My Child Will Be a Citizen: Intergenerational Motives for Naturalization

Abstract

A reform of German citizenship law in 2000 was expected to greatly increase the number of foreign residents becoming German citizens. In fact, the naturalization rate fell and has remained low ever since. This outcome cannot be explained either by existing research on citizenship laws or by scholarship on individual incentives to naturalize. Instead, this article argues that the family context shapes decision making about citizenship, with distinctive behavioral implications. Parents have an incentive to naturalize and thereby extend their new citizenship status to their children. The introduction of a right to citizenship for many children born in Germany to immigrant parents removed this incentive for the parents to naturalize. The author tests the predictions of this argument against both qualitative and quantitative evidence. The article concludes with a discussion of other domains in which it may be possible to gain analytic leverage by studying political decisions in the family context.

The citizenship premium

“…A life course perspectives has been increasingly popular within migration studies (Wingens et al, 2011), yet so far under-utilized in naturalisation research. In our view of the state-of-the-art of the field, a life course perspective chimes well with research that demonstrates that the decision to naturalise is not solely the result of an individual deliberation, but rather made in the context of the family situation and broader social network in which immigrant lives are embedded (Helgertz & Bevelander, 2016;Street, 2014). Comparative research has demonstrated that the decision to naturalise is contextualized by the institutional setting, especially the relative restrictiveness of the host country citizenship policy and origin/destination country dual citizenship policies .…”

“…Notwithstanding the dominant view of naturalisation as a product of an individual utility-maximizing calculation, these results indicate that the decision to naturalise is a joint resolution between partners based on a shared ambition to invest in a long-term settlement in the host country. These social aspects of naturalisation are also emphasized by Street (2014), whose work reveals the intergenerational motivation for citizenship acquisition by immigrants in Germany in order to guarantee citizenship status for their children.…”

“…This raises the question whether variation in the pathways to citizenship -fast or slow, under liberal or restrictive conditions, the list goes onmatters for related outcomes. Furthermore, how do naturalisation decisions take shape in the broader social context of family, friends and communities (Helgertz & Bevelander, 2016;Street, 2014)? Since the established mechanisms in the literature provide limited guidance to answer these questions, I introduce new theoretical concepts to the stateof-the-art, drawing on the sociological life course paradigm (Elder, 1974).…”

“…As such, it provides limited guidelines regarding the role of social relations. Yet recent findings in the literature clearly show that the decision to naturalise is not an individual deliberation, but rather made in close consultation with the spouse, or for the future benefit of children (Helgertz & Bevelander, 2016;Street, 2014). Therefore citizenship acquisition has to be understood in a biographical sense, where the utility of citizenship depends largely on the point in one's life course at a given time.…”

“…This not only relates to the propensity to naturalise, but also to its subsequent socio-economic impact. For instance, Street (2014) demonstrates that a key motivation for naturalisation of migrants in Germany was in fact not focused on personal gain, but rather on securing citizenship status for their children to promote their opportunities for upward mobility. Clearly, if the propensity to naturalise is not necessarily based on personal benefit, an individualistic model of subjective utility maximization is too limited.…”