Paths to citizenship? Public views on the extension of rights to legal and second‐generation immigrants in Europe

This study uses variations in the legal-institutional frameworks of citizenship to explore cross-nationally public views about granting equal rights to legal immigrants and citizenship status to second-generation immigrants in 20 European countries. We link the literatures on citizenship regimes and attitudes toward immigrants to construct a conceptual model that is tested using ISSP data from 2003 and a set of matching contextual measures. Results from hierarchical linear regression analyses indicate that (1) opposition to the extension of rights to legal immigrants is augmented by shorter periods of required residency for naturalization and (2) granting citizenship status to second-generation immigrants is not sensitive to whether a regime consents or not to citizenship by birth. Net of individual and contextual controls, the findings also show that resistance to the expansion of rights to legal immigrants is higher in countries consenting to dual citizenship. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that Eastern European respondents do not differ significantly from their Western counterparts with respect to extending rights to either category of immigrants. These results are discussed in reference to the diversity of citizenship regimes in Europe and in light of the existing debates on harmonizing immigration policies.     

Tensions and unity in the struggle for citizenship: Swedish disability rights activists claim ‘Full Participation! Now!’

This article analyses the claims of contemporary disability rights activists mobilising in a context where de facto second-class citizenship co-exists with legal and political declarations about the rights of disabled people. As an empirical case, it focuses on the blog ‘Full Participation.Now’, which was initiated by disability rights activists in Sweden. Drawing upon citizenship research, the article points to the tensions and dilemmas featuring the bloggers’ demand for participation and equality, as well as the challenges relative to their struggle. Although the bloggers formulate contrasting arguments, the article highlights that the activists share a common aspiration for ‘full citizenship’.     

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

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.     

Optional citizenship; articulation of interests and identities in naturalisations

Citizenship should be understood as a bundle of rights rather than as a legal expression of national membership. The citizenship status of immigrants is characterised by their human rights, their rights of external citizenship provided by sending countries, and their rights as resident aliens provided by receiving states. In this perspective naturalisation is only one amongst several options open to migrants to change and improve their legal position. The normative aspect of citizenship implies that general and basic rights should be distributed equally and universally within society. Raising the standard of alien rights, allowing for dual citizenship and conceiving of naturalisation as an individual option rather than as an obligation or as a discretionary decision of the receiving state would contribute to a more equal distribution of rights within societies of immigration. A model for explaining individual decision to naturalise is presented which is based on a combined analysis of interests and identities. The main factors that enter the model are rules applied by state authorities, social positions occupied by immigrants, the cost/benefit balance of rights in the transition to internal citizenship, and affiliations to different communities in the sending and the receiving state. The combination of rules, rights and social positions makes it possible to distinguish an objective value of internal citizenship for immigrants from transaction prices and subjective utilities. The main theoretical argument is that decisions can be influenced both by a perception of rational individual interests and by communal identities.     

Entry charges on immigrants

The author analyzes "the various arguments that can be advanced for imposing fees on immigrants to optimize...resident gains.... This article discusses cost recovery and emphasizes the costs of multiculturalism as a possible basis for fees. It then analyzes the effects of inelastic immigrant supplies in providing an optimal tariff motivation for monopsonistically restricting labor flows and deals with the second-best problem of devising an optimal fee policy to accompany a possibly suboptimal immigration quota. Next, attention turns to the role of priceable externalities. Externalities which are expensive to price because of transactions costs are analyzed. Finally, along with summarization of major conclusions, the author considers if, even in the economic interests of existing residents, entry rights should be sold."     

Practices and rhetoric of migrants’ social exclusion in Italy: intermarriage,work and citizenship as devices for the production of social inequalities

The article aims to investigate the intersection of legislative dimensions, economic conditions and intimate life contributing to racialising and marginalising the poorest non-European migrants. First, this article focuses on the central role played by the private life in claiming citizenship rights and in building a sense of belonging within migratory contexts. As a result, mixed couples become a border zone through which the state disciplines immigrants according to their class, nationality and gender. On the other side, mixed couples and their intimate lives define resistance against the state’s biopolitical power to control people and become the space of intimate citizenship. Second, the article analyses the matrix for immigrants’ exclusion and differentiation embodied within the institutional and legislative system through immigration and citizenship laws. Therefore, the ‘coloniality power matrix’ becomes an active component of the naturalisation system of social differences at an institutional level.     

