Blurred boundaries: fantasy citizenship, the worker citizen and mobility controls

ABSTRACT

This article uses the lens of state control over mobilities of residents both migrants and citizens to move away from assumptions that position them as competitors for the privileges of membership. I begin by critiquing the migrant/citizen binary, claiming that it promotes as actuality Fantasy Citizenship of equality and accessible rights when the reality is one of banal citizenship. This Fantasy citizen is a Worker Citizen. However, the substance of the ‘right to work' is the right to the welfare safety net and the banal citizen finds access to this safety net restricted by the ‘duty to work'. Taking the example of the UK and specifically, England, I examine how citizens' mobility is restricted and controlled, firstly by social housing allocation policies which effectively turns citizens into ‘migrants’ via worker citizenship, and secondly through the restrictions of COVID-19 including its racialised policing. In this way, I suggest closer attention to state restrictions on the mobilities of citizens can help draw out connections in practice between the citizen and the migrant, connections that are obscured by Fantasy Citizenship and the migrant citizen binary.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• mobility
• worker citizen
• welfare benefit
• social housing

Introduction

The citizen has rights. The citizen is privileged in comparison to the migrant who often aspires to citizenship. This is not an abstract aspiration: most migrants in Europe are not stateless but they do not have the citizenship of the state to which they have migrated, and many aspire to a specific citizenship, the citizenship of their current state of residence. However, while the legal status of citizenship offers very material advantages, there are exclusions within citizenship as well as from citizenship. Despite its claims to equality citizenship does not make the citizenry equal, ‘In fact, it appears to institutionalize both difference and inequalities, albeit in sometimes unexpected ways’ (Cohen 2014, 12). In many states, citizenship is being evacuated of some or much of its social content and increasing numbers of citizens are being excluded from the benefits of citizenship because they are perceived as undeserving or failing to live up to its demands. The literature on migration and welfare state bordering, which has been further enriched by research on EU mobile citizens, tends to focus on migrants’ exclusions from welfare states (Bruzelis 2019; Bommes and Geddes 2003; O’Brien 2017; Sainsbury 2012). However, research is also developing that examines mechanisms that restrict access to benefits of both migrants and citizens, particularly in the UK (Shutes 2016; Morris 2021). This paper seeks to contribute to this literature by using the lens of state control over mobilities of residents, both migrants and citizens, to move away from assumptions that position them as competitors for the privileges of membership.

I begin by critiquing the migrant/citizen binary, claiming that it promotes as actuality what is in fact a Fantasy Citizenship of equality and accessible rights when the reality is one of Banal Citizenship. This Fantasy citizen is a Worker Citizen. I focus on the ‘right to work’ whose substance is the right to the welfare safety net and the Banal Citizen finds access to this safety net restricted by the ‘duty to work’. Taking the example of the UK and specifically, England, I examine how citizens’ mobility is restricted and controlled, firstly by social housing allocation policies which effectively turns citizens into ‘migrants’ via worker citizenship, and secondly through the restrictions of COVID-19 including its racialised policing. In this way, I suggest closer attention to state restrictions on the mobilities of citizens can help draw out connections in practice between the citizen and the migrant, connections that are obscured by Fantasy Citizenship and the migrant/citizen binary.

Fantasy Citizenship

Citizenship is a legal status conferring rights and duties in relation to a particular state. The migrant/citizen binary has a tremendous hold on political imaginations: migrants are outsiders counterposed to citizen insiders (Hayat Taha 2019; Tonkiss and Bloom 2015). Their position as outsiders means that it is unproblematic to deny migrants rights that it would be unacceptable to deny citizens. This includes mobility within a state: Australian 491 regional visa holders may be unable to choose where to live in their host state. In Canada people who hold visas granted under the Provincial Nomination Programme (PNP) may be required to sign documents committing to reside in a certain province, and post ‘good faith deposits’ as evidence of that commitment. The legal status of citizenship is a key principle determining entitlement to welfare rights which it is also legitimate to deny non-citizens (Marshall 1950; Sainsbury 2012).

