Abstract
The conditionality of precarious non-citizenship
Luin Goldring, York University
Patricia Landolt, University of Toronto
After dominating discussions of membership and rights, the field of citizenship
studies is being transformed by scholarship on temporary migrant workers, migrant
illegalization, and deportation regimes. Non-citizenship is gaining center stage,
after years of treatment as a residual category that served as a foil to citizenship but
did not require much conceptual elaboration. Nevertheless, non-citizenship
remains under-conceptualized. Critical contributions by Linda Bosniak and other
scholars have convincingly argued that the boundaries between citizenship and
non-citizenship are not fixed in time or space, and that these boundaries are
permeable and potentially blurry. But what about non-citizenship? We propose
that non-citizenship can be analyzed drawing on insights from feminist, anti-racist
and other critical approaches to citizenship in order to examine boundary
construction within the arena of non-citizenship as well as between citizenship and
non-citizenship. In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding noncitizenship that emphasizes the conditionality of precarious legal status.
Conditionality has two dimensions. It refers to the insecurity and
contingency surrounding an individuals’ ongoing presence, and includes the formal
and practical conditions that must be met in order to retain legal status and/or
remain present in a jurisdiction. It also refers to the uncertainty of access: to the
multi-actor negotiations required to secure resources or public goods, whether or
not these are formally defined as a right of the precarious non-citizen. For people
living with different forms of precarious non-citizenship, presence and access are
largely beyond their control. Meeting the conditions necessary to retain status or
secure rights calls for ongoing work and is based on unequal relations with a range
of social actors (employers, family and friends, medical practitioners, school
officials, co-workers, etc.). The conditionality of presence and access points to noncitizenship as an assemblage of legal status in which the boundaries between
citizenship and non-citizenship can be contested, breached, negotiated, and altered
by different combinations of actors, across a variety of institutional sites and at
different scales. Drawing on our own research and reviews of work by others, we
illustrate how conditionality plays out in people’s status trajectories and encounters
with various institutional actors.
This approach to the conditionality of legal status complements, but is
distinct from, arguments about social exclusion or differential inclusion based on
the temporality of temporariness and the limited rights of non-citizens, or how
these intersect with social location and racialization. It also complement work on
neoliberal citizenship. Given the increasing number of non-citizens generated in the
context of global migrations, it is important to consider how we understand the
production and negotiation of non-citizenship. Our goal is to use this discussion to
contribute to discussions about temporary versus permanent entry policies, and the
formal and practical rights and entitlements of people with precarious status.