Immigration Policy and its Effects on Foreigners’ Political Integration

Sergi Pardos-Prado (Merton College Oxford)

31th may 2018, 17:00h, Sala de Juntes de la Facultat de Ciència Política i Sociologia de la UAB
Which type of immigration policy best fosters immigrants’ political integration? Apart from increasing evidence of the positive effects of naturalization, little is known about the interrelation between border control and integration policies affecting a significant portion of immigrants who are never eligible or decide not to naturalize. Our cross-sectional analysis reveals that inclusive labor market integration policies have positive effects on democratic satisfaction and political trust. Those effects, however, are exacerbated at moderately higher levels of restrictiveness in eligibility and border control. The long-term settlement incentives provided by this type of coconut policy (with a hard surface but a soft inside) outperform the opposite plump-type model, and all the models in between. We subsequently focus on the internal validity of this claim by exploiting the timing of the implementation of the 1962 Commonwealth Act, which dramatically changed the entry rights of immigrants for the first time in post-colonial Britain. Our interrupted time series and difference-in-differences estimates suggest that migrants just affected by the policy substantially increased their levels of democratic satisfaction, and that these effects are long-term.