As well as a legal status, citizenship is also a normative good. Citizenship is often synonymous with nationality, that is with the belonging to the national community. This is a community of value ‘composed of people who share common ideals and (exemplary) patterns of behaviour expressed through ethnicity, religion, culture, or language – that is, its members have shared values’ (Anderson 2013, 2). To access legal citizenship migrants must almost always prove that they deserve to enter the national community through fulfilling criteria that exceed the tick box technicalities of length of residence or language abilities. They may have to demonstrate that they are a person of worth through tests, behaviour and sponsorship, ‘earn citizenship’ through following ‘pathways’ and claiming to uphold certain values, thereby proving that they can be integrated. These requirements purport to identify those suitable to be designated as ‘insiders’ and exclude those not seen as deserving or desirable for the state and who fail to fit the normative order (Anderson 2013). For example, migrants who wish to become Australian, Spanish or French citizens must be of ‘good character’. In the UK (where good character is required of anyone over the age of 10 seeking to register or naturalise) not being of good character is the most common ground for refusal and it has been rising in recent years, accounting for 44% of Home Office refusals in 2016. Good character has some components that seem relatively straightforward: not having a criminal record, not being a bankrupt, and having paid taxes. In the USA one must be of ‘good moral character’ and examples of what constitutes failing to have this include polygamy, prostitution, habitual drunkenness and gambling. Infamously, in the Netherlands, the naturalisation process at one stage included watching a film depicting female nudity and gay men kissing and showing that you found these acceptable. Such demands run alongside the requirements not to be involved in terrorism, crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide. Thus, naturalisation procedures and requirements typically attempt to map legal citizenship onto normative ideals of citizenship, mimicking the model citizen (Fortier 2013).

These kinds of criteria promote Fantasy Citizenship. Many people with the formal status of citizenship are not paid-up members of the community of value. Plenty of those born into US citizenship are habitual drunkards or gamble; at the time the Dutch government required acceptance of gay kissing by naturalisation applicants, research found that 42% of Dutch nationals did not like to see gay people kissing in public (Hekma and Duyvendak 2011). A research study found over 65% of UK residents, the vast majority of them citizens, failed the Life in the UK test (van Tilburg, Saadi, and Mahadevan 2021) and YouTube is awash with videos showing natural-born citizens, including the highly educated, stumbling over citizenship test questions. Following Billig’s (1995) distinction between hot and banal nationalism, we might distinguish between Fantasy Citizens and the Banal Citizens of ordinary life who may not be of good moral character, fail to pay their taxes, and, in the UK case, do not know the height (in feet) of the London Eye.

Moreover, the binary conception of migrant/citizen, outsider/insider is fundamentally flawed. This has been highlighted by the scholarly literature for decades (Hammar 1985; Ellermann 2020). To begin with migrants are inside the territory, and to that extent are no longer outsiders. They may not have been granted insider status, but their very presence on the host state’s territory demonstrates that the distinction between insider and outsider is blurred. Furthermore, citizenship is not a singular legal status. For example, Spain distinguishes between nacionalidad originaria, (nationality by origin) and nacionalidad derivative (derivative nationality) with dual nationality permitted only for the former. Similarly, Croatia distinguishes between ‘facilitated’ and ‘regular’ naturalisation. Even more so than ‘citizen’, ‘migrant’ is a highly heterogeneous status, shaped in part by the citizenship held by the migrant. When people are seeking migrate there are gradations of outsider-ness. Some nationals may be granted visa-free entry under bilateral agreements, while the diaspora, the wealthy and the so-called ‘highly skilled' are likely to find visa regimes designed in such a way that it is easier for them to enter states than co-national low waged migrant workers (Anderson, Shutes, and Walker 2014). Regional agreements facilitate entry for certain nationals. There are now policies and laws promoting regional free movement involving at least 33 regional organisations and 174 states, most famously in the European Union, but also in South America, Africa, and the Caribbean (Chetail 2019).

