Citizenship ceremonies around the world have a large degree of similarity, with oaths taken, flags waved and general celebrations invoked. The path leading to this ceremony differ wildly around the world however, whether in terms of one’s length of residence or language capabilities.
A new study from Stanford University explores these various citizenship landscapes to try and uncover which is best, those which provide a tough pass with citizenship seen as a sufficient prize to incentivize people, or those who take a more relaxed approach and regard new citizens as essentially co-creating a better society with existing citizens.
The research explores around thirty years worth of data on many thousands of immigrants in Switzerland, and discovered that those immigrants who did manage to naturalize, tended to earn more money than their peers who had not obtained Swiss citizenship. What’s more, this ‘citizenship boost’ was biggest for those people who would ordinarily face the biggest disadvantages in the labor market.
Equipped for success
In many ways, this seems wholly intuitive, as citizens of most countries gain a range of benefits in the labor market, whether in terms of access to educational opportunities, easier job application processes or even simply the peace of mind that comes from knowing your status in your home is secure so you can invest in your future.
The researchers accept that it’s not easy to make reliable comparisons as those who gain citizenship are often fundamentally different to those who do not. Indeed, there is sufficient differences between successful and unsuccessful applicants to make comparisons challenging. Elements such as work ethic or the amount of resources one can call upon can all play a part in one’s success, both in navigating the citizenship process but also in life more broadly.
“To accurately assess the benefits of citizenship it is essential to compare naturalized and non-naturalized immigrants that are similar in all characteristics but for their passport,” the researchers say.
In many ways, Switzerland is perhaps a paradise for analyzing such matters, because many Swiss towns put citizenship applications to a public vote for a prolonged period between 1970 and 2003. This adds a greater degree of complexity to the procedure in most countries, as applicants could have been denied citizenship as much by chance as on their particular merits. The researchers believe this allows them to make a much fairer comparison between people.
The country also has extensive records on things such as earnings and even perceived trustworthiness via the country’s pension system. This allows the researchers to gauge the fortunes of people before and after citizenship.
Sliding doors
The researchers began by identifying the individuals who had narrowly won or lost their citizenship bid. They then looked back over the past five years worth of data for those people to ensure they had similar incomes and so on. This then allowed them to explore the post-citizenship landscape, and it emerged that those who obtained citizenship began to pull away from their unfortunate peers in terms of income, with the gap widening with each passing year.
Thus, what began as a gap of around 3,000 Swiss francs grew to a gap of around 8,000 after a decade. This corresponded to an earnings gap of over 5.5% per year.
“In sum, these findings provide causal evidence that citizenship is an important catalyst for economic integration, which benefits both immigrants and host communities,” the researchers say.
The researchers hypothesized that this gap was caused largely by the negation citizenship provided of the discrimination many migrants face in the labor market. It’s common in Switzerland for one’s citizenship status to be as prominent in a job application as other visible characteristics of that individual. Indeed, because of the difficulty of the citizenship process, for many it’s seen as a credential for that individual that they have undergone it.
Overcoming discrimination
Employment data seemed to support this hypothesis, as people who would ordinarily face discrimination on account of their faith, their country of origin or those in precarious, low-wage occupations, also experienced a boost due to their citizenship. For instance, this was noticeably evident for immigrants from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, both groups of whom have experienced anti-Muslim discrimination in the past, yet both saw average earnings gains of 10,721 Swiss francs per year after gaining citizenship.
“The finding that the benefits are disproportionally larger for poorer and more marginalized immigrants speaks to the important role that citizenship policies can play in facilitating more equal access to employment opportunities for immigrants,” the researchers say.
While the researchers readily admit that our work life is but one aspect of our lives, it is nonetheless a hugely important element in our overall health and wellbeing. As such, the authors believe that their findings shed a new light on the role citizenship can play in helping assimilate people into their new home.
Rather than being the purely private issue it’s often perceived as, it can indeed have a societal impact if it helps people make a greater contribution to society. As such, if citizenship can help people to overcome discrimination and therefore aid their social mobility, then perhaps there is a strong case for governments to make obtaining citizenship less laborious than it so often is today.
