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

Abstract

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.

Immigrant meanings of citizenship: mobility, stability, and recognition

“…It contributes to the literature by delineating what citizenship in the country of residence means and to whom naturalization matters the most (cf. Bloemraad and Sheares 2017). The analysis showed that the interviewees assigned three meanings to citizenship, albeit in differing degrees.…”

“…Selecting groups who tend to naturalize in high numbers limits the possibility of generalizing (in a non-statistical sense) the findings to immigrants in general. Previous research has shown that citizenship in the country of residence seems to matter less to immigrants from developed, Western countries since they already hold valuable citizenships (Bevelander et al 2015;Bloemraad and Sheares 2017;Vink, Prokic-Breuer, and Dronkers 2013). Furthermore, most of the denizens interviewed were not denizens by choice but by constraint; they wanted to naturalize but were legally ineligible because of insufficient identity documentation (a requirement to naturalize).…”

“…National membership is not only governed by the state from above, but also between ordinary people, employing tacit understandings of belonging (Brubaker 2010). Visible and audible traits such as 'race', ethnicity, religion and accent may supersede formal citizenship in daily negotiations over national membership (Bloemraad and Sheares 2017;Lynnebakke and Fangen 2011;Erdal, Doeland, and Tellander 2018). Thus, acts of social recognition (and misrecognition), taking place in the horizontal sphere of citizenship between majority and minorities, also shapes immigrants' sense of equality, belonging and membership (cf.…”

“…As visible minorities, it seemed like they had a need to 'prove' their membership and belonging (cf. Bloemraad and Sheares 2017;Erdal, Doeland, and Tellander 2018), perhaps more so than the Russian interviewees, who could more easily 'pass' as Norwegians by virtue of being white Europeans. Despite being legally recognized as full members of society, some of the naturalized citizens indeed emphasized racializing acts as sources of exclusion and inequality.…”

4 Migration research and analysis: Growth, reach and recent contributions

“…A number of IMR articles tackle foundational concepts like citizenship, examining how residential concentration and naturalization rates are linked (Abascal 2017) or offering synthetic overviews of citizenship scholarship in migration studies (Bloemraad and Sheares 2017). Others grapple with popular concepts like "crisis" in public discourse around international migration, highlighting the political work such terms do while also showing how a 'crisis' might feel quite ordinary to migrants already experiencing chronic and slowly unfolding 'crises' of their own (Bylander 2018).…”