Tracing the Pathways for Labor Migrants in Thirty States: The Nexus between Immigration Regulations and Immigrant Rights

Academia and policy worlds consider the skill-based discrimination of migrants at entry as legitimate and unproblematic. Yet, the apparently neutral criterion of “skills” is under increasing scrutiny and, we contend, rightly so: its blurriness is impractical for comparative purposes and conceals that selection endures after immigration. With a new dataset encompassing thirty diverse states from Asia, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean, we examine how entry regulations connect to immigrant rights and access to permanent residence. We identify four clusters of countries displaying varying relations of immigration selections at entry with packages of rights and the possibility to settle, thereby largely defining the trajectories that are possible for different categories of migrant workers. Variation matters: some states carefully select by “skills” at entry and control access to rights, but several others provide fairly equal rights to ample groups of migrants regardless of skills.