JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2020, VOL. 46, NO. 12, 2463–2479 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1561053 Discrimination in migration and citizenship Antje Ellermann Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada ABSTRACT KEYWORDS After decades of scholarly optimism that the immigration reforms that swept across the Global North in the postwar era had ushered in a new age of non-discriminatory migration policy, recent scholarship has challenged this narrative. This Special Issue offers an empirical and normative contribution to this critical turn in migration studies by examining the multiple ways in which immigration and citizenship policy continues to create hierarchies among migrants that mirror the intersection of non-meritocratic attributes of social group membership. We show that access to territory and citizenship is governed by highly differentiated legal distinctions that closely map onto social identities such as gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, religion, and class. This introduction maps two important and interrelated developments in the literature which this issue engages. First, the ‘politics of belonging’ remains shaped by the intersection of multiple axes of inclusion and exclusion that are (re)produced by immigration and citizenship policy. Second, whereas legal precarity has long been associated with undocumented and temporary immigration status, over the past two decades precarity has penetrated all immigration status, including those that have long been understood as secure. The article concludes with an overview of the Special Issue’s individual contributions and identifies some remaining research needs. Discrimination; stratification; precarity/precariousness; race; ethnicity; nationality; class; gender; religion; immigration policy; citizenship; exclusion; inclusion Migration and citizenship scholarship for many years celebrated the expansion of rights to immigrant groups previously excluded from access to territory and citizenship. This scholarly optimism was largely inspired by two historic policy developments. First, in the 1960s and 1970s, the settler colonial states of North America and Australasia dismantled their racially-stratified immigration systems and substituted family ties and skills for race, national origin, and religion. This prompted many scholars to pronounce the era of discriminatory immigration policy to be over. From now on, immigrant selection in liberal democracies would rest on the principles of universalism, liberalism, and non-discrimination (Fuchs 1990; Hawkins 1991; Garcia y Griego et al. 1994; Cornelius, Martin, and Hollifield 2004; Kelley and Trebilcock 1998; Joppke 2005; Reitz 1998; Borjas 1999). As the rise of skill-based immigrant selection came to be hailed as the epitome of non-discrimination, inclusion and exclusion were seen to operate solely on the basis of individualist, rather than collectivist, criteria. To quote Christian Joppke, ‘the state may consider CONTACT Antje Ellermann Antje.ellermann@ubc.ca © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group