It is not only that the citizen/migrant binary vastly oversimplifies a whole range of very complicated statuses, but also that there are many connections and overlaps between Banal Citizenship and migrants and these connections can appear in plain sight. Consider the descriptor of ‘second generation migrants’, a term in Europe applied to racialised minorities who may well have never crossed a border in their lives. This is terminology in common popular usage and signals that it is possible to be both ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’ at once. It also illustrates how once migration is no longer at the border it becomes ‘race’. Who sheds and who retains their migrancy is often bound up with nationally specific ways of encoding and remaking of race (Sharma 2019; Mongia 2018; Lentin 2014). Racialised citizens may have the legal status of citizens but in many contexts are nevertheless not regarded as proper insiders, and indeed may be treated as migrants despite their status. Those charged with imposing immigration checks typically rely on race and/or ethnicity as a marker of national difference and people considered to look like migrants are more likely to be subject to routine document checks and policing. Workplace raids and random document checks, the requirement to produce passports to employers, health services and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency affect citizens and non-citizens alike, but Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) citizens are more likely to be checked up on than those who are racialised as white. In many countries, the general population is increasing drawn into immigration enforcement, and, poorly trained and anxious to err on the side of the law, deputized actors often ‘directly reinforce symbolic and moral distinctions of otherness and illegality’ (Walsh 2014) with significant consequences for negatively racialised citizens. This conscription of social actors into immigration policing, or ‘deputization’ is insidiously expanding in many states including the USA, Netherlands and France. In the process, immigration controls are increasingly criminalising, not only non-citizens, but also citizens, who find themselves entangled in complex bureaucratic and legal requirements (Aliverti 2014).

While Fantasy Citizens have access to a panoply of rights, Banal Citizens can find those rights hedged round by restrictions and conditions. It is not only citizenship as normative status signifying membership of the community of value that is fantastical, but also the policy and practice of citizenship as entitlement to rights. The dazzling distinctions of the migrant/citizen binary gold plate citizenship by looking at it from the outside, preventing us from seeing Banal Citizenship and potentially important connections between the marginalisation of Banal Citizens and the marginalisation of migrants.

The Fantasy Citizen as Worker Citizen

There are multiple ways in which formal citizens may be denied rights that are considered integral to citizenship of a liberal democracy. People who have been found guilty of a criminal offence and are therefore considered as not of good character (to use the naturalisation term) are particularly vulnerable to the removal of rights. In the US 2020 election an estimated 5.2 million US citizens were not eligible to vote because of criminal convictions (Uggen et al. 2020). In the UK the Forfeiture Act of 1870 disenfranchised prisoners, and while since 2017 this is no longer a blanket ban, there are still significant numbers of incarcerated citizens who do not have voting rights (Johnston 2020). Moreover, while states can’t deport, they can extradite their citizens and those considered home grown terrorists or sexual deviants can be subject to forms of regulation and control of movement and activity that significantly question and downgrade their status as citizens (Anderson and Gibney 2017).

These are extreme examples of what might be viewed as a form of ‘civic death’ when states would likely respond, were the perpetrators not citizens, with imprisonment and deportation (in some cases of course states proceed with literal death by execution of both citizens and non-citizens alike). However, the Banal Citizen’s restricted access to rights does not have to be so spectacular and is not only revealed in the cases of criminality, terrorism or child sex offending. For full inclusion in the community of the Fantasy Citizen it is typically necessary to work or, for older or disabled persons to be a ‘working kind of person’, that is to have worked in the past or to be demonstrably eager to work (Zatz and Boris 2014).

Work is the primary means by which individuals are integrated not only into the economic system, but also into social political and familial modes of cooperation. That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract; indeed, working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary, and for that reason, is treated as a basic obligation of citizenship.

(Weeks p.8)

The Fantasy Citizen is a Worker Citizen. They contribute to national society through the labour market, and they do so through honourable work. They are a hardworking taxpayer who can find their job taken and their benefits diminished because of migration.

One way then in which the migrant/citizen binary shores up the representations of Fantasy Citizenship is through the ‘right to work’. This marks the national labour market as a space of privilege for citizens where jobs, it is claimed, are ringfenced for them. Indeed, that the state should give citizens priority access to the labour market and only then should jobs be available to non-citizens is a fundamental principle of low-waged labour migration policy. In contrast to working-age citizens, most non-citizens residing outside of country A do not have an automatic ‘right to work’ in Country A and indeed for many immigration statuses (e.g. visitors’ visas), access to the territory may be conditional precisely on a person not participating in the labour market. For those who are legally permitted to work, or whose purpose of stay is to work, access to the labour market is a privilege rather than a right. In the study of migration and migrant activism, the contingency of access to the labour market is typically read, correctly, as exclusive of migrants. Civil society actors call for the ‘right to work’, particularly for asylum seekers. In the UK, Lift the Ban, a coalition of 240 charities, businesses and trades unions seeks to overturn the Government’s ban on asylum seekers working which they argue is bad for both asylum seekers and the country at large: ‘It takes the toughest toll on people seeking asylum, but the UK economy also misses out on tax revenue and much-needed specialists’ (Refugee Action 2022).

