Citizenship
Definition: Citizenship is both a formal status denoting rights (political rights, in particular)
and a more general concept for understanding social membership. Some immigrants
become naturalized citizens; immigration has also transformed the meaning of citizenship.
For most people citizenship is understood as an identifier of national belonging, codified as
a legal status and signalled by the passport one holds: “I am a Canadian citizen”. Such
belonging has complex and comprehensive ramifications, however – which means that
citizenship as a concept functions at the core of several social-science fields. Some
conventional ways of thinking about citizenship – in particular, the ostensibly natural
association between membership in a nation and the possession of a set of rights – have
come under severe strain as a consequence of mass migration (e.g. Joppke 2010). In
idealized understandings of the nation-state, individuals have a single, stable national
membership that determines rights and constitutes identity (Gellner 1983; Castles and
Davidson 2000). Large-scale immigration, however, poses a number of challenges that
connect with citizenship: under what conditions can immigrants (“foreigners”) become
citizens? What consequences follow if immigrants can’t or don’t become citizens? What
consequences follow when they can and do? Citizenship is also a means of exclusion (not
only inclusion): lack of citizenship is, for many would-be immigrants, an insurmountable
obstacle that prevents migration to the country they might choose.
Bosniak (2008) identifies four distinct components of citizenship, each with its own
complexities and ambiguities (cf. Bloemraad, Korteweg and Yurdakul 2008; Jenson 2007).
First, citizenship is a matter of formal legal status, as with the passport one holds (or could
hold). Second, citizenship is a matter of rights – at an earlier stage, civil and political rights
(e.g. to own property and to vote), and in the later Marshallian (1950) conception, social
rights as well (the right to a minimal economic/material condition facilitating participation in
the communal life of a society). Third, citizenship denotes active engagement or
participation in democratic self-governance. In recent years, this “participatory citizenship”
has been located not just in the political sphere but in a wider range of institutions,
including those conventionally considered “private”. Fourth, citizenship has a subjective
component that captures people’s sense of identification and solidarity. This affective
dimension helps bind members of a nation-state (typically on the basis of the common
culture and language that help constitute the nation), but it also describes the ties felt by
members of other types of collectivities, including some that reach beyond national borders.
There are significant disjunctures among these four aspects of citizenship, and the
disjunctures are highlighted and intensified by mass immigration, particularly in democratic
countries where political legitimacy derives from the “consent of the governed” (Bauböck
1994). The possession and exercise of rights is not limited to those who hold citizenship as a
formal status; Bosniak (2008) writes persuasively about the “citizenship of aliens”. Noncitizens commonly have extensive (citizenship) rights, even some of the political rights that
one might imagine are the distinctive preserve of (formal) citizens; non-citizens cannot
voting in national elections (though in some countries they may vote in local/municipal
ballots), but voting is only one political right among many and is arguably not the most
important one. In addition, many natives, whose legal status affords them rights, do not
exercise them, and some “foreigners” have higher levels of actual political and civic
engagement (e.g. helping with candidates’ campaigns) than some status citizens – a point
that extends even to undocumented immigrants, who sometimes engage in political
mobilization despite insecure status and residence rights (Monforte and Dufour 2011).
Immigration adds in obvious ways to the numbers of people for whom these ambiguities
arise; it also extends affective identifications in ways that transcend national borders (thus
“transnational citizenship”).
In some countries access to formal citizenship (via “naturalization”) is relatively easy,
requiring little more than a sufficient period of legal residence, some language competence
and a declaration of loyalty (as well as a typically hefty application fee). Canada, an
“immigration country” to an even greater degree than the US, actively encourages
naturalization among immigrants and consequently experiences a higher rate of
naturalization than in the US where a laissez-faire approach prevails (Bloemraad 2006).
Naturalization confers rights and benefits and, in the minds of many, is supposed to
symbolize the achievement of a new national identity (as against a merely instrumental
desire to gain the rights and benefits). States sometimes pass laws that have unintended
consequences in this regard, as when the USA in 1996 reformed its welfare laws to exclude
permanent residents who had not become citizens – resulting in an increase in
naturalization applications (some of which no doubt did not reflect genuine adoption of a
new loyalty). On the other hand, naturalization can lead to new loyalties, rather than
merely reflecting a completed process (Schuck 1998).
In other settings the “national” aspect of citizenship involves less permeable boundaries. It
was long more difficult for Turkish immigrants and their children to become naturalized
German citizens, in part because of a more exclusive understanding of what it means to be
German in a national/cultural sense (Brubaker 1992, Nathans 2004). This understanding
was apparent by contrast in Germany’s version of a “Law of Return” extending immigration
rights and easy access to citizenship to ethnic Germans in eastern European countries.
Formal requirements for some applications types are more extensive (including fifteen
years’ residence in some cases), and even a successful application does not result in
citizenship in the sense that one is accepted by the rest of the society as fully “German” (the
preceding paragraphs make it clear that status covers only a portion of citizenship
particularly as it relates to immigrants). The 1999 revisions to naturalization requirements
amounted to a significant liberalization that had rapid consequences for application
numbers, but the new law is more the beginning than the end of a project to reshape
German citizenship in its identity sense (Nathans 2004). In some developing countries, on
the other hand, acquisition of citizenship as formal status can be accomplished without
naturalization as conventionally understood: the weak institutionalization of citizenship
means that even undocumented/illegal immigrants manage to acquire documents that
convincingly attest to formal citizenship (Sadiq 2009).
