(How) Does Citizenship Matter?
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Understanding Membership in a World of Global Migration: (How) Does Citizenship Matter? Irene Bloemraad Sociology, University of California, Berkeley [email protected] Alicia Sheares Sociology, University of California Berkeley [email protected] ABSTRACT: This article synthesizes the literature on citizenship and immigration to evaluate the heft of citizenship and theorize why it matters. We examine why citizenship laws vary cross- nationally and why some immigrants acquire citizenship while others do not. We consider how citizenship influences rights, identities and participation and the mechanisms by which citizenship could influence lives. We consider frameworks, such as cultural and performative citizenship, that de-center legal status and the nation-state. Ultimately, we argue for a claims-making approach to citizenship, one that is relational, includes actors outside the individual/state dyad and views claims as rights, legitimate membership, identity and participation. Forthcoming in International Migration Review (Winter 2017). 0 In January 2014, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, hinted that Republicans might work with President Barack Obama to legalize undocumented immigrants. But, he suggested, legal residency could come without a path to citizenship. Some advocacy groups rejected any proposal barring naturalization. Others were open to negotiation, believing that the benefits of legalization outweighed the disadvantages of permanent noncitizenship. As legal theorist Peter Spiro puts it, “The real prize is legal residency, not citizenship” (2008: 159). In parallel, denationalization— the withdrawal of citizenship—is experiencing an up-tick, albeit small. The United Kingdom now strips British citizenship from dual citizens if the government feels it is warranted for the ‘public good.’ In 2013, the High Court of the Dominican Republic retroactively applied a change in birthright citizenship law to 1929, denationalizing large numbers of Haitian-origin residents born in the Dominican Republic.1 What effect does denying access to citizenship or stripping birthright citizenship have for immigrants, their descendants and the societies in which they live? Citizenship may make little practical difference in the life circumstance of residents in poor or nondemocratic countries with weak governmental systems, limited resources and political indifference to rights. In Western nations, states have more capacity to link citizenship to benefits. However, the formal set of rights, duties and assistance restricted to citizens, as compared to legal residents, appears small, while responsibilities such as paying taxes and obeying the law hold equally for citizens and noncitizens. Acquiring citizenship can come with costs. Naturalization usually involves a fee, bureaucratic paperwork, and tests of language, civic knowledge or social fit. It may entail identity shifts and giving up real or imagined ties to the homeland. Is it worth it? In the 1990s, scholars noted an extension of rights, irrespective of citizenship, in many wealthy democracies. Some worried that the trend devalued citizenship (Schuck 1998); others celebrated universal personhood norms and human rights institutionalized in international or regional bodies such as the European Court of Justice (Soysal 1994; Jacobson 1996) or extended via global diffusion processes, including to Japan (Gurowitz 1999). We know that undocumented or precarious legal status affects immigrants and their families. In this article we ask whether citizenship matters for immigrants, compared to holding secure legal residence, and we place this question in a broader survey of the literature on citizenship and immigration. We define citizenship as a form of membership in a political and geographic community. This means that citizenship is a specific legal status that signals a relationship between an individual and a 1 In 2014, a presidential decree made it possible for many to reclaim Dominican citizenship, but the administrative process is formidable, effectively rendering many stateless. The UK government has not released comprehensive data on denationalization, but one report puts the number at 27 people between 2010 and 2014. http://statewatch.org/news/2016/may/uk-ind-terr-david-anderson-QC-citizenship-and-statelessness.pdf. 1 sovereign state. In the first section of the article, we synthesize debates that ask why countries vary in their citizenship laws and why, given the laws on the books, some immigrants acquire citizenship while others do not. We note that much of this research examines immigrants in (Western) Europe, North America and Oceania. An important avenue for future research is the comparison of citizenship regimes across “Western” and “non-Western” states. This would force analysts to consider how democratic institutions, historical legacies, civil society mobilization, and notions of sovereignty, self-determination or equality shape the law on the books across regime types. Comparing and contrasting who gets citizenship in different countries could also illuminate when and how citizenship is seen in instrumental terms, or when it is seen as about identity and community, as a mark of privilege, or as a defense against exclusion, either political or social. Rather than just “Does citizenship matter?” expanding research beyond Western nations raises the question of which citizenships matter and under what conditions. We build on these ideas in the second section, where we consider how citizenship might matter. We consider the methodological challenges of studying citizenship effects and then first conceptualize citizenship as rights, participation and identity. The gaps between legal status, on one hand, and rights, participation and identity, on the other, lead some scholars to explore notions of cultural, flexible, every-day, performative and semi-citizenship, which we discuss in the final section. In these approaches, disadvantaged noncitizens can claim citizenship through everyday acts or, for wealthy migrants, through consumption. Alternatively, scholars suggest that inequalities rooted in class, gender, ethno-racial background or other sources of marginalization render formal citizenship irrelevant. At best citizenship is a nice ideal, but of little substantive help to the disadvantaged. Or, more perniciously, it undermines the ability of those in structurally vulnerable positions, irrespective of citizenship, to make common cause toward change. Throughout, we theorize the possible mechanisms by which citizenship might matter and we survey the empirical social science research on the consequences of holding citizenship for legally resident immigrants and their families. We find evidence that holding citizenship can increase political and civic engagement, socio-economic inclusion, identification, and social integration, but effects appear modest in the aggregate. Importantly, citizenship’s significance varies in patterned ways, appearing to matter more in Western countries for migrants from less democratic and poorer nations, people who also tend to be ethno-racial and religious minorities. Moving forward, researchers must investigate not just whether citizenship matters, but for whom, in what contexts, when, and why. We end by arguing for the value of a claims-making approach to citizenship. Our view of claims- making keeps front-and-center the saliency of citizenship as a legal and political status, but moves 2 researchers’ focus beyond the question of how rights align with citizenship. A claims-making approach incorporates appeals to law, but also an orientation to participation, drawing attention to migrants’ agency. Because claims-making is relational, not just between an individual and the state, it draws attention to other individuals and institutions in a polity, from the local to the national, and to those outside a state’s borders. It also incorporates attention to recognition: when do states, institutions and individuals accept immigrants’ claims to equal membership? Claims-making brings together the instrumental, performative, symbolic and discursive facets of citizenship, raising the question: What, if anything, changes when claims are made from a position of citizenship? CITIZENSHIP AS LEGAL STATUS: CONCEPTUALIZATION, SCALE, AND ACQUISITION To conceptualize citizenship, scholars must recognize the contemporary division of the world’s territory and population into sovereign states. From the realism strand of international relations, citizenship matters in a Hobbesian world of potential violence. By controlling the legitimate use of force, the state provides “membership in that human association that trumps all others through providing elementary security and protection” (Joppke 2010: 3). Hannah Arendt’s observations on the plight of German Jews, stripped of their citizenship under Nazism, remain an important caution. Without citizenship, people lose the very “right to have rights,” that is, “their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them” (Arendt 1962: 295-6). In 2016, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that at least 10 million people around the world were stateless.2 International deference to sovereignty means that states are integral to theorizing: they allocate citizenship status through their control of political-legal borders that delineate territory and the people on it. This is the case even when the ideal of protection and security is not realized,