Immigration-related policies can be conceptualised along two basic dimensions. On the one hand, territorial boundaries are about immigration policy and refer to territorial admission and the granting of (long-term) legal residence. On the other hand, membership boundaries are about immigrant policy and refer to the treatment of immigrants after the establishment of (long-term) residence. Hammar (1985), who popularised this distinction, further differentiates two kinds of immigrant policies. The first concerns the rights afforded to ‘denizens’ (Hammar 1990), while the second concerns citizenship policies – that is, the regulation of the access to citizenship in the sense of passport-holding or nationality.
The aim of this article is to theorize, explicate, and assess this two-dimensional architecture of national boundary regimes and explore its evolution over time. I zoom in on immigration regimes and citizenship regimes to address three intertwined questions:
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(1)
What are the main structural logics shaping immigration regimes and citizenship regimes in liberal democracies?
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Do these two policy dimensions and the resulting two-dimensional policy space follow from these structural logics, and does this two-dimensional model withstand empirical testing?
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What do the structural logics tell us about the trends in, the configurations of, and the correlations between immigration regimes and citizenship regimes across space and time, and can these theoretical expectations be empirically corroborated?
To answer these questions, I draw on the account of Hampshire (2013) to argue that immigration policies and citizenship policies are driven by the divergent logics of markets and nations, as well as the intermediate logics of overarching liberal-constitutional and democratic institutions. Immigration policies are mainly exposed to economic and legal forces, while citizenship policies are primarily driven by democratic concerns and national identities. This structural divergence gives rise to the distinct empirical nature of immigration regimes on the one hand and citizenship regimes on the other.
I further propose that each structural logic can come in a liberal or open or inclusive, or an illiberal or closed or exclusive variant. It should thus be possible to observe all four logical combinations of open or closed immigration policies and inclusive or exclusive citizenship policies. Moreover, in line with much of the existing literature that discusses this problem under the heading of the ‘gap hypothesis’ (e.g. Cornelius et al. 2014; Lutz 2019), I argue that external constraints imposed by global markets and international institutions favour open and liberal policies in the realm of immigration, while citizenship policies are less externally constrained and thus more malleable by domestic structures and political forces. This should set immigration policies on a more liberalising and convergent trajectory than citizenship policies. I then suggest that the structural logics underpinning each dimension pulls immigration regimes and citizenship regimes apart. Hence, they should not only be conceptually and statistically distinct, but also not systematically correlated.
Using Categorical Principal Component Analysis (CATPCA) to scrutinize data across 23 liberal democracies from 1980 to 2010, the empirical investigation validates The National Boundary Regime Typology. The policy components of Immigration Regime Openness (IRO) and Citizenship Regime Inclusiveness (CRI) can be reduced to two internally consistent and statistically distinct dimensions. By demonstrating the empirical existence of theoretically assumed dimensions, this analysis thus addresses an important gap in the literature (Koopmans 2013: 696). There are studies that have introduced two-dimensional policy spaces of integration and citizenship regimes without testing this dimensional assumption (Koopmans et al. 2005; Goodman 2010), while others who analysed citizenship regimes more comprehensively (by adding, among other things, indicators on the loss of citizenship) validated their two-dimensional model (Vink and Bauböck 2013). Inspired by recent literature (Boucher and Gest 2015), this study is the first to combine immigration policies and citizenship policies with a novel two-dimensional scheme capturing regimes proper (i.e. policies as such).
Based on the typology, I then show that over the observed time period, an increasing number of cases can be described as open-inclusive boundary regimes: they have relatively open borders and relatively inclusive citizenship. In fact, open-inclusive regimes are the most common in the sample. However, many cases still show other configurations. One notable finding regarding these other types is that closed-inclusive regimes are the least frequent, even though they embody the conventional liberal-communitarian model defended in classical normative accounts in democratic theory (e.g. Walzer 1983, ch. 2).
Furthermore, the analysis shows that the aggregate levels of both IRO and CRI follow overall liberalising trajectories. However, after a surge in liberalisation from 1980 onwards, immigration policies start fluctuating after 1996. Citizenship policies show a much-observed restrictive turn during the 2000s. I also show that there has already been a restrictive turn in citizenship during the 1990s. Finally, I find that immigration regimes show increasingly similar levels of openness while citizenship regimes do not converge significantly overall.
