Schmid Comparative Migration Studies (2020) 8:25 regarding immigration policies is one of expansive openness. However, we can imagine a situation in which national labour markets start following a closed protectionist logic. Peters (2017) shows, for instance, that in reaction to greater openness to trade, firms move their production abroad, taking their jobs with them. Such firms then demand more closed immigration policies at home as the need for migrant labour decreases. The legal logic of the liberal state manifests in “legal-constitutional constraints on the executive” (Joppke 1998) by independent judiciaries on both the international and the national level. Because of these constraints, in liberal democracies rights to family reunification cannot be significantly curbed and may acquire an expansive dynamic (Joppke 1998, 2001; see also Hollifield 1992, p. 94). A case in point is the liberalisation of family reunification after officially terminating temporary guest worker schemes in countries like Germany after the oil crisis in the 1970s. Rather than (re-)uniting in their countries of origin, the families of migrant workers did so in the countries of destination. Courts intervened, and executive and administrative authorities had to follow suit (Hollifield 2004, p. 895). Policies targeting asylum seekers and refugees also find grounding in liberal norms. Some of these norms, namely the principle of non-refoulment, operate at the international level (Neumayer 2005, pp. 56–7). Independent judiciaries in democratic nation-states often further facilitate the access of those with claims to asylum and refugee status. As with family reunification, in this realm courts again appear as the phalanx of political liberalism. However, asylum and family reunification have become increasingly politicised over time. Thus, an illiberal variant of the legal logic seems possible when certain political players are in power, and especially when strong illiberal political forces hijack the liberal state and the independent nature of the judiciary (which is not so hard to imagine in the current populist era). Thus understood, economic liberalism and political liberalism can be interpreted as two parallel threads knit into the same fabric of liberal democracies. They are friends, not enemies. Rather, their common enemy is closed and exclusive illiberalism. One implication of this proposition is that immigration policies in all their aspects – labour migration, family reunification and asylum and humanitarian protection – should be positively correlated to a high degree; they should be reducible to a single consistent dimension of IRO. In addition, for democracies the liberal mode can be assumed to be the natural mode; some illiberal element or actor must be added to derail this inherent liberal tendency. This liberal logic underpinning immigration policies is further amplified by strong economic and political constraints imposed by globalised (labour) markets and liberal international institutions (cf. Sassen 1996). These factors lead to a ‘liberal bias’ in immigration policies – a gap between the restrictionist bent of public opinion and liberal immigration policy-making (Cornelius et al. 2014; Lutz 2019). Thus, contrary to what many believe to be an age of restrictionism, we can expect that immigration regimes should exhibit an overall liberalising trajectory over recent decades. To theorize citizenship regimes, I go back to Hollifield’s usage of the term political liberalism. It combines rights-based liberalism with the collective right of (native) democratic communities to national self-determination. This conception of political liberalism is, therefore, intimately connected to concepts of nationhood and citizenship. Against this background, I suggest that citizenship regimes are, first and foremost, Page 7 of 20