Social Protection of Migrants and Citizenship Rights

This chapter discusses the relationship between citizenship and migration in the context of social protection. It reviews existing literature on the social rights of immigrants, which has noted that over the course of the last century, formal citizenship has become decreasingly important for immigrants’ access to social benefits and programs, and that instead, most Western welfare states now use residence as the key criterion to establish applicants’ social entitlements. It then argues that there are three reasons to question that this residence-based model offers appropriate social protection today or can do so in the future. First, formal equality between all residents in existing systems does not guarantee social equality between native-born citizens and immigrants. Second, the residence-based model is poorly positioned to accommodate three categories of migrants who are increasingly numerous: undocumented migrants, refugee claimants, and - arguably most importantly - temporary migrants. And third, the increasing political relevance of welfare chauvinism and anti-immigrant populism makes it difficult to maintain the residence-based model, let alone to adopt additional adjustments to promote the social protection of immigrants.