The liberalising tendencies in both immigration policies and citizenship policies contrast with the finding of a proliferating ‘Market Model’ (Boucher and Gest 2018), which occupies a middle ground between the closed-exclusive and open-exclusive types of boundary regimes. The sample and type of indicators used in this article show that, instead, the ‘Liberal Model’ (ibid.) of open-inclusive regimes is more prevalent. Furthermore, these results cast doubt on the notion that democracies remain trapped in ‘liberal paradox’ that manifests itself in a tension between open borders and inclusive citizenship (Hollifield 1992, 2004). Rather, this ‘paradox’ is increasingly resolved. Meanwhile, the finding of substantial convergence in immigration regimes but not citizenship regimes is more in line with the existing literature (e.g. Helbling and Kalkum 2018; Koopmans et al. 2012).
The last part of the article uses the two-dimensional policy space to analyse the correlation between immigration regimes and citizenship regimes. Calculating the pooled correlation for three time periods (last decade of the Cold War: 1980–1991; 1992–2001; and post 9/11), I show that the two dimensions are in fact not uncorrelated; the correlation has become increasingly positive. Challenging widespread notions of trade-offs between openness and inclusiveness (e.g. Ruhs 2013), this finding suggests a more intricate interplay and potential convergence of the structural logics behind the two policies realms across time.
Defining national boundary regimes regarding immigration
National boundary regimes regarding immigration are constituted by two sets of policies: immigration regimes and citizenship regimes. Immigration regimes are, on the one hand, constituted by the legal regulations that define the conditions for and guide the volume of immigrant intake to a receiving country (Goodman 2014a, p. 814; Helbling et al. 2017, p. 82). These policies distinguish different types of immigrants, namely labour immigrants, immigrants that reunite with their families, and asylum seekers and refugees (Helbling et al. 2017). Examples are conditions such as job offer requirements for labour migrants or eligibility criteria such as age limits for family migrants.
On the other hand, immigration regimes confer residence rights. These rights define how long an immigrant can stay in the receiving country under the relevant permit. This is not to be confused with the regulation of permanent residence proper, which may or may not depend on additional conditions. For instance, Green Card holders in the US receive permanent residence rights upon admission, whereas in other countries residence rights may not allow any category of migrants to renew their temporary visas or transition toward a permanent stay.
Conceptualizing residence rights as a part of immigration regimes does not conflate immigration policy with immigrant policy. Non-transient residence rights short of the regulation of access to permanent residence proper are immigration rights, not immigrant rights. Indeed, regulating the duration of stay is a necessary component of any immigration policy; it is associated directly with entry permits. Depending on the number of possible permits and their variation in legal content, such permit rights do not only exhibit cross-national but also intra-national variation across entry tracks (cf. Ruhs 2013).
By contrast, more general rights mainly show cross-national rather than intra-national variation (cf. Koopmans et al. 2012). General rights may still discriminate between various categories of migrants, but not based on permits. It is hard to give examples for rights in the two categories because the distinction is somewhat artificial, and the rights architecture can vary across countries – a fact that is usually not acknowledged and is hard to capture empirically. A safe bet for a general right is the right of non-citizens to vote in local elections. Here, states discriminate on grounds of nationality and duration of residence rather than residence permits (Schmid et al. 2019).
Permit rights, and especially residence rights, constitute the inner belt of the territorial boundary instead of an intermediate stage between entry and naturalisation (Helbling et al. 2017; see also de Haas et al. 2015). Hence, immigration regimes, as conceptualised here, feature entry and stay as their constituent components. The less restrictive the regulations of entry and stay, the higher the level of Immigration Regime Openness (IRO).
Regarding immigration, citizenship regimes comprise the regulations that define the conditions for immigrants to acquire the legal status of full membership in the sense of nationality (Goodman 2014a, 814). Based on a review of extant indices and other conceptualisations in the literature (e.g. Howard 2009; Fitzgerald et al. 2014; Blatter et al. 2017), this analysis focuses on four core policy components of citizenship regimes: (1) the strength of jus soli; (2) residence duration requirements; (3) the toleration of multiple citizenship; and (4) further naturalisation requirements (language and citizenship tests as well as economic and criminal record requirements). The less restrictive the requirements for citizenship acquisition for immigrants, the higher the level of Citizenship Regime Inclusiveness (CRI).
