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Abstract

While a growing body of work investigates the social rights of immigrants, there is a notable lack of comparative research on the topic that includes countries in the Global South. In this paper we argue that existing approaches often lack reproducibility, comparability, and adaptability beyond the cases that they focus on. To remedy this shortcoming, we propose a three-dimensional conceptualization of immigrant social rights that takes into account differences between legal categories of migrants, between types of welfare benefits, and between types of restrictions. Applying this conceptualization, we offer the Immigrant Social Rights Dataset (ImmigSR), a set of quantitative comparative measures of de jure immigrant social rights covering 39 countries in Europe, Latin America, North America, Oceania and Southeast Asia for the years 1980–2018. Our analyses show commonalities as well as differences between world regions. Rights are more inclusive in the Global North than in the Global South. There is however a slight trend towards convergence, with rights retrenchment in the North and expansions in the South. Across all regions, temporary migrant workers and asylum seekers are the groups that are granted the least comprehensive set of rights. Depending on the dimension that is taken into focus, there are however also more nuanced intra-regional differences. The findings confirm the usefulness of a multi-dimensional conceptual approach to measuring immigrant social rights in a diverse set of cases.