are awarded with the same social safety net as citizens (e.g. Portugal, Greece). Other EU member states alternatively take a targeted approach to migrants, giving these immigrants equal access to resources to improve socio-economic mobility (e.g. Estonia, Belgium). Finally, some offer very little in the way of providing non-EU migrants with any economic rights or protections (e.g. Latvia).

Given the variation in type of economic entitlements granted to immigrants, three specific categories of rights are most relevant to immigrant integration: (1) employment access; (2) welfare and social security rights and; (3) socio-economic mobility. The first category represents immigrant access to various aspects of the labour market, including public, private, and self-employment options. Welfare and social security rights, on the other hand, relegate immigrant access to a wealth of social security benefits, including unemployment benefits, pension, invalidity benefits, maternity leave, family benefits, and social assistance. The final type of economic rights –– socio-economic mobility –– represents an immigrant’s access to benefits aimed at improving their social and economic position including access to public sector employment services, training, and study grants.

Exactly how varied are EU member state approaches to non-citizen economic rights? Although EU law has harmonized some national provisions with respect to socio-economic rights for long-term resident third country nationals,⁶ Fig. 5.1 reveals these policies remain nationally distinct. Overall, these policies over time range from hostile (i.e. 0) to extremely welcoming (i.e. 10), with the average policies scoring as rather inclusive (i.e. 7.03).⁷ Further, countries do not appear to be either universally accepting nor restrictive in their approach to immigrant economic rights. Austria, Estonia, and Greece, for example, possess relatively closed labour markets despite allowing some non-citizen access to welfare and socio-economic mobility rights. Denmark, Poland, and the United Kingdom, however, present the opposite policy environment whereby employment access is more regulated than welfare or mobility. And while some of the included countries certainly offer relatively similar access across economic rights (e.g. Portugal), the vast majority of the included countries appear to favour providing welfare rights over those associated with equality in employment or socio-economic mobility. France is an exemplar of this trend, on average offering its non-citizen population near equal access to social assistance (i.e. 10) despite being one of the most restrictive with respect to granting migrant access to the labour market (i.e. 1.33).

Fig. 5.1

Comparative Economic Rights in Reference Year (2009)

Despite this variance, all EU member-states share a practical interest in providing immigrants with economic rights. Enabling access to employment opportunities for migrant communities can advance economic growth and native prosperity (Borjas, 1994; Dancygier & Laitin, 2014) whereas protecting employment opportunities for citizens alone can enable immigrant marginalization, depression, and depreciate overall life satisfaction (Clark et al., 2001; Lelkes, 2006). Beyond such instrumental state concerns, economic rights may be crucial to promoting migrant societal incorporation. As alienation and marginalization expand through unemployment, so may pathways to violent extremism and radical policies (Dancygier, 2010; Eatwell, 2006; Falk et al., 2011; Sobolewska, 2010). Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s statement in response to the 7/7 bombings that, “We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong” is further indication of the state’s pressing desire to decrease exclusion as a means to prevent radicalization (Cameron, 2011). Former French Interior Minister Manuel Valls conversely suggested inclusion may beget inclusion across immigrant communities, proclaiming that divorcing citizenship status from economic preconditions would ensure “French nationality should not be sold off or reserved for the elite” (France to make it easier to become French, 2012).

Insights as to whether economic rights affect integration, however, require first the broader discussion of immigrant integration itself. Immigrant integration is a multi-dimensional concept, encompassing a vast array of relationships between an individual immigrant and their host society (Harder et al., 2018). This intricacy is often lost however, within the extant literature (Schinkel, 2018), partially due to an overemphasis on the naturalised as objects of inquiry or a focus on problematizing the immigration-diversity nexus (see e.g. Bloemraad, 2006; Hainmueller et al., 2015; Yang, 1994). Although citizen-migrants are clearly important in their own right, this singular focus omits not only any experience between arrival and naturalisation but also reduces integration to a phenomenon which either only begins or ends after citizenship acquisition. This is particularly problematic as states continuously promote policies treating the two in reverse: integration as the finish line and citizenship as the ultimate prize (Van Hook et al., 2006). This focus too also ignores the power relationships inherent between the state and the final markers of immigrant integration –– again, often measured as citizenship acquisition.

