Beyond the Digital Divide: Exploring Immigrants’ Pathways to Digital Citizenship

Social inclusion in a digital society entails becoming digital citizens. Immigrants who move to a highly digitalized country face many challenges in doing so beyond the digital divide. This paper draws on the capability approach to highlight the necessary skills for immigrants to become digital citizens and explore the barriers that may lead to capability deprivation. Moreover, we explore the combinations of factors that lead to easy or difficult pathways to digital citizenship for skilled immigrants from diverse backgrounds and age groups. We performed a mixed-method study, including descriptive statistics, text analysis and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Our findings offer valuable insights for researchers and practitioners to understand the barriers that need to be addressed to foster social inclusion of immigrants in a digital society. This work contributes to the Information Systems (IS) research stream on social inclusion in an increasingly digitalized world.