Naturalization raises the question of dual citizenship, which again challenges some core
conventional notions about citizenship (Faist 2007). Again, historically citizenship was (and
in many jurisdictions still is) tightly tied to a single national identity and nation-state. A
significant (and varying) proportion of immigrants in most destination countries have
remained outside the community of formal citizens – a situation that raised concerns about
the depth of democratic governance. In some cases immigrants remained “foreigners”
because they could not satisfy the conditions for naturalization; in other contexts
immigrants chose not to naturalize despite having the opportunity to do so – in part
because their origin and/or destination country would have required renunciation of the
origin’s citizenship. These requirements have been abandoned in certain instances (e.g.
Mexico in 1998), and in other countries they remain on the statute books but are not
enforced (e.g. the USA); in recent years one thus sees a marked increase in naturalization
applications among Mexicans in the USA.
Trends described above have led observers to offer apparently divergent conclusions about
the evolution of citizenship in an “age of migration”. In contrast to its grounding in the
nation-state as conventionally understood, citizenship is sometimes said to have entered a
“post-national” phase (Soysal 1994), wherein the rights dimension of citizenship becomes
detached from its (national) identity dimension. The consolidation of international human
rights norms/laws (and their institutionalization in bodies such as the European Court of
Human Rights) means that the rights that constitute a central aspect of citizenship are
rooted in a universal notion of personhood rather than in membership of a particular
nation, and in many countries formal citizenship status does not entail a great many rights
not held by permanent residents as well. Alternatively, migration leads to changes in
practice that amount to a devaluation of citizenship (Jacobson 1996): when non-citizens
have rights to such an extent that many are not inclined to become status citizens even
when that option is available, then citizenship is no longer the defining principle of
membership in nation-states – and indeed the nation-state itself is perhaps no longer a
foundation for sovereignty and self-determination. These two perspectives are arguably
different only in their premises; if one believes a priori that it is impossible to conceive
meaningfully of citizenship without its national/identity component, then arguments such as
Soysal’s will appear objectionable (cf. Miller 2000). Both arguments can also be said to
overstate the extent of recent change in citizenship practices (cf. Joppke 1999).
From the perspective of immigrants (i.e., those already “here”), citizenship is about
inclusion (though some immigrants might experience “second-class citizenship”). However,
from the perspective of some non-migrants, citizenship is decidedly about exclusion
(Brubaker 1992, Shachar 2009): lacking citizenship of the country to which one would like to
migrate is usually sufficient reason for that country to deny entry (not to mention
permission for residence), particularly to those lacking family connections to citizens. The
point can seem unremarkable because the practice seems so natural – but Shachar suggests
that citizenship (i.e., of a wealthy/developed country) is akin to a valuable form of property,
such that unrestricted inheritance of it (together with the migration-inhibiting
consequences of that mode of transmission) is impossible to justify. Most countries grant
citizenship at birth only to children who have at least one parent who is a citizen (jus
sanguinis – as against jus solis laws that grant citizenship to children born in that country’s
territory). This way of determining who is entitled to live in a particular country
perpetuates a set of vast inequalities, and Shachar argues that if one wants to preserve the
identity-sustaining component of citizenship, then its transmission via inheritance
(“birthright citizenship”) ought to be taxed, to redistribute some of the unearned
opportunities that accrue to those born in wealthy countries and to compensate those
whose migration ambitions will be frustrated by exclusions rooted in citizenship.
An extensive literature has emerged in recent years on notions of “global citizenship” or
“cosmopolitan citizenship” (e.g. Carter 2001, Cabrera 2010). This idea is inspired in part via
consideration of the impacts and implications of international migration (as well as
globalization more generally). Some individuals actively embrace an identity as global
citizens, and for a small cosmopolitan elite the idea can be realized in practice (in the sense
that one can choose to live just about anywhere). But migration possibilities for most of the
world’s population remain quite restricted (whether by policy or poverty), and when most
people are unable to live in much of the world outside their own national borders, the
notion that they are “global citizens” seems more than a bit dubious. Migration is typically
considered the least advanced component of globalization (in comparison to trade and
investment), and that point reflects some significant limits on the notion of global
citizenship as well. Mass migration has had significant implications for citizenship (including
its meaning for natives as well), but it is more reasonable to perceive an evolution of
national citizenship rather than its demise and/or replacement.
(Monforte and Dufour 2011) (Joppke 1999) (Joppke 2010) (Bloemraad 2006) (Bloemraad, Korteweg,
and Yurdakul 2008) (Gellner 1983) (Castles and Davidson 2000) (Bosniak 2008) (Bauböck 1994)
(Schuck 1998) (Brubaker 1992) (Nathans 2004) (Faist 2007) (Sadiq 2009) (Soysal 1994) (Jacobson
1996) (Miller 2000) (Shachar 2009) (Carter 2001) (Cabrera 2010) (Marshall 1950) (Jenson 2007)
References
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Aldershot: Avebury.
Bloemraad, Irene (2006), Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United
States and Canada. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bloemraad, Irene, Anna Korteweg, Gökçe Yurdakul (2008), 'Citizenship and Immigration:
Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Challenges to the Nation-State', Annual Review of
Sociology, 34 (1), 153-79.
Bosniak, Linda (2008), The citizen and the alien: dilemmas of contemporary membership. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Brubaker, Rogers (1992), Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Cabrera, Luis (2010), The Practice of Global Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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of belonging. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Faist, Thomas (2007), 'Dual citizenship: change, prospects and limits', in Thomas Faist (ed.), Dual
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Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu (1994), Limits of citizenship: migrants and postnational membership in
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