To reframe this integration conversation, I therefore aim to take a holistic approach to the concept of immigrant integration: considering both individual and institutional markers of integration of non-citizen immigrants. Of the former, I specifically consider psychological and social facets of integration which captures an individual’s general satisfaction with their personal and political life in their country of residence. Of the latter, I examine citizenship acquisition as an institutional marker of immigrant integration.

Integration within this broader understanding is a clear obligation of the state. To this end, states may extend economic rights with the goal of facilitating broader integration (Huddleston & Vink, 2015). Such inclusion would therefore be path dependent –– whereby early inclusive experiences enable immigrants to actively view themselves within the national identity, increasing the likelihood of citizenship acquisition. Provided inclusion is in fact habit-forming (Cho & Tam., 1999; Ferwerda et al., 2020; Street, 2017), allowing immigrants to access economic environments prior to citizenship would provide the conditions necessary for their naturalisation. As citizenship itself is unlikely to foster complete inclusion (Bevelander & Veenman, 2006; Levin, 2013), these early inclusive experiences constitute a meaningful step toward rather than hurdle to integration.

In addition to the possibility of economic inclusion’s path dependence, research reveals inclusion broadly and within the economic realm specifically engenders connections to the democracy and the state. For one, research in the United States reveals the lives and subsequent integration of immigrants and their families improve when welfare and other economic benefits expand to include non-citizens (Bitler & Hoynes, 2011; Perreira & Pedroza, 2019). Policies geared toward increasing equality across the public –– such as expanding equality in economic rights to non-citizens –– improve social and political trust and perceptions of governmental quality (Sirovátka et al., 2019; Ziller & Helbling, 2019). Alternatively, immigrants are less satisfied with democracy when residing within environments of exclusion or welfare retrenchment (Just, 2017; Larsen, 2018). Employment access specifically is likely to possess a unique role in immigrant lives, enhancing non-citizen political participation and civic belonging (Alarian, 2017b). These rights are core components of embedded structured mobilization where inclusive policies move beyond mere bureaucratic tools and additionally act as normative signals broadcasting an inclusive, tolerant citizenship to the wider national community (Bloemraad, 2006; Cort, 2012; Tankard & Paluck, 2017). Through this inclusion, immigrants appear to be more trusting of, satisfied with, engaged in, and accepted by their destination – all conditions which are critical in an individual’s quality of life and a state’s decision to facilitate citizenship acquisition.

Still, others contend that immigrant economic rights specifically harm immigrants by increasing dependency on the state and depreciating participatory citizenship (Mohanty & Tandon, 2006). Koopmans (2010) exemplifies this argument, relying on relative deprivation theory (cf. Gurr, 1970) to conclude “unrestricted access to the full panoply of welfare-state benefits without demanding much in return ... have often turned [immigrants] into passive welfare state clients” (Koopmans, 2010, pp.22). More practically, it is likely that political opposition factors may prevent polices from reaching their intended integration goal. States may counterbalance liberal economic rights with exceptions for those applying for citizenship, effectively prohibiting or prolonging the naturalisation of those who received the provided economic benefits. In other words, the integration benefits of immigrant economic rights may be constrained by a state’s political will to formally incorporate immigrants within society.

By way of summary, I theorize inclusion via economic rights encourages immigrant integration. States doing such would actively treat economic rights as a pathway to citizenship and improving the daily lives of immigrants, signalling to majority and minority members alike that immigrants are permanent, valued fixtures within the national community. Conversely, states systematically excluding migrants from economic benefits risk regularising immigrant segregation in perpetuity. As such, I test the following hypotheses:

• Hypothesis 1: Immigrant economic rights increases social and psychological integration.

• Hypothesis 2: Immigrant economic rights increase citizenship acquisition.

2 Empirical Approach

I examine the relationship between economic rights and immigrant integration in two steps: first individually (i.e. social and psychological integration) and second institutionally (i.e. citizenship acquisition). Below, I describe the data, measurement, and results for each of these steps separately.