Organizing “Below and to the Left”: Differences in the Citizenship and Transnational Practices of Two Zapatista Groups

This article examines the political transnational practices—that is, both the physical and symbolic border‐crossing political practices—of two Zapatista groups. This study seeks to contribute to the existing body of literature on transnationalism and citizenship by focusing on immigrants’ political transnational activities in the global South, as well as transnational activists’ practices in the global North influenced by the global South. I argue that transnational ideological and political influences are bidirectional, that is, influences also flow from the global South to the global North. In addition, I argue that different transnational practices are strongly shaped by structural opportunities and constraints on activists, in this case, by citizenship status and economic class. My arguments are drawn from fieldwork and in‐depth interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area with two Zapatista groups, which I name the Localizers and the Globalizers.     

Migration pressure

"The basic message of this paper is that migration pressure is caused by an excess supply of migration-willing people relative to migration demand in immigration countries....I will also analyse the willingness of destination countries to accept immigrants.... This article concentrates more on political (in-)stability as probably the most important determinant of migration pressure....I also focus on the enormous migration-retarding effect of stable and well defined political institutions." Data concerning migration from Turkey to Europe, and especially to Germany, are used to illustrate. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

The Past is Ever Present: Transnationalism Old and New – Italian and Mexican Immigrants in the US

The paper focuses on what is old and what is new in transnationalism by analyzing extraterritorial attempts of the Italian and Mexican governments. During the large southern/ eastern European immigration to the US from 1890 to the 1920s, Italian immigrants reached 24 percent of the immigrant wave. Mexican documented and undocumented immigrants from the 1980s until 2010s made up 30 percent of the immigrant wave almost a century later. Transnational immigrants live in a country in which they do not claim citizenship rights and claim citizenship rights in a country they do not live in. Therefore migration and immigrant policies challenge both sending and receiving states. Foreign governments are limited in the policies and practices that they can enforce. A comparison of state policies from Italy and Mexico challenges the fact that transnationalism is significantly different and new.     

Citizenship: reflections on a relevant but ambivalent concept for persons with disabilities

This article examines the significance of citizenship with respect to disability. The article first highlights the idea of citizenship as ‘social contract’. This means the possession of civil, political, economic, cultural and social rights as well as the exercise of duties in society. Due to societal barriers, many disabled persons have difficulties fulfilling citizenship roles. Further, this article draws on citizenship theories; it examines three types of citizenship participation – the social citizen, the autonomous citizen and the political citizen – and discusses their promises and ableist implications. To counterbalance the exclusionary aspects of citizenship, we argue that human rights prove important. At the same time, human rights are more easily proclaimed than enforced and citizenship remains a precondition for effectively implementing human rights. The article concludes that citizenship is a relevant but also ambivalent concept when it comes to disability; it calls for a critical understanding of citizenship in Disability Studies.     

Is Preventing Coerced Repatriation Ethical and Possible? The Case of NGO Repatriation of South Sudanese in Israel

“Voluntary repatriation” to a country of origin may be necessary to restore refugees' rights, when only a country of origin will provide rights associated with citizenship. Yet, if refugees are returning because they do not have access to basic rights in a host country, their return is not voluntary according to UNHCR guidelines (1996). There is a tension between facilitating repatriation to restore rights, and ensuring that repatriation is voluntary. This article will first draw on arguments from moral philosophy to suggest an alternative policy to current UNHCR guidelines. Following this normative analysis, the article hypothesizes that, on an empirical level, a repatriation policy that attempts to only facilitate repatriation that is not coerced, out of concern for voluntariness alone, may fail both to prevent coerced returns and to restore right through repatriation. This hypothesis was then tested in the case of South Sudanese repatriation from Israel between 2009‐2012.     

