The Domestic and International Logics of Protection behind Codified Migrants’ Rights

• In Event: 2429 - Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Roundtable 8

Abstract

This study aims to adjudicate between institutional and realist theoretical perspectives in understanding the determinants of cross-national variations in protections for migrants across different policy dimensions such as family reunification, labor migration, and coethnics migration, arguing that the protections for migrant subgroups that are socially constructed as “deserving” and benign to state interests will be shaped by normative global influences that are exogenous to the state, whereas the protections for subgroups that are socially constructed as “undeserving” and threatening to state interests will be largely shaped by endogenous state interest calculations that “curtail” the effects of such exogenous normative influences on state policy. The study utilizes the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project dataset (Helbling et al. 2017) which not only measures immigration policy openness, but also disaggregates these scores into types of activities, allowing for an analysis of the sub-policy dimensions in this study. The panel data analysis and complementary fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) find that normative global influences are central in shaping protections for the family members of migrants, are increasingly relevant in shaping labor migration policies, and are inconsequential for coethnic migration policies.

Author

• Ralph Ittonen Hosoki, Sophia University