However, the ‘right to work’ is not synonymous with the right to have a job and citizens’ ‘right to work’ does not, in contemporary liberal democracies, mean that the state has a duty to provide work. The ‘right to work’ becomes visible through its denial to migrants rather than through its enjoyment by citizens. In the UK this prefigures more recently granted ‘rights’ such as the ‘right to rent’ and the ‘right to study’, which bring neither the right to rental housing nor a right to a graduate education. These too are rights which are realised through their denial to migrants rather than offering any material guarantee to citizens exemplifying the insubstantiality of Fantasy Citizenship.

For Banal Citizens, the right to work does not give rise to a right to livelihood but rather a right to subsistence i.e. (non-contributory) social assistance (Paz-Fuchs 2015) and the substance of the right to work is welfare protections. Non-citizens rarely have guaranteed rights to these protections, particularly social assistance. Indeed, battered and hollowed out as it is by neoliberalism and austerity, in many European states protecting the welfare state from the demands of outsiders is an important legitimising claim for immigration controls. The very fact that, in practice, welfare support falls short of the illusion of Fantasy Citizenship is further evidence of the necessity to conserve. The separation of the ‘right to work’ from the social safety net means it is not treated as contradictory to maintain that migrants both take jobs AND welfare benefits.

The social rights afforded by the welfare state have been analysed in a tradition starting with T.H. Marshall (1950) as the culmination of social citizenship. However, in many European states, rights to social assistance that were in the aftermath of the Second World War premised on universalism, albeit the universalism of the liberal able-bodied male subject, have shifted to be largely distributed on the basis of preparedness to work (see Bendixsen and Näre 2024, this issue). Welfare provision became viewed as obstructing rather than facilitating a well-functioning labour market and citizens’ rights to welfare moved to conditional entitlements on the basis of individual responsibility to sell one’s labour through the market, in what Offe (1984) refers to as the ‘re-commodification’ of labour. ‘It is not that social rights are being extinguished, rather that they are being made less democratic and more akin to the property rights of classical jurisprudence’ (Dean 2015). Thus, when we no longer take for granted the dichotomous, work as right (for citizens)/work as privilege (for migrants), and consider the substantive question of access to welfare it becomes apparent that the right to work can be highly disciplinary of citizens, and indeed might be better characterised as a duty to work, rather than a right.

One helpful tool to analyse this shift in grounds for distribution is the framework proposed by Clasen and Clegg (2007). They describe three different ‘levels of conditionality’ that govern access to social benefits: conditions of category (e.g. lone parents; disabled people); conditions of circumstance (e.g. criteria with respect to work or need); conditions of conduct (requirements that are conditions of on-going entitlement). Conditions of category have significantly expanded, and particular adult groups (carers, older people and citizens who are sick or with disabilities) are increasingly no longer considered legitimately ‘economically inactive’ (Anderson, Shutes, and Walker 2014). So too have the work-based criteria of conditions of circumstance (Shutes 2016). This is also accompanied by demands to comply with conditions of conduct. The UK has led the way in Europe, and access to welfare benefits is increasingly contingent on surveillance and behavioural intervention, particularly since the introduction of the ‘claimant commitment’ that is a requirement of Universal Credit (UC). Punitive measures are taken towards those claimants who are judged to not comply with work-related conditions such as mandatory participation in employment-related programmes, job search interviews, and unpaid work placements. If a person fails to comply with their claimant commitment, is late for appointments, considered to not be putting enough effort into looking for work, misses telephone calls etc., they are subject to an extremely tough sanctions regime, with benefits reduced or even cut completely. The introduction of UC was accompanied by a strong emphasis on sanctions and nearly a quarter of all claimants were sanctioned between 2010 and 2015. Research conducted between 2014 and 2019 found that this ‘punitive welfare conditionality often caused symbolic and material suffering and sometimes had life-threatening effects’ (Wright, Fletcher, and Stewart 2020). Moreover, even those who are working may be subject to conditionalities and penalties as Universal Credit is payable to poorly paid workers, and those earning below a ‘conditional earnings threshold’ may be subject to work conditions and told they must find more hours or better paying work.