Value-oriented parameters in migration policies in the 1990s: the Israeli experience

"This article focuses on value inputs at various junctures of the immigrant-absorption process in Israel and their possible implications for the future of the immigrants.... The model of value inputs of the 1990s suggests several directions in which absorption policy may head....One such direction is dominant in other immigration countries: the integration of the stronger immigrants--those whose ability to function in modern Western society is high--is left to market forces.... Another possible paradigm of absorption is one in which the government intervenes selectively to help especially disadvantaged groups....A third orientation depends on the immigration trend. If immigration tapers off, the government will intervene more intensively and extensively in the integration of the 1990s immigrants, particularly at the municipal level." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

Mobile pensioners: retirement migrants’ perspectives of EU citizenship and free movement

The European institutions picture EU citizens as important actors in the process of transforming EU citizenship into a “tangible reality”. By knowing and practising EU citizenship rights, EU citizens are supposed to give meaning and depth to the otherwise hollow concept of EU citizenship. What EU citizenship means for mobile citizens themselves and how EU citizens practice and evaluate their rights (“lived citizenship”) is generally not a central theme in reports and studies on EU citizenship. In this article the value of EU citizenship will be discussed by applying a qualitative research approach and by focusing on retired EU citizens’ perspectives and practice of, in particular, free movement. This article applies a comparative approach and includes EU citizens who move or return from the Netherlands to Spain or Turkey after retirement. Four groups of EU citizens move between these countries: Dutch nationals who move to Spain, Spanish nationals who return to Spain, Dutch nationals who move to Turkey and Turkish dual-nationals who return to Turkey after retirement. This article shows that migratory background, country of origin, country of retirement and the way in which EU citizenship is acquired determine retirement migrants’ perspectives and practice of EU citizenship.     

From political opportunities to niche-openings: the dilemmas of mobilizing for immigrant rights in inhospitable environments

This article examines how undocumented immigrants mobilize for greater rights in inhospitable political and discursive environments. We would expect that such environments would dissuade this particularly vulnerable group of immigrants from mobilizing in high profile campaigns because such campaigns would carry high risks (deportation) and have little chance of success. However, we have witnessed many mobilizations by undocumented immigrants in both Europe and the United States over the past 20 years. This article uses the case of undocumented youths in the United States (DREAMers) to examine how a group of undocumented immigrants have overcome important barriers and become a powerful voice for immigrant rights in the country. The article suggests that while undocumented immigrants faced inhospitable contexts, cracks and “niche-openings” they continued to present themselves to groups with the right set of cultural, legal, and economic attributes. Immigrants in possession of these attributes (in this case, youth) could target a niche-opening and argue that they are particularly deserving of legalization. This article also highlights an important dilemma: In contexts characterized by general closure and hostility, narrow mobilizations targeting niche-openings provide the only path to legal status for some, but they can also differentiate (discursively and legally) between “deserving” and “undeserving” undocumented immigrants. Differentiation can contribute to stratifying the immigrant population, with those deemed more deserving facing greater rights and entitlements and those deemed less deserving facing greater restrictions and repression. This carries the risk of magnifying normative and legal inequalities between immigrant groups while introducing many points of conflict within the broader immigrant rights movement.     

Mental Health Practice and Children

SUMMARY

In the field of mental health, debates range along opposing axes with the protection of the public on one axis and the citizenship and human rights of the individual on the other. There is also considerable contestation for ideological and theoretical dominance about how mental distress should be viewed and responded to. Discourses alternatively emphasising protection, control and compulsion, and rights, citizenship autonomy and self-determination have added impetus when applied to children and young people. This is also a grouping denied a voice both in terms of individual treatment programmes and in the formulation of policy and practice. This article addresses the key debates and appraises the implications of changing policy and practice for children and young people experiencing mental distress in the UK. Although the discussion is located in a particular national context, the emergent themes have a much broader relevance for debates, policy and practice in the international arena.     

Under Two Flags: Dual Nationality in Latin America and Its Consequences for Naturalization in the United States

This article surveys the practice of dual nationality in the Western Hemisphere, particularly as it impacts the naturalization rates of immigrants in the United States. The article begins by looking at the extent and spread of dual nationality provisions and the pathways for its implementation. Next, the article turns to a discussion of the multiple (and at times conflicting) interests – of immigrants, sending states and receiving states – in dual nationality. While immigrants and sending countries are in general agreement on the positive benefits of dual nationality, commentators in receiving countries like the United States continue to express deep unease at the spread of dual nationality and its consequences for American citizenship. Are these concerns justified? Not according to U.S. naturalization rates. Data from 1965 to 1997 indicate that immigrants from countries recognizing dual nationality average higher naturalization rates in the United States than countries that do not.     