The overarching concept of national boundary regimes regarding immigration therefore focuses the two fundamental ‘social closures of nation-states’ (Brubaker 1992, ch. 1; Weber 1946, p. 78). The inner boundary of citizenship is fundamental because it endows immigrants with the ‘highest standard of equal treatment’ (Bauböck et al. 2013, p. 40). If access to citizenship were completely blocked, immigrants could never become equals. In addition, the transformation of non-citizens into citizens has crucial repercussions on territorial admission: It permanently unlocks access to a state’s territory by establishing the right of unconditional re-entry and residence. The outer boundary of immigration is also fundamental. If it were completely blocked, citizenship could never be reached. Indeed, the territorial boundary is ‘citizenship’s perpetual gatekeeper’ (Joppke 2010, p. 150).
Immigrant rights are important, but not as fundamental as immigration policies and citizenship policies. Still, one may argue that the architecture of national boundary regimes cannot be properly conceptualised and understood without the dimension of immigrant rights. However, there are empirical, theoretical, and pragmatic reasons to omit this dimension. First, Huddleston and Vink (2015) provide empirical evidence showing that various general rights and the ease of access to citizenship are so highly correlated that they can be reduced to the same empirical dimension. They identify the citizenship policy component as the ‘best predictor’ of the overall rights regime. Second, granting rights amounts to boundary blurring between citizens and non-citizen residents, while the establishment of long-term legal residence upon immigration and the inclusion into a receiving country’s national community regulate the more fundamental aspect of boundary crossing. Lastly, comprehensive data on immigrant rights for the sample and timeframe used in this study are not available, especially for the last decades of the old millennium. Such data would be very laborious to collect, especially when one considers a wide variety of rights. To make such an endeavour possible we would also have to narrow the number of rights we examine, provoking the need for a selection that can be widely agreed upon. For these reasons, I leave aside immigrant rights and focus instead on the fundamental boundaries defined by IRO and CRI.
Theorizing the architecture of national boundary regimes
To theorize the architecture of national boundary regimes, I first take a step back and examine the idea of the liberal paradox. Coined and elaborated by Hollifield (1992, 2004), it refers to the tension between economic liberalism and political liberalism in regulating immigration and the access to citizenship. To maximize material welfare in a globalizing world, transnational economic forces propel liberal states toward greater openness in territorial admission (Hollifield 2004, p. 902). At the same time, however, to ensure security, to preserve the democratic social contract, and to protect the cultural cohesion of the national community, political forces push for greater territorial closure (ibid.). Furthermore, however, whereas economic liberalism tends to see foreign workers as commodities, the liberal constitutional order of democracies provides the grounds for granting them rights and citizenship (Hollifield 1992).
Against this background, Hollifield points to two possible outcomes. The first is that – in the context of a growing international labour market – an individualist understanding of political liberalism points to the possibility of a “gradual resolution of the liberal paradox” (Hollifield 1992, p. 223). Indeed, for Hollifield, “rights-based liberalism goes hand-in-hand with the spread of market relations”, and it is this “confluence of unregulated markets for foreign labour and the rise of rights-based politics that explains the failure of restrictionist policies and the persistence of immigration” (ibid., p. 170). The second possibility – stated as a conclusion in various pieces (e.g. Hollifield 2004, 905; Hollifield and Faruk 2017, 143) – is that “[e]ven as states become more dependent on trade and migration, they are likely to remain trapped in a liberal paradox for decades to come.”
These two possibilities still feature in the current scholarly discourse. However, where Hollifield has envisioned a gradual resolution to the liberal paradox towards a comprehensively liberal model reconciling open borders and inclusive citizenship in the long run, others have suggested that more and more states show a seemingly ‘paradoxical’ configuration of open borders and exclusive citizenship. For instance, Boucher and Gest (2018) contrast the ‘Liberal Model’ with the ‘Market Model’. The latter embodies the tension between the openness towards certain (mostly temporary and high-skilled) labour migrants and the closure towards others, as well as patterns of citizenship exclusiveness. However, rather than ‘being trapped’ in this tension, governments may embrace it because it allows them “to have it both ways – effectively sanitizing globalisation from its purported ills while enjoying the benefits it brings” (ibid., p. 6).
In the following, I suggest that not only two but four national boundary regime types should be theoretically possible and empirically observable. This is based on a theory of structural logics and their interaction in shaping coherent immigration regimes and coherent citizenship regimes, respectively. The resulting two-dimensional policy space and its four ideal-typical configurations follow from these structural logics.