Isabel Shutes (2016) has extended this framework to include migration in the UK where, No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) is a standard immigration condition applied to all migrants on temporary visas, making it effectively a condition of entry for anyone subject to immigration controls (Sainsbury 2012). Migrants’ first barrier to access social assistance is on the grounds of conditions of category. This means they effectively ‘pay in’ without taking out, most obviously through payment of Value Added Tax (VAT) that applies to all goods and services in the EU. In 2018-2019 VAT was the UK government’s third largest income generator. The second largest was National Insurance contributions. Migrant workers who earn between £792 and £4,167 a month, are, like citizens, subject to the compulsory deduction of National Insurance payments of 12% towards the National Insurance Fund to pay for contributory benefits. However, the barriers to settlement (conditions of circumstance) for most visa holders means that in practice they cannot access contributory benefits and typically neither do they have any option for repayment of their contributions.

Fantasy Citizenship directs attention to the condition of citizenship category for migrants and citizens alike and appeals to the inherent and unavoidable nationalism of nationally organised welfare states. It reinforces the migrant/citizen binary and distracts attention from other kinds of conditions of category and conditions of circumstance and conduct. Before Brexit, despite the UK’s membership of the EU, EU citizens were firmly positioned in political rhetoric on the ‘migrant’ side of the binary. Restrictions on EU migrants’ access to benefits was central to the British negotiations on continued EU membership in 2015/16. Yet this was in a context where the rights of citizens to access social assistance in the UK had been significantly eroded, fundamentally altering the access to welfare for citizens and non-citizens alike.

Mobility and the UK’s Worker Citizen

While there is no formalised obligation to work, the Banal UK Citizen must often make considerable efforts to prove that they are actively seeking employment to be able to access social assistance. This includes in-country mobility. Within the territory Worker Citizen logic means that mobility is ‘both socially expected and supported because it marks the willingness of individuals to improve their chances of social inclusion within the territory’ (Bommes and Geddes 2003, 1). Like many states the UK has a mandatory travel to work area, and in 2011 the government announced that working-age benefit claimants should be prepared to take up jobs within a one-and-a-half-hour commute from their home unless they had children under five years old or who were severely disabled.

At the same time as unemployed citizens have mobility for work as a requirement placed on them, for non-citizens access to welfare benefits is viewed as an incentive that might attract ‘migrants’ moving for ‘benefit tourism’. This concern is not peculiar to the UK. When EEA citizens were granted the right of free movement and residence across the European Economic Area in 2004 there were concerns about benefit tourism across EU member states. This was even though residence for longer than three months in any EU member state was contingent upon the mobile EU citizen (the European Commission was adamant that these mobile citizens were to be distinguished from ‘migrants’) not becoming an ‘undue burden’ on the country of residence. This meant that in effect the person had to be economically active – a Banal Worker Citizen – or able financially to support themselves without working.¹

In response to these concerns, most EU member states introduced national Habitual Residence Tests (HRT) that effectively meant the ‘right to work’ of EEA citizens was not underwritten/given substance, by the right to welfare benefits. A person might be legally present, they might also have the right to reside, but this does not mean they are legally habitually resident. HRT requirements are a hurdle to benefits that are imposed via national social security regulations not via immigration controls, as they were aimed at EEA citizens who are not subject to immigration controls in EU member states. What constitutes habitual residence can include duration of stay, intention to stay and one’s place of principal residence and the weight given to different considerations varies between states (Bruzelis 2019). The UK introduced its HRT in 1994 making it a condition of access to non-contributory benefits. The underlying principle is ‘the taxpayer should not have to subsidise people with very tenuous links to this country’ (Kennedy 2011). The test itself is opaque and designed to demonstrate applicants are legally resident and intending to remain in the UK for a reasonable period, measuring factors such as length and continuity of residence, prospects of work, and having a ‘settled intention to reside’. In 2004 it was ‘significantly tightened’ through the introduction of a further ‘right to reside’ test that had to be passed in addition to the HRT. Because it is imposed via social security regulations while UK citizens do have an automatic right to reside in the UK, when returning after a period of residence abroad they do not necessarily pass the HRT. Having the legal status of citizenship is not, by itself, considered a strong enough link to merit immediate access to social assistance, which can come as a surprise to British nationals who are returning to the UK after a period living abroad (Anderson and Dupont 2019).² British citizens returning to the UK after a period outside the Common Travel Area may face a three-month delay if they wish to access Universal Credit. Policies designed to limit non-UK nationals’ access to rights have consequences for UK citizens – and in this case, policies enacted to affect EU migrants are consequential for UK citizens even though the UK has now left the EU.

