Globalcit

Citizenship is widely summarized as producing a “naturalization premium” for immigrants, but naturalization is selected: immigrants who naturalize differ in language, residence, employment, and motivation. We provide a quantitative meta-analysis of citizenship effects on immigrant earnings, synthesizing 60 preferred estimates from 31 studies. How a study separates the effect ...

Citizenship combines a formal legal bond with a State and a sense of belonging to a political community—a tension made especially visible by long-term migration, which produces populations integrated in society yet often excluded from full citizenship. Naturalization is where this tension plays out, shaped by national laws that vary widely across countries. This study examine...

This article examines contemporary citizenship reforms as institutional mechanisms through which states remake the boundaries of the people. Nationalism studies have long analysed the symbolic construction of nations, while citizenship studies have explored status, rights, migration and inclusion. Yet nationality laws remain under-theorised as legal-political technologies of ...

The reform of Germany’s Citizenship Act (StARModG), in force since 27 June 2024, marks a turning point in the country’s approach to citizenship and political inclusion by reducing the regular residence requirement for naturalisation from eight years to five and removing the general obligation to renounce previous citizenships. Drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews with Tur...

While both de facto and de jure inequalities in global mobility have been well documented, the interplay between law, global mobility, and socioeconomic inequalities remains under-conceptualised. Building on Kaufmann’s notion of motility as mobility capital, this article develops the concept of transnational mobility capital to capture an individual...