Naturalization and Its Determinants Among Immigrants from Latin America: The Role of Dual Citizenship Rights

Abstract

This chapter presents an empirical analysis of US citizenship acquisition among immigrants from Latin America in the 1990s. While immigrants from Latin America have had historically lower propensity to naturalize than immigrants from other parts of the world, they are observed to experience the largest hikes in naturalization in the 1990s. Welfare and illegal immigration reforms that made access to public benefits and other selected rights increasingly dependent on citizenship are among the explanations that have often been offered for the surge in naturalizations in the 1990s. Other explanations include changes in immigration laws in the late 1980s, which allowed large numbers of immigrants to apply for citizenship in the mid-1990s, and anti-immigrant reform attempts (such as in California). The common denominator of the available explanations is that they are about domestic administrative and political changes, and neglect to consider those sending-country policies that might have affected immigrants' propensity to naturalize in the 1990s. Notably, between 1991 and 1996, some important Latin American sending countries (Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Brazil) changed their laws and granted their expatriates the right to naturalize in the receiving country without losing their nationality of origin. Immigrants from these countries are expected to be more likely to naturalize because of the decrease in a major cost of naturalization, specifically the need to forfeit rights in their country of origin. The analysis presented in this chapter suggests that these laws are associated with an increase of 10 percentage points in the probability of naturalization of immigrants coming from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Brazil. These effects are sizable, explaining one sixth of the overall rise in the naturalization rate of non-Mexican Latin Americans in the 1990s.