Migration and Inequality by Mirna Safi

Author:Mirna Safi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Legal de-/recategorization of immigrants and the remaking of inequality

One of the specificities of the legal categorization of migration lies in the fact that it is assigned formally, defined, and enforced by legitimate institutions. It thus falls into the imposition type of categorization (Tilly 2003, 2005), involving more top-down techniques than participation and negotiations. Therefore, the degree to which the legal categories of migration result in dynamics of group self-identification – or groupness (Brubaker 2002) – is relatively weak. In this sense, migratory categorization is fundamentally nominalistic; refugees, guest workers, temporary workers, and even undocumented migrants are “labels” that externally define groups (Zolberg et al. 1986; Donato and Armenta 2011; Lochak 2013). They sharply differ in this respect from categories of identity – at least, they did not emerge as such. Their social construction process is straightforwardly traceable. This presents a convenience for researchers on these questions: it is indeed possible to identify specific “events” (laws, decrees, implementation of migration policies, police or legal procedures, etc.) that map the dynamics of migration legal categorization (Calavita 1992; Phillips and Massey 1999).

From a policy point of view, the nominalist character of migratory categorization provides avenues for egalitarian action through legal de- and/or recategorization. This is initially observable at the individual level; since migratory categorization is firmly connected to access to resources, as discussed above, immigrant social mobility becomes closely tied to “administrative mobility,” or mobility across legal categories. The most impressive mobility is, of course, the one that governs the passage from foreigner to national. Recent scholarship has been documenting significant effects of naturalization on the reduction of inequality between natives and immigrants, particularly in the labor market (Bratsberg et al. 2002; Fougère and Safi 2009; Corluy et al. 2011; Steinhardt 2012; Gathmann and Keller 2014; Hainmueller et al. 2015). Some of these effects are simply related to the fact that citizenship acquisition opens the way to the public sector, which constitutes a considerable share of the labor market in most economies. Some others are related to lower discrimination facing nationals in comparison to foreigners. Here, the context of EU enlargement offers an interesting case-study. Ruhs (2017) investigated the effect of acquiring EU status on the relative earnings of Central and Eastern European migrants who had been working in the UK before the 2004 enlargement. He found that EU status had a statistically significant and positive impact that is mainly channeled through easily changing jobs and career mobility. All in all, this “naturalization premium” explains the inevitable instrumental dimension of access to citizenship that may, although still marginally, lead to the selling and buying of passports as a form of redistributive process (Joppke 2019).

Although empirical work is scarcer due to a lack of data and the difficulty of disentangling strictly causal effects, de-categorization of unauthorized migration through legalization is shown to lead to similar egalitarian dynamics (Hall et al. 2010). And beyond these most powerful categorical mobilities, obtaining work permits, moving from temporary to permanent residency, and other changes in legal status probably have similar positive effects on access to resources (Lowell and Avato 2014).

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