Immigrant citizenship: neoliberalism, immobility and the vernacular meanings of citizenship. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (original) (raw)

Citizenship Unhinged: Chapter One--Introduction

Citizenship Unhinged explores citizenship and the politics of migration through the lens of agonistic pluralism. Notions of commonality packed within citizenship risk papering over the always fragmentary, imperfect, and re-arrangeable status of membership and identity in larger collectivities. Democratic notions of popular sovereignty and inclusive pluralism call upon us to continually examine these boundaries and potential rigidities in order to ensure a vibrant and dynamic political space which promotes meaningful contestation. The central research question addressed in this study is how we can move toward a model of democratic citizenship which recognizes exclusion yet allows space for “outsiders”, such as migrants and refugees, to challenge the naturalization and permanence of their exclusion. I rely upon insights from agonistic pluralism to conceptualize such a political space as well as to draw out the ways in which this model would differ from prevailing conceptions of democratic citizenship. However, this study moves beyond a theoretical account through extensive field interviews conducted with immigration advocates and activists in the US, which allows me to examine the feasibility of fostering such spaces out of our current political realities.

Citizenship and Immigration: Pathologies of a Progressive Philosophy

New Community, 1997

Across Western Europe and North America, ideas about citizenship have become central to understanding the problems involved in immigration and the integration of ethnic minorities and likewise to formulating their resolution in public policy. Academics for their part have reflected this growing political interest by rediscovering citizenship as a theoretical concept, going well beyond its formal legal meaning into discussions about its symbolic, affective and moral dimensions: citizenship as membership or belonging; citizenship as participation or duty. The present article attempts to bridge the gap between the two arenas of policy and theory and to show how abstract, normative discussions of citizenship can bear a relation to immigration questions in practice. The scene is set with a theoretical discussion of the role of normative ideas and values in explaining the policy process and the emergence of institutions for dealing with specific public problems. This theoretical model is then applied to France (1981–1995), where a strong, abstractly formulated frame of citizenship enabled a new policy response to the growing political problem of immigration and integration in the country. A number of adverse and restrictive effects have become evident. The French scenario is then compared to other national cases, namely Britain, other West European states, and Canada and the USA, where a similar concentration of interest in the issue has resulted in somewhat different responses. The account moves towards the establishment of a single explanatory framework that may account for national variation in policy‐making, and address the issue of whether cross‐national convergence is occurring. The relationship between debate on citizenship and the apparent end of equality as a policy goal is discussed, and finally the article moves on to suggest a comparative research agenda.

Who Has a Right to Rights? Citizenship's Exclusions in an Age of Migration

Globalization and Human Rights, 2002

Noncitizen populations pose a quandary for the administration of human rights because human rights norms have generally been enacted within the nation-state system and administered as the rights of citizens. While the human rights regime is international, its greatest influence has been to establish standards for states’ obligations vis-à-vis their own citizenries. Hence, even in Western states that are vocal champions of human rights, policymakers debate the extent to which they are responsible for protecting the full range of human rights for noncitizen migrants, particularly migrants lacking state authorization. Universal personhood is subordinated to citizenship as a basis for rights. The violations and vulnerabilities of migrant rights in the U.S. can be understood as extensions of a cultural logic in which even human rights are framed as entitlements exclusive to citizens. My analysis suggests that popular and political discourse in this context conceptualizes citizenship less in objective terms (as a legal status) than as a relational identity defined in opposition to “aliens,” particularly in reference to labor migrants from less developed states. This constructed opposition—positioning migrants as lacking a legitimate claim to rights—has two dimensions. The first dimension of the citizen-alien opposition rests on logics grounded in liberal notions of contract and property that position migrants as criminals, trespassers, and usurpers who have forfeited claims to rights by virtue of individual breaches of contract or law. The second reflects a neocolonial logic that legitimates differential claims to rights in accordance with an individual’s position in a racialized international division of labor, equating the privileges that accompany First World status with a greater entitlement to rights. These oppositions between citizens and aliens pose obstacles for migrants’ claims to rights based on universal personhood, even within a state that formally supports international human rights norms.

