Historical Immigration Policies: Trends and Lessons

Summary, in English

In recent years, scholars of migration have created several new immigration policy indexes, but most existing databases have limited temporal scope. They also focus, to a large extent, on the Global North. In this research note, we introduce the Historical Immigration Policy dataset (HIP), which begins to fill these gaps. We first provide an overview of the data and then describe how they offer new insights into immigration policy. We make three empirical observations. (1) On average, democracies are less open to immigration than authoritarian states but grant resident migrants more rights. (2) European states were open to immigration earlier than standard accounts of global migration assume. (3) Historically, openness to immigration and inclusive rights for resident migrants have often been complements, not substitutes.

• Author: Margaret E. Peters; Frida Boräng; Sara Kalm; Johannes Lindvall; Adrian Shin
• Department/s: Department of Political Science; LU Profile Area: Human rights
• Publishing year: 2024
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: International Studies Quarterly
• Volume: 68
• Issue: 3
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqae084
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Topic: Political Science
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1468-2478