Migrant Rights through Children’s Access to Citizenship

• In Event: Migrant Rights: Practices at the Local, National, and Multilateral Levels

Abstract

Given the absence of international enforcement of migrant protections, we seek to understand the scope of mechanisms that protect migrant rights, as well as the actors who implement or enforce these mechanisms. This paper examines the access of migrant children to citizenship as one means of extending migrant rights. Access to citizenship provides protections for those children. Moreover, in democracies, those migrant children may become political actors as they reach the age of majority. Children are also usually seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, regardless of the status of their parents. (The right to education regardless of status is widely implemented in wealthy western democracies, for example.) Employing a cross-national dataset on children’s access to nationality, we explore the determinants of children’s access to multiple forms of jus soli and jus domicile access to citizenship. We hypothesize that immigrant population, rule of law and regime type are important determinants in the choice to retain or modify the status quo ante. The results of the quantitative analysis will be supplemented with case studies to illustrate the causal mechanisms at play.

Authors

• Jeannette Money, University of California, Davis

• Shaina Western, University of Oxford