Why do some countries enact structural reforms to accommodate large-scale immigration while others maintain exclusionary policies? Why do some states expand migrant rights while others curtail them? Based largely on European and North American case studies, the dominant scholarship on immigration and citizenship has focused on three types of variables: culture, domestic political elites, and international norms. These works tend to assume that the countries in question have relatively open immigration policies to begin with and thus do not sufficiently explain patterns among so-called negative cases of immigration. Recent studies focusing on East Asia point us toward an important intervening variable: civil society. But the presence of civil society alone does not explain divergent immigrant incorporation patterns. Rather than assume that civil-society actors are unified in their goals, world views, or strategies, I introduce the concept of civic legacies to refer to the ideas, networks, and strategies applied in past struggles for democratic inclusion that differentially shape the direction of immigrant incorporation and the potential for structural reform.