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ABSTRACT
This epilogue to the special issue of Citizenship Studies reflects on the connections between states’ powers to deport foreigners and to denationalise citizens and asks how both powers ought to be hedged in by liberal and democratic constraints. The article argues that citizenship revocation powers are ultimately at odds with a democratic principle that governments are collectively authorised by citizens. It suggests also that the protection of long-term foreign residents from deportation is due to the emergence of a quasi-citizenship status for denizens in liberal democracies. Finally, the article raises a question about the future of the power to expel in increasingly mobile and interconnected societies. Could the proliferation of multiple citizenships and the increasing number of people with multiple residences in different countries undermine the justifications for strong constraints on the state power to expel proposed by the contributions in this volume?
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws (1930), Art. 1; European Convention on Nationality (1997), Art. 3(1).
2. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 15.
3. The general right to a nationality proclaimed in the UDHR in 1948 was reduced to a right of children to acquire a nationality in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 24.3). The right to change a nationality leaves states free to impose conditions for naturalisation as well as renunciation of their citizenship.
4. European Convention on Nationality, article 7.
5. For a discussion of the case law of the U.S. Supreme Court, see (Weil Citation2013).
6. For contrary argument in favour of mandatory naturalisation see (Rubio-Marín Citation2000; de Schutter and Ypi Citation2015).
7. As of 2016, 26 out of 175 states in the GLOBALCIT database require residence abroad as a general condition for voluntary renunciation of citizenship. Thirteen of these states are European, with the other half being rather evenly distributed across world regions (see http://globalcit.eu/loss-of-citizenship/).
8. Only some Asian countries with ius sanguinis regimes that want to strictly avoid dual citizenship limit the transmission of citizenship by descent outside their territory in cases where another citizenship is acquired at birth.
9. A plausible exception to this norm is when citizenship has been acquired by fraud, but even in this case, there should be limited time period within which such citizenships can be annulled (Bauböck and Paskalev Citation2015).
10. See the Tjebbes et al judgement of the Court of Justice of the European Union (Case C-221/17, decided on 12 March 2019), in which the court requires a proportionality test whenever citizenship revocation entails the loss of EU citizenship.
11. Directive 2003/109/EC Concerning the Status of Third-Country Nationals who are Long-Term Residents, Article 12.1.
12. ‘We may treat our fellow citizens arbitrarily according to [our own] discretion. To aliens within our national territory, however, we must afford their persons and property protection “in accordance with certain standards of international law” …’ (Oppenheim Citation1955, quoted in Goodin Citation1988, 669).
13. As discussed in the previous section, there are strong reasons why citizens should not be deprived of their status in order to circumvent their special protection.
14. The argument about free choice obviously does not apply to immigrants’ children who should acquire citizenship at birth automatically, just as the children of native citizens do.
15. This argument only applies to those entitled to citizenship, not to foreigners whom states may grant citizenship on a discretionary basis after examining their individual claims, such as second foreign-born generations of emigrant origin residing abroad.
16. Countries of origin of irregular migrants sometimes do not collaborate with deportation efforts by refusing to issue return certificates or by denying that the deportees are their nationals. In the case of unjust deportations, this might be regarded as a justifiable act of resistance. However, such policies turn nationals into de-facto stateless people, which can never be justified.
17. GLOBALCIT data for 2016. See https://migrationdataportal.org/themes/citizenship-and-migration.
18. There is no serious estimate of the number of multiple citizens in the world population, since most states count only their residents and their citizens abroad if these register with a consulate, but do not know how many in both categories possess another nationality.
19. See (Bauböck, Honohan, and Vink Citation2018) and GLOBALCIT 2019 http://globalcit.eu/databases/global-birthright-indicators/.
20. See Canales and Nowakowski (Citation2020) for data on the number of states permitting multiple citizenship on nine different grounds.
21. As noted by Worster (Citation2009, 494), the 1992 Micheletti decision of the European Court of Justice has established a stronger principle of mutual recognition of member state nationalities for purposes of free movement in the EU even if a third country nationality is considered to be the dominant one.
22. For some doubts see (Bauböck Citation2018).
23. In contrast with a legal conception of domicile as being by definition singular, Birnie’s account does allow for multiple domicile and could support non-deportability rights in more than one country. However, since the threshold for domiciliation is much higher than for residence, this would not apply to most circular migrants and other highly mobile populations.
24. Doing so may also diminish their protection since, under international law, foreign nationals enjoy better protection against expropriation than citizens do. See note 12 supra.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rainer Bauböck
Rainer Bauböck is part time professor in the Global Governance Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, where he held the Chair in Social and Political Theory from 2007 to 2018. He is corresponding member Austrian Academy of Sciences and chairs the Academy’s Commission on Migration and Integration Research. He teaches at the Central European University Vienna campus as a guest professor. His research interests are in normative political theory and comparative research on democratic citizenship, European integration, migration, nationalism and minority rights. He co-directs GLOBALCIT, an online observatory on citizenship and voting rights. His most recent book is Democratic Inclusion. Rainer Bauböck in Dialogue, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017.