Causes and Consequences of Immigration and Citizenship Policies

Over the last decade a new development has taken place, first in the citizenship and then in the immigration literature: more and more researchers have started to quantify admission, integration and naturalization policies and to build indices that aim at measuring the restrictiveness of formal regulations. The developments in the citizenship and immigration fields have however taken place mostly independently from each other. The aim of this conference is therefore to bring together for the first time political scientists, sociologists, economists and others who work on policy indices in these two fields.

Moving beyond descriptive comparisons and conceptual discussions, the second aim of the conference is to explore ways to analyse causes and consequences of immigration and citizenship policies. How can we explain differences across countries and changes across time? Are policies effective and do they influence naturalization or immigration rates and the integration of immigrants?

The role of immigration and citizenship policies constitute an important research focus at the research area Migration and Diversity of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Ruud Koopmans and his team have developed the Indices of Citizenship Rights for Immigrants (ICRI) for currently 25 countries and the years 1980-2010. For the same period Marc Helbling and his team have built the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) Index that covers 33 OECD countries.