2.1 Integration below Citizenship: Social and Psychological Integration in the EU

I first address the question of how economic rights affect individual social and psychological integration within the EU. The assessment of such individual experiences therefore requires the use of survey-level data across a variety of economic right settings. To do such, I rely on the cumulative European Social Survey (ESS) –– a biennial cross-national survey of European countries (European Social Survey Cumulative File, 2020). This data allows for a test of a wide range of individual perceptions of the quality and satisfaction with one’s experience across a collection of democracies with varied economic rights policies. I identify non-EU citizens within the ESS as any respondent who indicated both that they are not a citizen of the survey country and do not hold a citizenship with an EU member state. To further account for the possibility of including either immigrant citizens or EU citizens in my sample, I exclude any individual who reported voting in the last national election.⁸ In total, the sample includes 11,451 adult non-EU immigrant respondents across 23 EU countries and 14 years.⁹

3 Measurement

I first assess social and psychological integration as satisfaction with one’s life within their country of residence with four survey items. The first three assess individual satisfaction with (1) democracy, (2) government,¹⁰ and (3) life¹¹ and the fourth measures an immigrant’s overall happiness.¹² All items are recoded to range from 0 to 1, with higher scores indicating greater satisfaction, happiness, or interest in politics.¹³ All items are chosen for their ability to triangulate both across integration experiences and over time –– including only those variables which are asked of survey respondents across all relevant survey waves. Further, these items possess nearly identical response options, which allow for a meaningful interpretation and comparison of the resulting coefficients. Together, these items allow me to capture a broad understanding of the relationships between non-citizen economic rights and integration across time.

3.1 Economic Rights

I measure employment access, welfare and social security, and socio-economic mobility rights using re-aggregated policy scores from the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX, Solano & Huddleston, 2020). MIPEX is a useful tool for this endeavour, compiling annual policy experts’ assessments on integration and citizenship policies across the EU between 2007 and 2020. Once scored, these policies are categorised into policy indices with scores reflecting unfavourable (i.e. 0) to highly favourable policies toward migrants (i.e. 10).¹⁴ In other words, values closer to zero reflect policies limiting non-citizen access to economic rights whereas scores closer to 10 indicate non-citizens have relatively equal rights compared to natives.

Rather than using these aggregated, curated indices, I use individual policy indicators on the Labour Market Mobility index to create my own precise indicator of interest (see e.g. Goodman, 2015). For employment rights, I take the average of a country’s annual policies regulating non-citizen access to: (1) the labour market overall; (2) public sector employment; and (3) self-employment.¹⁵ Welfare and social security rights scores come from a single measure assessing the degree of immigrant access to social security, including unemployment benefits, pension, invalidity benefits, maternity leave, family benefits, and social assistance.¹⁶ The final economic rights indicator –– socio-economic mobility –– is represented by the average equality in access to (1) public sector employment services; and (2) training and study grants.¹⁷ These three policy indices are used to separate the policy effects of various economic rights that migrants enjoy.

Finally, I include individual demographic variables within the analysis which may account for any relationship between economic rights and the key integration components of interest. These demographic indicators include gender identity, age, marital status, religious affiliation, and employment status.¹⁸ Similarly, I consider several immigrant-specific variables including how long an individual has resided within the destination country, immigrant heritage, and speaking any of the destination country official languages at home.¹⁹ Models also include year fixed effects calculated as the year of survey completion.²⁰

4 Analysis

All analyses are conducted using ordinary least squares regression estimation with post-stratification weights and include year fixed effects with clustered robust standard errors by destination country.²¹ Figure 5.2 below reveals the unstandardized beta coefficients for these models with and without covariates by the dependent variable of interest.²² Within these figures, I present the main effects of these policies with and without all relevant covariates.