Citizenship and Immigration: Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Challenges to the Nation-State

Annual Review of Sociology, 2008

Citizenship encompasses legal status, rights, participation, and belonging. Traditionally anchored in a particular geographic and political community, citizenship evokes notions of national identity, sovereignty, and state control, but these relationships are challenged by the scope and diversity of international migration. This review considers normative and empirical debates over citizenship and bridges an informal divide between European and North American literatures. We focus on citizenship within nation-states by discussing ethnic versus civic citizenship, multiculturalism, and assimilation. Going beyond nation-state boundaries, we also look at transnational, postnational, and dual citizenships. Throughout, we identify methodological and theoretical challenges in this field, noting the need for a more dynamic and comprehensive understanding of the inter-relationships between the dimensions of citizenship and immigration. 153 Click here for quick links to Annual Reviews content online, including: • Other articles in this volume • Top cited articles • Top downloaded articles • Our comprehensive search Further ANNUAL REVIEWS Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:153-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON -HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARIES on 08/25/11. For personal use only. 154 Bloemraad · Korteweg · Yurdakul Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:153-179. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON -HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARIES on 08/25/11. For personal use only.

Understanding Membership in a World of Global Migration: (How) Does Citizenship Matter?

International Migration Review, 2017

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 a relational process of recognition, includes actors outside the individual/state dyad, and focuses on claims to legitimate membership.

Transnationalism and migrants’ imaginings of citizenship

Environment and Planning A, 2006

Recent academic debates on transnationalism, immigration, and citizenship have largely ignored migrants' perspectives on citizenship. On the basis of ethnographic research in Germany and the United States between 1998 and 2001, we examine the values and meanings contemporary migrants assign to national citizenship and their citizenship practices. We argue that dominant discourses of liberal democratic citizenship and migrants' situated subject positions condition and mediate in complex ways their imaginings and practices of citizenship. We discuss how and why migrants' perspectives conform in significant ways across these two countries, while also varying among migrants. National citizenship remains meaningful in their struggle for mobility across borders, for equal protection under the law, and for equal access to social and political rights. However, migrants are also aware of the discrepancy between promises of equity and fairness associated with liberal democratic ci...

Citizenships under Construction: Affects, Politics and Practices

COLLeGIUM, 2017

‘Citizenships under Construction: Affects, Politics and Practices’ presents a selection of extended papers presented at the HCAS Symposium on Citizenship and Migration, held in October 2014. With contributions by Anne Marie Fortier, Bridget Byrne, Anu Koivunen and Olli Löytty, the volume aims to further interdisciplinary dialogue on citizenship in the context of increased global migration. It provides unique insight into the ongoing theorization of the complicated workings of power and affects in constructions of race, gender and class, in the shaping of narratives of history and nation, and in the creation of hierarchies of belonging and deservedness.

Xenophobia, Belonging and Agency: Citizenship in Immigrant America

New Political Science, 2018

Neoliberal globalization's promise of economic growth-along with war, famine, environmental disasters, and other social dislocating events-has led to mass migration under dire conditions. Immigrants have responded with remarkable resiliency and strength, building their own path to flourish and claim citizenship, often in hostile or xenophobic host societies. In this symposium, we explore and expand the concept of citizenship beyond legalistic frameworks that restrict citizenship to state-granted status. The articles, which employ mixed methods and an interdisciplinary approach, explore how immigrants redefine citizenship in America as an expansive set of practices emerging from persistent and coordinated demonstrations of engagement and resistance. In the context of xenophobia, immigrant engagement and resistance can be seen as reclaiming forms of citizenship, in concrete and daily practices evident in families and communities, institutional interactions, and city and state policy victories. In short, immigrants are democratizing notions of citizenship in rejection of the standard definition and legal framework, and despite targeted attacks on immigrants and resurgent nativism. The six articles showcased in this symposium show how immigrants, and immigrant allies, reconstitute and redefine their own membership and belonging in a host nation, even while under threat. The shift to a more virulent nativism in the last decade has fundamentally changed the conversations around American political institutions, civil discourse, and American identity, building on historical traditions of anti-immigrant sentiments and policy. The intersection of this anti-immigrant rhetoric with the Trump presidency, which is deeply enmeshed in the language of misogyny and racism, has given these traditions a sharper edge and urgency, and exposed the open and persistent wound that xenophobia inflicts upon the national identity and collective psyche of the American electorate. The wholesale criminalization of immigrants-particularly the undocumented-since the mid-2000s has led to the incarceration and detention of people for civil misdemeanors and minor crimes, the deportation of more than five million immigrants, and the normalization of a daily life of terror and heartache in the lives of countless individuals, families and communities. Since the election of Trump, the full state apparatus has been weaponized and escalated these tactics to frightening levels. The Trump administration tactics have led to raids at workplaces and in immigrant communities far from the border, the targeting of immigrant rights leaders for