Length of residence requirements can be imposed not only by the national governments but also by the sub-national local authority, which has responsibility for certain aspects of welfare provision, most crucially, housing. In his analysis of the history of the welfare state David Feldman (2003) has argued that ‘In those spheres in which welfare was financed and administered on a national basis, migrants who traversed internal boundaries no longer became strangers. The problem of the stranger increasingly became identified with the problem of the immigrant’ (Feldman 2003, 96). In the case of housing, which is administered by the local authority, these internal boundaries continue to determine eligibility and the problem, as with the Old Poor Law is understood as the ‘stranger’ who crosses boundaries internal to the state. Homeless people deemed not to have a sufficient local connection to one authority can be required to move to a different local authority before they can make a claim to a right to housing and even be given money for a fare to encourage them to move.

In 2011 the Localism Act formalised as statutory guidance that local authorities impose ‘residency requirements’, and that social housing applicants must have lived within the local authority’s district for a minimum of two years. Local authorities were encouraged to prioritise ‘those in need who have invested in and demonstrated a commitment to their local community’ (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government 2013). In her study of local authority documents implementing these proposals, Rosie Carter discovered that in practice most local authorities impose a far longer residency requirement than two years, with some requiring people to be resident for as long as ten years before they can legitimately go on the waiting list (Carter 2015). Notably, the movement of people into local authority areas was described as ‘migration’ irrespective of the citizenship: ‘By migration, we are not just talking about people moving to and from the UK, it also means the movement of people to and from different parts of the country’ (Tendring DC 2012 cited Carter 2015, 34). The coverage by the local press used similar language:

the Thanet press ran a story headlined ‘Is Thanet ready for the migration of people on benefits?’, claiming that welfare reforms had caused ‘a mass exodus of benefit claimants’ searching for the ‘benefits-by-the-sea’ lifestyle; ‘an influx of single people, long term unemployed and criminals’. (Thanet Star 2013)

Carter 2015, 36

At the local scale negative connotations of ‘migrants’ and ‘migration’ are deployed against the very people that are depicted by national government as vulnerable to migrants taking jobs and benefits. Notably, the concern is not with internal mobility per se, but with the movement of people who are not working:

The recession, welfare benefit changes and increasing housing pressures in London particularly, have stimulated a further and a growing migration of needy people … a further haemorrhaging of the London poor, many signposted to, if not actively resettled on the coast. (Hastings BC 2014, cited Carter 2015, 36)

Concerned that this hostility to incomers might be misdirected to people in work, in 2015 the Government published statutory guidance on ‘the Right to Move’, ‘to prevent local authorities applying a local connection test that could disadvantage tenants who need to move across local authority boundaries for work related reasons’. If the tenant needs to move for the purposes of work, they should be eligible for social housing. If they need or wish to move for other purposes, however, this can be disregarded.

To become eligible for housing this stigmatised citizen/migrant can face demands akin to migrant naturalisation processes. Like migrants they must be resident for specific periods to qualify for rights, but they must also demonstrate they fulfil certain normative requirements akin to the ‘good character’ requirement of naturalising citizens, – Clasen and Clegg’s (2007) conditions of conduct. Some local authorities even have behavioural requirements for social housing eligibility. These can be negative – not having a criminal conviction, not being ‘anti-social’ but also positive – making a ‘contribution’ with working is very strongly associated with contributing. For example, as well as a five-year residential qualification, Barnet council’s housing allocation policy offers community contribution awards:

People who play a part in making their neighbourhood strong, stable and healthy – those who help make it a good place to live, work and play – are valuable people. They are the backbone of their community, and the Council believes such people should be allocated social housing to continue contributing to sustaining local communities in the area where they contribute.