Fig. 5.2

Predicting Social and Psychological Immigrant Integration by Economic Rights. Unstandardized Beta Coefficients with 90 and 95 percent confidence intervals

Regarding rights regulating immigrant access to employment, I find immigrant social and psychological integration is significantly improved when granted equal access to the labour market. Specifically, liberalisation in employment rights from restriction (i.e. 0) to even moderate access (i.e. 5) corresponds with an approximate increase of 8% increase in democratic satisfaction, controlling for all covariates. Individuals similarly report greater satisfaction in life and with one’s government, similarly representing an approximate increase of 7% and 5% respectively. Non-EU citizens also report an increase in happiness when employment rights reach equality between native and migrant communities. These findings suggest that when states provide migrants with employment rights, immigrants are more supportive of democracy, satisfied with the government, and report living happier lives. Conversely, when states tie employment access to citizenship status, non-EU immigrant experience within and support of one’s country of residence declines. This finding mirrors well with those of refugee employment status, finding that blocking refugee access to the labour market has a marked decline on their subsequent integration (e.g. Hainmueller et al., 2015). In conversation with this work, these findings should act as a call to action for states to reduce restrictions to ensure refugee and immigrant populations are included socially, economically, and democratically regardless of citizenship.

Socio-economic mobility, however, largely appears unrelated to immigrant social and psychological integration. Practically, this suggests that targeted socio-economic support (i.e. educational grants, public employment assistance) may not alter an immigrant’s evaluation of their political or private lives in the EU. Although one can observe a negative relationship between these socio-economic mobility rights and democratic satisfaction when including all covariates in the model, this finding is not present within the basic model suggesting this finding may be spurious. Employment access consequently appears distinct in its apparent inclusive effect on individual integration.

Yet more puzzling is the mixed depiction of social welfare access on immigrant integration. Such access is unrelated to democratic or governmental evaluations and negatively, albeit meagrely, associated with individual life satisfaction and happiness. Although these findings may on face value appear in line with other research suggesting welfare negatively affects immigrant lives (Koopmans, 2010), this relationship should not be interpreted, as a negative relationship between actual welfare reception and individual integration within society. Specifically, this indicator only measures the possibility of welfare access as opposed to actual welfare reception. Thus, the messaging surrounding dissemination of these welfare rights may account for this decline in self-reported life satisfaction and happiness. Moreover, these coefficients are small and inconsistent across all key dependent variables of interest which suggests this relationship may tell us little substantively. Including all covariates, moving from complete exclusion from (i.e. 0) to access to (i.e. 10) social welfare benefits corresponds with a 3% and 5% decline in self-reported happiness and life satisfaction respectively. Still even when accounting for all economic rights and individual covariates, employment rights far exceed this negative effect –– with a positive effect size more than double that of welfare access in either domain. Put simply, the meagre effect size across the EU suggests a more nuanced examination of the relationship between welfare access and immigrant integration is required.

I wish to pause here to reflect on the collective findings in relation to the extent literature advocating that economic rights diminishes ‘pushes’ to integrate. These findings fail to support such claims, revealing instead that opening up labour markets to immigrants can improve immigrant lives –– both normatively and practically. Hence outside of harming immigrant economic lives, restricting access to economic rights also likely damages immigrant social and psychological well-being. These findings behove scholars to engage with the unique importance of such economic belonging. More importantly, this conclusion provides a clear path forward for European states to foster immigrant integration: simply remove barriers to immigrant employment.

4.1 Integration at Citizenship: Naturalisation Within the EU

Although economic rights –– specifically employment access –– appears positively correlated to immigrant social and psychological integration, questions remain as to whether these rights also affect state recognition of integration via citizenship acquisition. In this second component of my analysis, I use administrative-level naturalisation data compiled from OECD (2020), Eurostat (2020), World Bank (2020), and national census estimates. It is necessary for this cross-validation across sources to ensure reliability and supplement missing data if possible from official sources. Cases were only excluded if data could not be validated across these primary and secondary sources for a given year and country pairs. In what follows, I describe this measurement and modelling strategy in more detail to assist in the interpretation of the ensuing results. After merging across these data sources, this second study includes a total of 14,680 citizenship acquisitions of 133 non-EU origins²³ within 19 EU destinations²⁴ between 2009 and 2018.