My starting point is the account of Hampshire (2013). He argues that there are four potentially ‘contradictory imperatives of the liberal state’ (ibid., p. 2). These are: capitalism, constitutionalism, representative democracy, and nationhood. Hampshire then goes on to argue that the former two tend to induce openness, while the latter two tend to generate closure. However, he also extends this structural account with a complex and comprehensive framework of how factors such as politicisation, public opinion, or labour market conditions, and actors such as far-right parties, courts, or firms may affect immigration-related policy-making in these four facets of the liberal state (ibid., p. 51–4).
My modified version of Hampshire’s framework mirrors these liberal imperatives by focusing on the following structural logics: the economic logic of the market, the legal logic of the liberal state, the democratic logic of the liberal state, and the cultural logic of the nation. I shall argue that the former two are complementary in shaping immigration regimes, while the latter two are complementary in shaping citizenship regimes. Furthermore, I suggest that each structural logic comes in two variants, liberal or illiberal, open or closed, and inclusive or exclusive.
The economic logic of the market is where, first and foremost, labour immigration policies can be located. They are embedded in the dynamics and the regulation of transnational trade and shaped by the behaviour and lobbying activity of labour-intensive firms (Peters 2017). Because of their commitment to economic liberalism in the context of globalisation, democracies tend to allow certain interest groups – namely firms – to capture command in steering labour immigration. In the modern dual labour market, low-skilled and high-skilled immigration policies can thus expand simultaneously. This dynamic of ‘client politics’ is likely to emerge despite popular opposition because the costs of immigration for the broader and disorganised public are diffused, while the benefits are highly concentrated in well-organised business coalitions (Freeman 1995). Thus, the inherent tendency in the economic logic of the market regarding immigration policies is one of expansive openness. However, we can imagine a situation in which national labour markets start following a closed protectionist logic. Peters (2017) shows, for instance, that in reaction to greater openness to trade, firms move their production abroad, taking their jobs with them. Such firms then demand more closed immigration policies at home as the need for migrant labour decreases.
The legal logic of the liberal state manifests in “legal-constitutional constraints on the executive” (Joppke 1998) by independent judiciaries on both the international and the national level. Because of these constraints, in liberal democracies rights to family reunification cannot be significantly curbed and may acquire an expansive dynamic (Joppke 1998, 2001; see also Hollifield 1992, p. 94). A case in point is the liberalisation of family reunification after officially terminating temporary guest worker schemes in countries like Germany after the oil crisis in the 1970s. Rather than (re-)uniting in their countries of origin, the families of migrant workers did so in the countries of destination. Courts intervened, and executive and administrative authorities had to follow suit (Hollifield 2004, p. 895).
Policies targeting asylum seekers and refugees also find grounding in liberal norms. Some of these norms, namely the principle of non-refoulment, operate at the international level (Neumayer 2005, pp. 56–7). Independent judiciaries in democratic nation-states often further facilitate the access of those with claims to asylum and refugee status. As with family reunification, in this realm courts again appear as the phalanx of political liberalism. However, asylum and family reunification have become increasingly politicised over time. Thus, an illiberal variant of the legal logic seems possible when certain political players are in power, and especially when strong illiberal political forces hijack the liberal state and the independent nature of the judiciary (which is not so hard to imagine in the current populist era).
Thus understood, economic liberalism and political liberalism can be interpreted as two parallel threads knit into the same fabric of liberal democracies. They are friends, not enemies. Rather, their common enemy is closed and exclusive illiberalism. One implication of this proposition is that immigration policies in all their aspects – labour migration, family reunification and asylum and humanitarian protection – should be positively correlated to a high degree; they should be reducible to a single consistent dimension of IRO. In addition, for democracies the liberal mode can be assumed to be the natural mode; some illiberal element or actor must be added to derail this inherent liberal tendency. This liberal logic underpinning immigration policies is further amplified by strong economic and political constraints imposed by globalised (labour) markets and liberal international institutions (cf. Sassen 1996). These factors lead to a ‘liberal bias’ in immigration policies – a gap between the restrictionist bent of public opinion and liberal immigration policy-making (Cornelius et al. 2014; Lutz 2019). Thus, contrary to what many believe to be an age of restrictionism, we can expect that immigration regimes should exhibit an overall liberalising trajectory over recent decades.