(Barnet Council 2019, 35)

Such a contribution may be manifest in working or volunteering for a recognised not-for-profit organisation (Barnet Council 2019).³

Housing policies can expel as well as exclude. In areas where housing is expensive or difficult to come by, local authorities will negotiate ‘out of area placements’ for those whom they have obligations to house, principally single mothers of young children. Pressure can be put on benefit recipients, and there are cases where claimants have even been threatened with having their children put into care unless they move. In a policy originally led by London councils, some authorities buy up properties hundreds of miles away, and require people to move, placing them far from networks of friends and family often in areas where educational and health provision is already overstretched. This has significant knock-on displacement effects, leading to shortages of properties in areas selected, meaning that those local councils in turn, resort to out of area placements (Anderson and Dupont 2019).

It is important to note that these kinds of mobility requirements and restrictions are not peculiar to the UK. In the Netherlands social assistance claimants can be sanctioned a month’s worth of benefit if they move without a ‘clear and good reason’ (Knijn and Hiah 2019). In Turkey, some recipients of disability and elderly allowance cannot even move to a different street in the same district, as any application is automatically terminated meaning in effect that benefit is withdrawn for months (Akkan and Serim 2019, 27). In Hungary it is necessary to prove residence for a year in a local area before being entitled to apply for social housing (Veres 2019, 20), while in Portugal claimants can be required to present at the parish council every two weeks to confirm unemployment status (Brito 2019, 25).

The relation between mobility, labour and access to social protection is obfuscated if we impose a migrant/citizen binary. For example, we miss the relation between the right to work and the substance of the right (social welfare), the consequences of the tension to be mobile for work and sedentary for welfare, the ways in which citizens’ mobilities are shaped by states at national and local level, and the continuities as well as the differences between citizens and people subject to immigration controls.

Mobility, COVID-19 and the UK’s racialised citizen

The COVID pandemic has had the effect of significantly increasing mobility restrictions on citizens at both domestic and national scales. The global mass confinements imposed in March 2020 included flight bans and quarantines imposed by multiple states, and as the pandemic developed very few states were free of the growing complexity of international restrictions. In January 2020, a US passport guaranteed visa-free access to 184 states, but a year later this had fallen to 75 (notably Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq continue to have the lowest access of all). Nearly all states of the world initiated travel restrictions as a response to the COVID pandemic and by October 2020, a total of 219 countries, territories or areas had issued over 98,500 travel restrictions including restrictions on entry and exit, changes in visa and documentation requirements and medical requirements.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has both reinforced and upended assumptions of mobility and inequality. In 2020/21 staying at home not air miles became a marker of privilege. At the same time, COVID exposed how our economies and societies depend on movement, and while international travel was impossible for most, exceptions were made for e.g. senior bankers, hedge fund managers and executives involved in high value deals flying into the UK who were exempted from quarantine under plans to ‘promote global Britain’. However, the largest exempted group were those designated essential workers and low waged workers in key sectors such as agriculture were permitted, not to say encouraged, to cross borders. Within states too, while most people were locked down, essential workers were permitted, and in some instances even required, to leave their homes to go to work. Many of these essential workers were non-citizens.

In the UK – and in many other states – the response to COVID-19 was framed in unashamedly national and Fantasy Citizen terms. Updates were given from Georgian panelled rooms by speakers flanked by Union Jacks. We were ‘enlisted’ to fight a ‘national battle’ and ‘frontline’ staff who die were spoken of in quasi-militaristic terms as ‘fallen heroes’. This was the Fantasy Citizenship of ‘we’re all in this together’. Yet there was resistance to accepting the national as the suitable scale to respond to the virus which sharply exposed and instantiated internal as well as external borders. Previously taken-for-granted internal movements came under scrutiny – the movement of a million UK national students from home to their universities for example, was designated as ‘migration’ in the context of concerns about infectious spread.⁴ Borders between the UK’s constituent countries hardened, and Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all initiated tougher measures than those implemented nationally. This resulted in mobility restrictions and, for example, in October 2020 the Welsh government banned travel into Wales from English COVID hotspots and set up checkpoints on the border to stop people travelling ‘without reasonable excuse’. Domestic confinement coupled with sub-national differences in restrictions brought a new layer of restrictions on citizens’ movements. The boundaries internal to the British state afflict and are visible to the homeless citizen and the welfare claimant through the kinds of policies detailed above, but COVID-19 made these internal borders visible to groups for whom they might previously have passed largely unnoticed and who were given crash courses in administrative boundaries they crossed unknowingly every day. Local authority boundaries were given new meaning through the Tier system, which demarcated what level of restrictions residents and businesses were subject to according to their local authority.

