Vink et al: Immigrant naturalization in the context of institutional diversity: policy matters, but to whom?

Apart from these more traditional factors known from the naturalization literature, the majorinnovative implication of our analysis is that the legal opportunity structure set by the citizenshiplaws in the country of destination matters, however only for immigrants coming from countrieswith low levels of development. We show this by introducing the indicator that captures theopenness of citizenship policy in the destination countries for first generation immigrants(MIPEX access). We observe that an increase of 1 unit on the MIPEX scale leads to a 2.4 percentincrease in the likelihood of having destination country citizenship (model 2a). On a scale thatranges from 29 to 79 in our sample of countries this can be seen as significant factor. However,once we look separately at the pool of immigrants for developed countries (2b and 3b) anddeveloping countries (2c and 3c), we observe that when the level of country of origin is taken into account, legal requirements with regard to access to citizenship only play a significant rolefor immigrants from under-developed countries. The relationship is even more pronounced thanin the analysis of all immigrants together (models 2a and 3a), being 3.5 percent for eachadditional increase in the MIPEX index...Read more