5 Measurement

Naturalisation, the central variable of interest, is measured as the annual number of citizenship acquisitions of an origin group within a destination. As a simple example, one data point could represent the number of naturalisations in the United Kingdom from migrants with Moroccan descent for the year 2017. Consequently, I adopt pseudo-gravity modelling approach (see e.g. Alarian & Goodman, 2017; Fitzgerald et al., 2014). This modelling strategy allows for the consideration of both origin and destination elements which may also account for the relationship between economic rights and naturalisation annually. Importantly, I opt to use count of acquisitions as opposed to a rate for each origin group. This is accordance with the EU’s statistical office warnings against using naturalisation rates (see Eurostat, 2020) in addition to methodological concerns of introducing error in predicting naturalisation outcomes (e.g. Alarian, 2017a).²⁵ To ensure accurate estimates, I also include indicators of the immigrant population as necessary independent controls within each model. Regardless of the measurement, however, it is crucial to note the results cannot be interpreted as estimating individual desire for citizenship. Although the dyadic approach does estimate naturalisation patterns between an origin and destination, citizenship acquisition itself is beholden to destination bureaucracy, policy, and discretion.

Although the independent variable measurement remains the same as the first study, I include a one- year policy lag within this second study to represent the time delay for these policies to affect year-end reported citizenship acquisitions. Again, all models include the requisite measures of citizenship policy and naturalisation social assistance penalties. In addition, I include a variety of control variables known to affect the relationship between naturalisation and economic rights including historical legacies, democratic quality, and economic health. In the interest of clarity, these variables, coding schemes, and sources are found in Table 5.1. As stated above, after merging across these data sources yields a total sample of 14,680 citizenship acquisition dyads between 133 non-EU sending and 19 EU receiving countries over ten years.

Table 5.1 Covariate Predictors of Naturalisation in the EU

6 Analysis

To estimate the effect of economic rights on immigrant integration through naturalisation, I conduct a series of mixed-effects models estimated through ordinary least squares regression.²⁶ Each model includes a random origin-destination dyad intercept and clusters the robust error term by origin-destination dyad. The results of these models –– found in Fig. 5.3 below –– represent the unstandardized beta coefficients with their respective 90% and 95% confidence intervals.²⁷ Similar to the first analysis, the figures first present the main effects of these policies without any relevant covariates. The subsequent model includes all relevant covariates of interest (see Table 5.1) as well as fixed effects accounting for year and region of origin. These fixed effects therefore subsume any unchanging attributes of the place or time that may be unaccounted for with the included covariates.

Fig. 5.3

Predicting Citizenship Acquisition by Economic Rights. Unstandardized Beta Coefficients with 90 and 95 per cent confidence intervals

First, similar to the individual integration findings, states appear to award citizenship more often when immigrants also possess more freedom to access the labour market. This finding, however, is not robust to the inclusion of origin and destination covariates. Unlike the previous study, however, this study suggests citizenship acquisitions increase alongside socio-economic mobility policies. Moving one point toward policy liberalisation, for example, would predict an approximate 8% increase in citizenship acquisitions from a given origin. Given the disconnect between individual and institutional integration arrangements, this relationship may be attributed directly to state interest. In other words, states may reach out to assist migrant socio-economic mobility when they also have an interest in making these immigrants into citizens.

Potentially most surprising, however, is the negative relationship between welfare access and citizenship. Although this finding again may appear conform to the expectations of the ‘penalty of welfare’, a deeper consideration of the relationship reveals a nuanced relationship between the two. Despite offering welfare access, many of the included states penalise migrants for accessing such welfare or social assistance. Denmark, for example, explicitly prohibits naturalisation for migrants who have accessed social benefits in the past year (Ersbøll, 2013; Stadlmair, 2018). Even Slovenia, who generally does not permit non-EU citizens to access full social assistance, additionally disqualifies any individual from acquiring citizenship if they receive welfare. In total, nearly half of the sample countries restrict immigrants who wish to naturalise from accessing welfare or social assistance. Hence this negative relationship obfuscates a complex story, whereby states may grant rights as a means to exclude –– rather than integrate –– migrant communities (cf. Huddleston & Vink, 2015). Should this be the case, it may also partially explain the negative relationship between such rights and life satisfaction found above in study one.

