Citizenship Regimes and Exclusion: Historical Analysis of Legislation on Illegalized Migration in the US

Abstract

Citizenship regimes are institutionalized systems of formal and informal norms that define access to membership, as well as associated rights and duties. This paper studies illegalized migration as one of the major tests to assess whether citizenship regimes are fair institutions, based on a historical analysis of legislation meant to reduce illegalized migration in the United States between 1995 and 2022. We build our empirical research starting from a simple observation: despite the great number of bills introduced to reduce illegalized migration to the US, most of such initiatives fail to become law. In fact, 93.5% of all immigration initiatives did not even pass the chamber of Congress in which they were originally presented. Such a high rate of failure shows that these proposals are motivated by electoral aspirations, rather than coming from a genuine wish to help migrants or grant them citizenship. Furthermore, there is also an economic interest that justifies the maintenance of low-cost disposable immigrant labor, with no right to citizenship. Our analysis is an example of how state regulation processes seem to work to formalize, rather than alleviate or eradicate, the precarious legal statuses of illegalized migrants. We conclude that a globalized phenomenon such as citizenship requires going beyond merely institutional and formal conceptions. We need to rethink the institutional notion of citizenship, as a merely status held under the authority of a state and consider it from a cosmopolitan perspective and a multilateral basis. But as long as citizenship remains under the responsibility of states, illegalized migrants will continue to experience precarious citizenship.

Propuesta cuasi-voluntarista del derecho internacional como derecho: grupos autocontenidos internacionales

“…Una idea muy sencilla a la que podemos apelar son los regímenes de ciudadanía, donde es a través de estos que ocurre la regulación de los derechos y obligaciones dentro de un Estado(Mosqueda, Chávez y Tigau, 2023). Con esto en mente, creemos que es importante analizar el caso domestico y la forma en la que crean derecho para compararlo de forma analógica con el derecho internacional.…”