Essays on Citizenship Policies and Immigrant Integration

Differential treatment towards minority groups in host societies and labor markets may be a result of both a governmental registration system that fosters unequal rights based on the origins of individuals and the disadvantageous attitude of local employers and the general population towards non-locals. In the first chapter, I test for differential treatment in the Chinese labor market towards rural migrants with and without urban registration, using data from the Rural to Urban Migration Survey in China. The findings indicate that despite its often-assumed large impact on the differential treatment towards rural migrants, the type of household registration (hukou) is not entirely responsible for the local-migrant differences in the total hourly earnings that are not attributable to personal characteristics. The results suggest that even the complete abolishment of the hukou system may at most eliminate only a portion of the disadvantageous treatment towards rural female migrants that is not attributable to differences in personal characteristics, and may even have no measurable impact on rural male migrants working in the paid-employment sector in Chinese urban labor markets. In the second chapter, I conduct an empirical study in order to estimate the impact of naturalization on the labor market..