Overlooking/Looking Over Neoliberal Immigration: Amnesty Policy in the ‘Nation of Immigrants’

In the self-proclaimed ‘nation of immigrants’, a struggle for power plays out in US immigration law. This article examines such a struggle in the context of rising neoliberalism. As president Ronald Reagan set out to revolutionize America with the deregulation of the economy, privatization, and the globalization of capitalist democracy, pundits claimed that the country was experiencing a Mexican illegal immigration crisis that pivoted on Mexican women's fecundity and abuse of social services. Yet along with punitive provisions, the first US law to directly address undocumented migration, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) included an amnesty programme widely praised as a democratic watershed for the undocumented. Consequently, ‘multicultural’ immigrant men and women seemed to be embraced, while in the same breath disciplined through discourses of respectability and criminality that secured both a pool of cheap immigrant labourers and minoritized citizens. More specifically, two strains of ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse that circulated around amnesty during the law-making process affectively (and effectively) framed America as the globally exceptional guarantor of democratic rights, inclusivity, and equal access to economic opportunity for citizens. On one hand, discourse that welcomed and celebrated an abstracted immigrant subject who was free to succeed on the basis of individual hard work was coded as the epitome of Americanism. On the other hand, discourse that welcomed explicitly racialized and gendered immigrants who were free to succeed on the basis of their hard work was coded as emblematically American. In this case respectable tokens of multiculturalism (i.e. immigrants of colour and especially immigrant women of colour who upheld traditional family values) evidenced American inclusivity. This article argues that both strains of ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse naturalized a relationship between citizenship, freedom, and free markets and thus powerfully masked the exploitative social relations key to neoliberal economic arrangements.     

Citizenship rights for immigrants: national political processes and cross-national convergence in western Europe, 1980-2008

Immigrant citizenship rights in the nation-state reference both theories of cross-national convergence and the resilience of national political processes. This article investigates European countries' attribution of rights to immigrants: Have these rights become more inclusive and more similar across countries? Are they affected by EU membership, the role of the judiciary, the party in power, the size of the immigrant electorate, or pressure exerted by anti-immigrant parties? Original data on 10 European countries, 1980-2008, reveal no evidence for cross-national convergence. Rights tended to become more inclusive until 2002, but stagnated afterward. Electoral changes drive these trends: growth of the immigrant electorate led to expansion, but countermobilization by right-wing parties slowed or reversed liberalizations. These electoral mechanisms are in turn shaped by long-standing policy traditions, leading to strong path dependence and the reproduction of preexisting cross-national differences.     

Citizenship struggles in Soviet successor states

"The breakup of the Soviet Union has transformed yesterday's internal migrants, secure in their Soviet citizenship, into today's international migrants of contested legitimacy and uncertain membership. This transformation has touched Russians in particular, of whom some 25 million live in non-Russian successor states. This article examines the politics of citizenship vis-a-vis Russian immigrants in the successor states, focusing on the Baltic states, where citizenship has been a matter of sustained and heated controversy." The author concludes that "formal citizenship cannot be divorced from broader questions of substantive belonging. Successor states' willingness to accept Russian immigrants as citizens, and immigrants' readiness to adopt a new state as their state, will depend on the terms of membership for national minorities and the organization of public life in the successor states." Data are from a variety of published sources.     

Citizenship on the margins: Citizenship,social work and social action

Drawing on a critical synthesis of the two main citizenship traditions, so as to construct citizenship as both a status and a practice, linked through the notion of human agency, the article explores citizenship's exclusionary and inclusionary sides within both a national and international framework. Within a national framework, the implications of citizenship's ‘false universalism’ are explored as the basis for a recasting of citizenship in a way that addresses the tension between universalism and particularity or difference. Within an international framework, a human rights perspective is introduced as a means of challenging citizenship's exclusion of nation state outsiders, most notably immigrants and asylum-seekers. This approach draws upon a multi-tiered conceptualisation of citizenship stretching from the local through to the global.

Some implications for social work practice and policy are then discussed in relation to support for active citizenship in deprived communities and anti-poverty action in which poor people themselves have a voice. This includes a brief consideration of political exclusion; the potential of self-help groups and community social work and development work; and user-involvement. The article concludes that citizenship offers social work a framework that embraces anti-poverty work, principles of partnership and anti-discriminatory practice and an inclusionary stance.