Working Paper

This paper generalizes the puzzle underlying my dissertation and offers conceptual and empirical innovations that contribute to its solution.

How are states’ territorial openness towards immigration and their level of internal equality related? In this paper, I make conceptual and empirical contributions to the solution of this Openness-Equality Puzzle (OEP). Conceptually, I argue that the OEP has been narrowly specified as the correlation between openness and equality variables. I contend that it is more useful to conceptualize it through the OE-Typology (OET), which is configurational at heart but can accommodate correlational perspectives and be applied to various relevant policy domains. Focusing on immigration and immigrant rights policies as crucial domains, I argue further that the resulting four ideal-types can be metaphorically described as different types of fruit. Moreover, the OET allows us to systematically connect these “fruits of immigration” to various positions in normative political theory. Empirically, based on two original analyses using existing cross-sectional and panel data, I demonstrate that openness-equality correlations can sometimes become positive and are not generally moderated by regime type. In addition, I show the added value of analyzing this data through the OET. The findings suggest that restrictive immigration regimes (closed borders) are not a necessary condition for equal immigrant rights (egalitarian societies) regardless of regime type. This challenges widespread normative assumptions and existing empirical work about the (in)compatibility of openness, egalitarianism, and democracy.