Movements of migration within and beyond citizenship (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Joined Destiny of Migration and European Citizenship
In this paper I try to unpack the nest of issues that recent waves of migrations bring to the floor and show how immigration plays a crucial role in the making or unmaking democratic citizenship in post-national Europe. Although recurrent terrorist attacks make harder and harder for many opinion-makers and ordinary citizens to associate immigration with positive opportunity for European citizenship, the paper argues that the right to free movement and of emigration is embedded in the nucleus of principles and ideals that makes for European citizenship since the Treaty of Rome. Subsequently, the paper introduces the category of statelessness and uses it to tackle the problem of the legal and political evolution furthered by the practice of rights within the horizon that is defined by the ideal of a European post-national citizenship. Refugees and immigrants are interpreted as a challenge and an opportunity in the spirit of Hannah Arendt’s intuition that citizenship brings to the floor an unsolvable paradox between the human and the political. The conclusion of the paper argues that stateless people—the migrants—personify this paradox as they can be the locus of a new political practice that signals an incipient form of citizenship, truly disconnected from the nation as the European citizenship aspires to be. The denial of many civil and political rights to undocumented immigrants and the detention of thousands of migrants in the camps located at the peripheries of Europe contrast radically with the community of rights that Europe has sought to be since its inception.
Citizenship, Migration and the Reassertion of National Identity
Citizenship Studies, 2005
Faced with increasing and diverse migratory pressures in the post Cold-War period, European states have created an increasingly complex system of civic stratifications with differential access to civil, economic and social rights depending on mode of entry, residence and employment. Now at the beginning of the 21 st century, expansion and contraction of rights have occurred within a managerialist approach which, though recognising the need for immigration, applies an economic and political calculus not only to labour migration but also to forms of migration more closely aligned to normative principles and human rights, such as family formation and reunification and asylum. At the same time, states are demanding affirmation of belonging and loyalty, leading to greater emphasis on obligations in the practice of citizenship. The first part of the paper traces the evolution of a managerialist regime and its consequences for the reconfiguration of spaces of citizenship. The second section examines the development of new contracts of settlement and the management of diversity as the state reasserts its national identity and sovereignty.
Impossibilities of Social Citizenship: On Statelessness of Migrants
Security, Insecurity and Migration in Europe, ed. G. Lazaridis, Farnham; Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 239-257., 2011
Productivity rates in the aging societies of the EU member states are increasingly possible to maintain due to migrant labour force filling up positions of undervalued and low-paid work, especially in construction, manufacturing, and the feminized sectors of care and domestic work. Migrants tend to increasingly occupy precarious jobs, often related to black market economies with no or low level of security and with poor recognition of their skills. Also those officially employed on the basis of different types of work permit find themselves in the grips of the flexibilization of the market reality where they are forced to accept vulnerable, short-term, low-paid and low skilled jobs. The actual demand for migrant labour remains poorly reflected in state policies, which, in turn, define and regulate the migrants’ positions primarily in terms of limitations and closure. The chapter argues that current migration and labour market policies sustain migrants in “rightless” positions where their security is not respected . Ensuring migrants the “right to have rights” (Arendt) is thematized as a precondition for any serious attempt to claim migrants’ integration as politics of security and of equality, not subordination. Drawing on the concept of social citizenship, the paper questions the contemporary rationale of migration and labour policies and problematizes what appear as “strategies of circular conditioning” of migrants’ lives. Migrants’ narratives obtained through biographical narrative interviews in Slovenia are used to pinpoint the various condition-setting mechanisms (work permits, the quota system, residence permits, access to social services etc.) that restrain migrants’ rights. Furthermore, the paper debates social citizenship both as utopian imagery and a point of reference that can facilitate the developing of the “needs discourse” pertaining to migrant populations. It explores how social citizenship could function as a concept that accommodates the irreversibility of social rights that have been in decline since the “crisis” of the welfare state.
