The Determinants of Cross-National Variation in Migrants' Access to Rights

States vary in the degree to which rights enjoyed by the native citizenry are conferred upon foreign nationals, and rarely do non-nationals fully enjoy comparable rights unless they naturalize. Extant studies on cross-national variations in access to citizenship are largely qualitative and limited to Western liberal democracies, making generalizable claims difficult, and there is limited theorization on the impact of exogenous global influences on citizenship and nationality laws. This cross-national study utilizes Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to adjudicate between world cultural and domestic economic, political, and demographic explanations for migrants' access to rights, using minimum residency length requirement for naturalization as a proxy measure. Results show that international non-governmental organization (INGO) membership is the strongest predictor of cross-national variance in minimum residency length requirements, suggesting that the diffusion of world cultural human rights scripts through cultural linkages with INGOs influences a state's willingness to confer the ultimate means to legal membership and rights.