The impact of immigration enforcement on racialised citizens has been exposed in the consequences of the UK’s hostile environment policies. ‘Hostile environment’ is the planned outcome of a series of measures that tie immigration checks to access to basic services and amenities including housing, health and education. Excluded from the labour market, from all housing including private-rented accommodation, from health services, in short denied the basics for a tolerable life, it is anticipated that undocumented migrants will choose to ‘self-deport’. Crucially checks are conducted, not by state functionaries, but by private and individual actors. Immigration and citizenship status have been introduced as everyone’s concern, and not just employers but universities, schools, landlords, banks, and health service employees among others, are required to check immigration documents and share information with immigration officials. Black and ethnic minority people with the legal status of citizens are policed as migrants, exposing the racialised nature of Fantasy Citizenship.

COVID-19 drew attention too to the racialisation of citizenship. In the report Policing the Pandemic, Amnesty International (2020) found that BME people were disproportionately targeted by police with violence, discriminatory identity checks, fines and forced quarantines. Michael Etienne has contrasted the policing of a street party to celebrate VE Day filmed by the BBC that seems to be in breach of lockdown restrictions, with the tasering in front of his five-year-old child of a Black man a few miles away, for not following those same lockdown restrictions. Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist organising and campaigning have foregrounded the violence meted out to Black people in the ‘wrong’ spaces, citizens or not, and the racist policing of lockdown. COVID has also exposed how who is considered in and out of place is bound up with nationally and spatially specific ways of encoding and remaking race within national borders at the level of city and neighbourhood. It is further intensifying the racialisation of the right to mobility that had already been exacerbated in the UK’s efforts to manufacture a ‘hostile environment’ for ‘illegal immigrants’ (for the situation in Germany, see Riedner and Hess, 2024, this issue). Thus the policing of the mobility of migrants and of BME that is enhanced through the different scales of COVID restrictions and their differential implementation exemplifies the connections in practice between migrants and citizens that are erased by Fantasy Citizenship.

Conclusion

Seen from the migrant side of the binary - the side occupied by people who identify or are identified as 'migrants', and by their supporters - citizenship is highly desirable, but Fantasy Citizenship turns attention away from the gendered, classed and racialised borders within formal citizenship. It also means that the connections between the controls on the mobility of citizens (within states) and controls on the mobility of migrants (across state borders and within states) remain uninvestigated. Indeed, with the exception of incarcerated people, there is an assumption that citizens are free to move within states, though this has changed with the pandemic. There is often an assumption in public and political discourse that migrants and low waged/unemployed citizens are competitors for privileges of membership and matters of differentiation, or marginalisation within citizenship, and of exclusion from citizenship are rarely considered together even as they clearly overlap. The naturalisation of difference between migrants and citizens, Fantasy Citizenship, and the ‘right to work’ together obscure and oversimplify the relation between control over mobility and control over labour, between freedom of movement and free consent, and between mobility, settlement and livelihood. In post pandemic times, mobility is potentially a powerful lens through which to dismantle Fantasy Citizenship and enrich understandings of these relationships.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 They must exercise their treaty rights as a jobseeker, worker, self-employed, self-sufficient person, or student

2 An exception is now made for those taxpaying citizens who have paid UK National Insurance contributions on the grounds that they have ‘recently contributed to the UK economy whilst being posted to work abroad, thus maintaining their connections to the UK’ (Kennedy 2015).

3 Please note Barnet Council changed their social housing allocation policy in 2023.

4 See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-53947488