Theorising the power of citizenship as claims-making

ABSTRACT

I advance a conceptual approach to citizenship as membership through claims-making. In this approach, citizenship is a relational process of making membership claims on polities, people and institutions, claims recognized or rejected within particular normative understandings of citizenship. Such a conceptual shift moves scholarship beyond typologizing—enumerating how citizenship is (or is not) about status, rights, participation and identity—to identifying the mechanisms through which claims on citizenship have power. This framework requires a relational approach and attention to dynamics of recognition within contexts of structured agency. Immigrants and their children can make claims to modify the normative content of citizenship, affect recognition evaluations and change the allocation of status and rights. But they are also constrained by legal structures, a society's institutional practices, and prevailing public perceptions. Citizenship as claims-making may require a reassessment of boundary approaches and a turn to metaphors of positionality, as well as more serious commitment to mixed-methods research. The stakes of understanding citizenship's power, as practice and status, are especially high right now. Yet based on existing scholarship, it is not entirely clear how much citizenship matters, in what ways, for whom, or why. This is the challenge for future scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• immigration
• claims-making
• recognition
• theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I replicate the parochialism of many citizenship studies in mainly referencing work based on ‘Western’ cases, that is, rich, democratic countries in (Western) Europe, North America, and Oceania. For a discussion of whether and how citizenship paradigms can be extended to post-colonial or non-Western contexts, see Sadiq (2017) and Chung (2017), respectively.

2. On the effects of illegality for citizen children, researchers find evidence that parents’ precarious legal status generates psychological harm (Chaudry et al. 2010; Dreby 2012), negatively affects health and educational trajectories (Bean et al. 2011; Yoshikawa 2011), and might affect political engagement (Terriquez and Kwon 2015; Bloemraad, Sarabia, and Fillingim 2016).

3. See, for example, Brubaker’s (1992) influential discussion of citizenship as territorial, legal, political, and social closure, and more recent conceptualising by Joppke (2010).

4. See Helbling (2016), Goodman (2015), and the EudoCitizenship website (http://eudo-citizenship.eu/) for a discussion of some of these indexing efforts. MIPEX (http://www.mipex.eu/) gets closest, but it enumerates policies directed at immigrants in general, not the specific dividing line between citizens and noncitizens.

5. The comparison with legal permanent residents is the ‘harder’ case to see whether citizenship carries measureable consequences. As I note at the outset, the evidence for categorical inequality experienced by those with precarious or no legal status is unequivocal. For a more detailed discussion of the relevant empirical studies, as well as the methodological problems of causal inference faced by researchers working on this topic, see Bloemraad (2017) and Bloemraad and Sheares (2017).

6. Such quasi-experiments can occur when a legislative change goes into effect on a particular day, thereby serving as an exogenous shock on people’s citizenship status. This was the case for babies born just before and after the cut-off date extending German birthright citizenship to the children of noncitizens, and thus permitting researchers to see whether status correlates with differences in child development (Avitabile, Clots-Figueras, and Masella 2013, 2014). In another set of creative studies, Hainmueller, Hangartner, and Pietrantuono (2015, 2017) examine would-be Swiss citizens whose naturalisation was subject to vote by local citizens. They argue that those who barely won or lost the vote are practically identical, allowing them to tie differences in outcome to citizenship acquisition.

7. According to Beckman (2012), noncitizens enjoy ‘reasonable access’ to national elections in only one country, New Zealand, although the law on the books in a handful of other countries, mostly in Latin America, stipulates that national voting requires only a period of residence.

8. Investment mechanisms are linked to rights to the extent that citizenship guarantees residence. Nevertheless, the link to a rights mechanism is a bit more tenuous than in the case of voting since in most countries permanent legal residency can be extended indefinitely absent criminal convictions or extended time outside the country.

9. See also Peters and Vink (2016), advancing a life course investment approach.

10. The process of government selection and state-directed settlement may also affect refugees, providing a message of recognition and legitimacy that may help them to challenge some of the vulnerabilities they face (Brown 2011).

11. Winter’s examination actually suggests more than a tripartite set of actors, as she examines Canadian national identity negotiated between Anglophone Canadians, Francophone Quebecers, Aboriginals, and immigrant-origin minorities.

12. My ongoing research on mixed-status families in California suggest that these two terms – U.S. citizen and American – are not perfect synonyms, but space constraints prevent an extended discussion of gaps and overlaps.

13. Schildkraut extends what she characterises as the traditional dichotomy between ethnocultural ascription and liberalism by identifying an additional ‘civic republicanism’ and ‘incorporationism’.

14. These dynamics have parallels to deservingness claims in modern welfare states in which actors contest whether certain types of people ‘deserve’ social benefits. A common counterclaim to redistributive exclusions is an appeal to shared citizenship.

15. The relatively limited work that draws on social movements scholarship to examine immigrants’ claims-making tends to focus on policy as a reflection of discursive opportunities (Koopmans et al. 2005) or a source of interpretative resources (Bloemraad 2006). But the resonance of citizenship claims obviously relies on a much broader public culture than policy alone. Researchers have paid more limited attention to popular culture, perhaps because citizenship is in part defined as nation-state membership. Some public notions of citizenship are linked to state decisions, such as choices around educational curricula or textbooks used in public schools, but other ideas circulate through alternative channels, such as depictions in movies and TV shows or shared social media content. Understanding the cultural sources of normative citizenship ideals is an area for future research.

16. See also Zolberg and Woon (1999) for an early application of boundary concepts to immigrant incorporation.

17. See also Brubaker (2009).

18. As noted above, being ‘American’ and a citizen are not necessarily the same things, but such shifting criteria, from economic behaviour to ascription to cultural acts, also came through when respondents discussed citizenship.

19. See http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/02/01/what-it-takes-to-truly-be-one-of-us/. The residents of 14 wealthy democracies were asked how much birthplace, language ability, majority religious affiliation, and shared customs and traditions mattered for being truly American, German, Japanese, etc.