Is Sharing Citizens Hazardous? Event History Modeling Dual Citizenship in Asia

• In Event: Poster Session: New Directions in Citizenship & Migration Research

Abstract

What are the chances of Asian “holdout” countries liberalizing their dual citizenship policies? While the extant literature finds a policy diffusion effect for dual citizenship liberalization among adjacent countries, a significant portion of Asian countries maintain an anomalous resistance to this trend towards formally recognizing transnational lives. Although intraregional migration within Asia has nearly doubled over the past three decades and the region hosts the second-highest number of international migrants (after Europe), Asia has the smallest share of countries where simultaneous state memberships are even legally possible. This has created a paradox: growing cross-border migration but stagnant dual citizenship liberalization. I hypothesize that, in Asia’s case, the prevailing weakness of catalyzing conditions that have led to dual citizenship policy liberalizations elsewhere are due to a regional pattern of diffusion hesitancy vis-à-vis policies based upon “new” Western-origin individual rights—including dual citizenship. These "new" rights may be deemed incongruous with traditional norms of stability, sensitivities to sovereignty, and the challenges posed by geopolitical rivalries. Adding a temporal component to analyzing spatial clusters of resistance, this paper employs event history model parametric estimates to test the durational aspect of regional dual citizenship policy discrepancies. Results indicate a lower likelihood of liberalization for “holdout” countries in Asia than in all other regions, while model estimates show the global probability of dual citizenship liberalization likely peaked after 2000 and is currently on a downward trajectory, thereby calling into question the teleological assumptions of the dual citizenship liberalization convergence theory. These findings raise important questions about the salience of de-globalizing forces, convergence saturation, and the lack of an international consensus on multiple citizenships that may leave remaining “holdouts” with few incentives to reach a liberalization tipping point.

Author

• Ken Silverman, CUNY Graduate Center