To test for this possibility, I code each country over time within the sample as to whether they expressly penalise welfare access within the naturalisation process. In doing so, I rely on primary and secondary sources including official government policies and GlobalCit country reports (see e.g. Ersbøll, 2013). Importantly, I code only those policies with specific welfare penalties as opposed to other existing policy coding of economic resource or employment requirements for naturalisation (cf. Solano & Huddleston, 2020). Once coded, I interact this policy with the measure of welfare access as described above. Fig. 5.4 above represents the average marginal effects of this significant interaction.²⁸

Fig. 5.4

Average Marginal Effects of Non-EU Citizen Welfare Access on Citizenship Acquisitions by Welfare Naturalisation Penalty

The evidence from this analysis is clear. Despite a negative main effect of welfare access, such rights are associated with a decline in citizenship acquisitions only when welfare in penalised within the naturalisation process. Even more, citizenship acquisition significantly increases when such penalties are not codified within state citizenship policy. As such, the degree to which welfare access is truly a policy of inclusion and integration depends not only on its existence but also its omission as a hurdle to permanent membership. Where welfare policy exists with strings attached to permanent membership, the policy serves as a tool of prolonged exclusion. Hence the sum total of results across these two studies suggest that policies of economic inclusion –– labour market access and social assistance –– can be powerful tools for immigrant integration both above and below citizenship.

7 Conclusion

In late 2016, the International Monetary Fund made a stark declaration of the state of EU member states. Europe’s economic growth, the IMF concluded, will “depend on the speed of newcomers’ integration in the labour market” (Aiyar et al., 2016, pp.12). Can the expansion of non-citizen economic rights rise to the challenge and integrate immigrant communities in Europe? To what degree does such inclusion truly cultivate political and social belonging? The answer, I find, depends on the policy domain of inclusion. Specifically, states providing immigrants with equal access to employment ––regardless of their citizenship or long-term residence status––are more likely to yield immigrants with higher regard for and satisfaction with their lives. Despite this measurable increase in the social and psychological lives of immigrants personally, this relationship is noticeably absent institutionally, as citizenship appears unmoved by employment rights. And although exclusion from economic protections vis-à-vis the welfare state heightens rather than deters citizenship acquisition, this relationship appears driven by state citizenship policy.

The conflicting evidence presented here still directly conflicts with the theoretical expectations of ‘citizenship light’ (Joppke, 2010) and equality trade-offs (Koopmans, 2010), revealing instances in which expansive economic rights can encourage rather than deter immigrant commitments to their countries of residence. This evidence further suggests the observed path dependency of non-citizen inclusion is not confined to political participation alone (see e.g. Coppock & Green, 2016; Ferwerda et al., 2020; Meredith, 2009). In short, destinations which grant immigrants access to the economic community appear to successfully cultivate individual inclusion. Consequently, destinations excluding immigrants from their political and economic communities may be more likely to face the costs associated with heightened return migration and marginalised migrant communities.

These conclusions further compel scholars to grapple with these puzzles of integration, inclusion, and rights below citizenship. These analyses, for one, are unable to address how immigrants without access to rights or citizenship interact with their political and social world. Perhaps these policies coincide with return migration, bleeding into larger rates emigration as migrants opt to exit when denied economic opportunities or political voice. On the other hand, immigrants may seek alternative status – namely permanent residence – when excluded from economic rights. In addition to destination encouragement, migrants themselves may be more inclined to acquire permanent residence in lieu of formal inclusion provided rights are comparable. And as nowhere is permanent residence more present as a secondary level of membership and often requirement prior to obtaining citizenship status than in Europe (Goodman, 2014), future scholarship in the EU would be wise to shift focus toward such experiences of permanent residence.

Moreover, within an era and region often examined from the context of exclusion, I encourage others to continue to advance our understanding of inclusion via public policy. Future research could too expand the boundaries of inclusion to include claims made of one’s origin. Doing so would consider both internal and external modes in affecting political, economic, and social behaviour. Such focus will require new methods and approaches to citizenship and immigrant behaviour, pushing scholars of policy, immigration, and behaviour broadly to think creatively and holistically about the theoretical and empirical processes of inclusion and consequently exclusion. The conclusions here, however, are merely the first step in a long journey of unearthing the role of non-citizen rights to immigrant lives. As these integration debates endure, these conclusions implore future policy and scholarship to expand the approach of immigrant inclusion as a path dependent process – one that has the power to perpetuate exclusion or create communities of new citizens.