SynthesisProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2026
The economic returns to citizenship: Evidence from a meta-analysis.
Synthesis in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Citizenship is widely summarized as producing a "naturalization premium" for immigrants, but naturalization is selected: immigrants who naturalize differ in language, residence, employment, and motivation. We provide a quantitative meta-analysis of citizenship effects on immigrant earnings, synthesizing 60 preferred estimates from 31 studies. How a study separates the effect of citizenship from selection into citizenship-its identification strategy-explains more variation in estimates than destination country, citizenship regime, or any other study feature we code. Averaging published estimates with a multilevel random-effects model yields a pooled premium of 9.9% (95% CI 5.1 to 14.9), and 11.0% (95% CI 5.7 to 16.6) when pooling within study-country cells. But this average conceals sharp differences across research designs. The randomized encouragement study relying on a lottery to overcome selection implies a near-zero effect of 1.9% (95% CI -1.3 to 5.3); the regression-discontinuity study yields 11.3% (95% CI 5.2 to 17.8); estimates from policy reforms and within-unit panels are positive on average but too imprecise to distinguish from either zero or the pooled average; and observational instrumental-variable estimates average 53.0% (95% CI 27.6 to 83.5). Excluding observational instrumental-variable estimates reduces the pooled premium to 6.0% (95% CI 3.8 to 8.2). Reanalyzing the randomized trial data shows the same pattern: Experimental estimates are near zero, while an observational difference-in-differences comparison based on self-selected citizenship uptake implies a 9.6% gain (95% CI 4.0 to 15.5) four years post lottery, a bias standard pretrend tests do not detect. The published citizenship premium is positive, but its size and causal interpretation depend on research design.
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