To theorize citizenship regimes, I go back to Hollifield’s usage of the term political liberalism. It combines rights-based liberalism with the collective right of (native) democratic communities to national self-determination. This conception of political liberalism is, therefore, intimately connected to concepts of nationhood and citizenship. Against this background, I suggest that citizenship regimes are, first and foremost, underpinned by a cultural logic of the nation. Citizenship policies with an inclusive tendency are based on inclusive conceptions of national identity (cf. Brubaker 1992). Emphasizing the individual right of immigrants to inclusion, the key purpose of such an inclusive citizenship regime is to ensure democratic legitimacy vis-à-vis migrant newcomers as they are subjected to the rule of the receiving state. Inclusive national identities are thus wedded to a democratic logic of the liberal state.
By contrast, citizenship policies that tend towards the exclusionary pole are rooted in exclusive conceptions of national identity (cf. Brubaker 1992). They subsume the egalitarian logic of the liberal state under a collectivist logic of the nation and the rights to self-determination and the idea of boundedness of the native majority. Emphasizing the right to exclusion, the key concern here is democratic legitimacy vis-à-vis native citizens as they strive to preserve socio-cultural cohesion and the cultural distinctiveness of their national identity. Hence, exclusive national identities are wedded to an illiberal democratic logic.
The modus vivendi of liberal states can be located in a comprehensively democratic logic. This should lead to a tendency of greater inclusiveness in citizenship over time. However, this tendency is weak because citizenship regimes regarding long-term immigrants are not subject to forces of globalisation and liberal biases as much as immigration regimes are (Lutz 2019).Footnote 1 Instead, marking the last, though perhaps falling, “bastion of sovereignty” (Dauvergne 2004; Spiro 2011), citizenship policies can be expected remain on trajectories that continue to significantly vary across states (cf. Koopmans et al. 2012). Table 1 provides an overview of these arguments.
Table 1 Overview of the analytical framework and its empirical implications In sum, on the one hand, citizenship regimes can be conceived as being mainly exposed to slow-moving logics of culture and national identity as well as the medium-paced logic of democracy. Thus understood, citizenship regimes are a product of the interaction of the cultural logic of the nation with the democratic logic of the liberal state. Immigration policies, on the other hand, are mainly driven by fast-moving economic forces as well as medium-paced legal and political dynamics. They are a product of the interaction of the economic logic of the market with the legal logic of the liberal state.
This brings me to my last proposition. Since the two policy areas of immigration and citizenship tap into different societal domains and are driven by distinct structural logics, IRO and CRI should not only be conceptually and statistically distinct, but also statistically independent – that is, they should not be systematically correlated. This hypothesis stands in contrast to the common assumption that there is a trade-off between the openness of borders and the inclusiveness of citizenship (e.g. Ruhs 2013).
The National Boundary Regime Typology
If immigration regimes and citizenship regimes are distinct and internally coherent, the resulting policy space should feature four ideal-typical configurations. Bosniak (2006, p. 119) explains that the “hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside model [ …] is the prevailing and commonsense normative account.” This is the broad agreement that the relatively hard shell or highly erected gate (restricted immigration) of democratic nation-states makes possible and protects the soft inside (inclusive citizenship). The normative model that corresponds most closely to this regime is liberal communitarianism (the classic statement is Walzer 1983, ch. 2) and can be abbreviated as closed-inclusive.
The diametrically opposing normative ideal-type is neo-liberal utilitarianism (see e.g. Ruhs 2013): Immigration is liberalised, but citizenship is exclusive; it is open-exclusive. By emphasizing economic openness to harness the benefits of globalisation, while at the same time controlling its impact on the fabric of the national political community by keeping or making citizenship exclusive, the neo-liberal regime type resembles the notion of the liberal paradox (Hollifield 2004).
The typology is completed by liberal cosmopolitanism and its counterpart illiberal nativism. The former combines open labour markets with rights to family reunification and the right to humanitarian protection and asylum as well as inclusive citizenship (see e.g. Carens 2013). This open-inclusive policy configuration thus embodies the resolution of the liberal paradox and has been abbreviated as the ‘Liberal Model’ (Boucher and Gest 2018). Illiberal nativism has relatively closed borders, and its citizenship is relatively exclusive; it is closed-exclusive. The ‘Market Model’ (Boucher and Gest 2018) is selectively open but exclusive and thus can be located in between the illiberal and the neo-liberal model. Figure 1 summarises this typology.
If IRO and CRI indeed increase over time, we can expect that more and more cases should be open-inclusive. However, if the liberalising and convergent tendency is indeed stronger for immigration regimes, the continued non-convergence in CRI should also lead to a substantial number of open-exclusive cases.