The Economics of Citizenship

With the exception of economists, social scientists have a long and detailed history of analyzing the political and social implications of citizenship acquisition by immigrants. Economists, on the other hand, have occasionally entered the field in an ad hoc manner with limited speculations about the possible earnings or employment effects that may derive from immigrant citizenship ascension. This book goes one step further by providing an economic model to predict immigrant citizenship and its impact in the labour market and the public finance spheres in a comparative framework. Five countries – Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway – with five different immigrant selection and citizenship-granting procedures are analyzed to test the robustness of the economic model. The results indicate that the immigrant selection process in turn influences a given country’s citizenship-granting process and affects the size of the economic premium derived from citizenship. Thus, the authors conclude that the design of a country’s immigration and citizenship policies influences the degree of economic integration of its potential citizens.