Migration and Citizenship: Rights and Exclusions (in Social Protection and Migration, 2011)
Migration and Social Protection
In a time of increasing migration, citizenship as a form of classification has come to assume the kind of importance once reserved for other kinds of discriminatory and exclusionary classifications of status. Distinctions in ancient times or in ante-bellum United States between free men and slaves, in French and Portuguese colonial empires between évolués or assimilados and other colonial subjects, in Nazi-occupied Europe between Aryans and Jews and Roma, or racial classifications in Apartheid South Africa, were all means of granting or denying social and political rights. Although citizenship has many other aspects, for migrants its primary significance is the extent to which it enables them to gain access to a territory and to rights within it. In the contemporary world, having one’s human rights protected and enforced is usually dependent upon one’s status in a state. The rights of non-citizens sometimes appear to be legitimately overlooked when no particular body or state is assigned obligations towards them in the place where they are living. This can be seen most clearly in the case of migrants, both those moving to a country in which they will be non- citizens and those who, in being described as newcomers, are deprived of full citizenship. Migrants’ rights vary according to the state within which they find themselves, and how they are categorized or classified in those states: for example, whether they are refugees or migrant workers, and according to the state’s current policies about these groups. International conventions on refugees make it clear that people rec- ognized as refugees should enjoy broadly the same rights as citizens in their country of refuge. However, the threshold of a grant of refugee status is extremely high, and governments often try to avoid these responsibilities by requiring unrealistic levels of proof of persecution or danger. Many more international migrants, however, do not seek refugee status but travel for the purpose of finding employment. Of the estimated 214 million migrants in the world today, about 16 million are refugees (United Nations, 2009). Rights of labour migrants have been even more contested than those of refugees, and despite attempts to produce international agreements on their rights, little has been ratified. This chapter explores the rights of different kinds of migrants in the context of contemporary and historical understandings of citizenship. Its purpose is to explore some key assumptions contained in contemporary uses of the term, especially as they pertain to welfare rights. By focusing on these, we try to show that many rights that are taken for granted are linked to, though not necessarily dependent on, citizenship, and that the absence of citizenship status can enable governments to limit the rights of non-citizens, particularly migrants.
Nordic journal of migration research, 2021
The book Migration, Borders and Citizenship: Between Policy and Public Spheres, edited by Ambrosini, Cinalli, and Jacobson, is a volume that is both theoretically challenging and empirically rich. It proposes to address the relationship between borders and citizenship in a multilevel governance setting where policy at different levels interacts-in cooperation or in conflict-with the public sphere and its various actors. The book gathers authors from different disciplines (chiefly sociologists but also lawyers and geographers) who, resorting to different qualitative methods, tackle a wealth of interesting issues, such as inter alia: borders in the European Union (EU) and in the larger Euro-Mediterranean region (Chapter 3), the contorted situation of the Dreamers in the United States (Chapter 4), the roles of medical expertise in the EU's hotspots (Chapter 7), and the narratives surrounding the construction of the French-Italian border in a historical perspective (Chapter 8). This brief review does not do justice to the variety of contributions, but selects some of the main take-aways the book offers for academics and students interested in migration and governance. In the lines that follow, I first present the theoretical contribution of the book and notably the original conceptualization of borders as seams stitching entities together rather than dividing them. Second, I outline some of the empirical findings of interest, which I group in two categories: one that reflects the local turn in migration policies while nuancing the role of local authorities, and another that provides insights in the activities of nonorganized civil society as actors of solidarity. From the theoretical standpoint, the book proposes a range of approaches to the bordercitizenship relationship. While borders are looked at as limits between territories, which consequently determines membership to the citizenry, they are also considered as less tangible walls that may erect within the state and entail different treatment between natives and foreigners or between different categories of citizens. But, the key conceptual contribution
In 2012, 150 undocumented immigrants marched from Paris to Strasbourg, traversing 1900 kilometres and protesting in 20 cities. Based on participant observation, this chapter argues that the European march is an expression of ‘non-citizen citizenship’. I show how the marchers enact, envision and experience non-citizen citizenship through symbolic practices like crossing borders. For the sans-papiers, the march turned out to be a collective experiment in creating new forms of political belonging and membership beyond the nation-state. Yet, activists’ diverging national realities exacerbated internal movement solidarity. This case study thus simultaneously points to post-national citizenship while re-confirming the nation-state’s resilience.
Dis-Citizenship and Migration: A Critical Discourse-Analytical Perspective
Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 2013
Inclusion and exclusion of migrants are renegotiated in the European Union on almost a daily scale: ever new policies defining and restricting immigration (usually from third world countries) are proposed by European member states. Thus, a return to ever more local policies and ideologies can be observed on many levels: traditions, rules, languages, visions, and imaginaries are affected. In this article, I suggest that we are currently experiencing a re/nationalisation in spite of (or perhaps because of) multiple globalising tendencies. Thus, citizenship and language tests are being or have already been introduced to all European nation states, thus emphasizing a revival of “the national language” as constitutive for access to employment, housing, or education and promising achievement of successful “integration.” In this way, migrants are perceived as having a “deficit” even if manifold tests provide evidence that native speakers (of German, for example) might also lack many language skills.