This chapter sums up the book’s key theoretical claims and empirical findings and then explores the extension of its argument beyond the cases examined in the empirical chapters. It first applies the argument to additional migration-related policy areas, including asylum, refugee resettlement, migration control, immigrant integration, and citizenship policy. The chapter then ventures beyond the national level of policy making by using the insulation framework to shed light on the logic of immigration policy making in the European Union, followed by subnational policy making. The chapter concludes with an appraisal of the future politics of immigration policy.

Chapter 3 gathers a variety of restrictive trends in the acquisition and loss of citizenship under the umbrella of “earned citizenship”, which is not a “right”, as in the liberal past, but “privilege”. “More difficult to get” and “easier to lose” are complementary sides of the same neoliberal-cum-nationalist logic of making citizenship more exclusive and conditional on the immigrant`s individual behavior and desert. Being neoliberal and nationalist in tandem, earned citizenship is the clearest expression of a neoliberal nationalism. Earned citizenship`s third element, to be “less in value”, seems to contradict the fact that a rich society`s “citizenship premium” (Milanovic 2016) has never been bigger than today. However, the same citizenship that re-nationalizing states have claimed to strengthen by making it more selective, has become internally devalued through its infiltration by immigration law and a neoliberal welfare-to-workfare devolution.