PhD thesis defence by Eréndira León-Salvador
Why do immigrants with similar needs receive considerably different protections, path-ways to citizenship, and opportunities for collective representation? This dissertation ar-gues that the answer lies in stratified migration governance: the systematic and unequal allocation of rights and recognition across immigrant groups. Focusing empirically on European states, it examines three institutional domains in which these inequalities are produced: seeking protection, securing long-term status, and seeking recognition as col-lective political actors. Across these domains, legal design, bureaucratic mediation, and immigrants’ strategic responses contribute in different ways to determining who receives protection, who can access citizenship, and whose claims are recognized as legitimate. The dissertation consists of three studies. Chapter 2 analyzes asylum adjudication in Italy, showing how political appointments, local partisan contexts, and administrative fragmentation influence asylum recognition. Chapter 3 examines Spain’s dual-track nat-uralization regime, showing how origin-based eligibility rules structure unequal access to citizenship and divergent trajectories of naturalization and economic resilience dur-ing economic downturns, while social integration remains similar across eligibility tracks. Chapter 4 investigates refugee-led organizations in the United Kingdom and Germany, developing the concept of host-country legitimacy regimes to explain how recognition and gatekeeping condition access to consultation, advocacy, and public representation, and how organizations adapt to these constraints. By bringing asylum, citizenship, and refugee-led organizing into a common analytical frame, the dissertation shows that stratified migration governance extends beyond admission or exclusion and operates across distinct institutional domains. It contributes to debates on migration governance and political inequality by connecting legal design, bureaucratic mediation, and legitimacy regimes to unequal incorporation. This has implications for democratic inclusion: left un-addressed, these hierarchies can provide fertile ground for exclusionary political projects that turn institutional inequalities into claims about belonging, worthiness, and social incompatibility. Together, the studies show how European democracies recalibrate the boundaries of protection, membership, and participation.
Eréndira León-Salvador is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute. Her research combines fieldwork and causal inference to examine how laws shape access to protection, naturalization, and integration across immigrant groups. She holds degrees in Philosophy and Global Studies and a double-degree MA in Immigration Studies from Pompeu Fabra University and the University of Liège. She has been a visiting researcher at University College London and the Spanish National Research Council, and a visiting fellow with nccr – on the move at the University of Neuchâtel. In autumn 2026, she will join University College Dublin as a postdoctoral fellow as part of the ERC-funded RefLex project, which conducts the first comprehensive empirical study of international refugee law and its effectiveness.
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