At a time when advances in transport and communications technology have made it far cheaper and easier for migrants to form and maintain social and political networks around the globe, an estimated 200 million people—roughly 3 percent of the world’s population—now live in countries other than those where they were born. This combination of record migration and a world made smaller by technology has prompted countries that are the source of migrants as well as those that host them to rethink notions of citizenship and belonging.
In the aftermath of World War I, the League of Nations commissioned the 1929 Harvard Research in International Law project to study and issue recommendations for draft conventions on three key areas of international law, including Nationality (in addition to Territorial Waters and Responsibility of States).1 That project’s continuing relevance is confirmed by its citation in venues including the recent UN Draft Articles on Nationality of Natural Persons in Relation to the Succession of States.2 Yet, by the very admission in the Harvard Law report, the status of citizenship and nationality law and policy is in constant need of updating: “In fact there seem to be no laws which are more fluid and subject to change than nationality laws.” The intervening eighty-eight years have brought with them little by way of stability.
Nations around the globe are changing laws and customs governing who is allowed to become a citizen and how the naturalization process works, even as they debate the shifting norms about the rights and responsibilities that citizenship entails. Many are moving or sharpening the line that distinguishes between the rights and responsibilities of citizens and noncitizens, as well as granting some limited privileges to some groups of noncitizens while isolating others. Some are opening new pathways to citizenship, while others are making it more difficult to naturalize. These shifting notions of citizenship, belonging, and exclusion do not represent mere theories but have significant real-world consequences for individual humans and their host and homeland communities.
Changing citizenship and nationality rules have revealed fault lines between the seemingly though not necessarily contradictory motives of migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries. Many developing countries depend upon the émigrés whom Bangladesh calls “manpower exports” to send home remittances, which surpassed $300 billion worldwide in 2007.3 Developing-nation governments thus have an interest in encouraging people to go abroad but also in retaining ties and a sense of responsibility toward the homeland. These governments are pursuing these goals, in part, through new nationality and citizenship laws. The United Nations’ 2003 Human Security Now (commonly referred to as the Ogata Report) argues that expanding access to citizenship—such as through dual nationality and absentee voting—has the potential to promote economic and social development in migrant-sending countries.4
New uses and forms of citizenship are causing no small amount of consternation in developed nations with entrenched ideas about the nature of national loyalty and belonging. These host societies are typically made up of aging populations that depend on immigrants to fill the workforce and contribute to state-sponsored social security and medical care. Even as these aging populations are wary of immigrants with multiple national loyalties, they often are ambivalent about how much they want to welcome newcomers into society, especially those who challenge traditional attitudes toward citizenship and belonging. This ambivalence is reflected in increasing attention to ensuring that prospective citizens are familiar with host-society values. Since the 1980s, at least nine countries have instituted citizenship tests that applicants must pass if they are to naturalize; some are considering requiring tests even of prospective permanent residents. Others, including the six biggest European nations, have proposed that new immigrants be compelled to sign an “integration contract” to ensure their commitment to adapting to host-society life.
The tacit acceptance, and explicit authorization in some cases, of dual citizenship over the past two decades is perhaps the clearest example of liberalization of citizenship laws. Germany has recognized the failure of its previous ethnicity-based citizenship laws in face of a large permanent Turkish guest-worker population and its descendants. Across Europe and in selected jurisdictions in the United States, voting rights—particularly in local elections—have been granted (or restored) to noncitizen residents, and many more jurisdictions are considering doing the same. Nations liberalizing their citizenship laws have often done so with the intent of promoting the integration of migrants as an explicit policy goal.
Other nations have moved to restrict rights, making it more difficult to naturalize as well as to challenge birthright citizenship, dual citizenship, and/or voting in more than one country. In the most extreme cases, countries—particularly in vulnerable African states in the throes of ethnic conflict—have attempted to deny the citizenship of ethnic minorities that have been present for generations.
The opposing expansionist and restrictionist perspectives cast citizenship in very different lights: one from the point of view that inclusion benefits the broader community and the other on the basis that participation in society should be limited to the deserving. These ongoing processes raise important issues for host and migrant-sending countries—as well as for third-party countries—involving extradition, repatriation, integration of migrant and minority populations, potential conflicts between citizenship regimes of different nations, the status of children born outside of the country of their parents’ citizenship, treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, work authorization rights, military service, dualnational holders of elected office, and statelessness.
Relevant questions abound. How do nations and communities reach a consensus on what citizenship entails? Does one earn the right to participate only by becoming a citizen, or does one earn the right to become a citizen by participating? Who benefits more when citizenship is conferred: the individual or community and nation? What determines the level to which a person should be considered to “belong” to an adopted land? Does participation in a home country’s affairs make an individual more or less likely to embrace the host society? Can an individual be loyal to more than one nation? Public debate tends to frame these questions in emotional terms that may or may not correlate with the practical consequences of the resulting answers.
A concept that initially correlated to city-states, citizenship has evolved along with the concept of sovereignty and nationhood—from city-state to empire to nation-state to today’s mix of nation-states and federations. Early citizenship rules were intended to keep people from leaving, while today’s rules include a mix of incentives and obstacles intended to manage—however imprecisely—the flows of migrants of varied socioeconomic, ethnic, educational, and other characteristics. The constant factor over time has been that concepts of citizenship outline the rights and responsibilities of citizens and states. Early sovereigns offered physical protection against marauders; today’s nations provide a range of social protections.
The concept of denizenship, or foreigner with special status, emerged in the sixteenth century and evolved into the various forms of status for migrants who are neither entirely alien nor yet deemed to belong. By the mid-nineteenth century, nation-states were beginning to use passports to denote national affiliation, though the passport did not come into widespread use until World War I.5 The concept of citizenship as many people know it today was not established until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it crystallized around the traumatic fissures and redrawing of borders following the war.
The central question in citizenship involves the rules of ascription: who is allowed to become a citizen and how, whether through birth, marriage, naturalization, physical presence, or the moving of national borders. The chief distinction is between jus soli—the law of the soil, which focuses on where an individual was born—and jus sanguinis—the law of blood, which is based on ethnic heritage. The choice of regime creates different consequences in terms of the number of naturalizations that are allowed.
Thus, nations have tinkered with rules of ascription as a rough way of managing the number of immigrants and prospective citizens. In addition to modifications to the central blood-versus-soil test, nations have refined myriad laws and regulations governing naturalization—residence or background requirements, language or civics tests, background checks, health requirements, income levels, professional credentials, excluded professions, and social categories.
Restricting birthright citizenship has been widely used as a tool for minimizing immigration. Until 2004 Ireland was the only European Union member to offer automatic citizenship to anyone born on Irish soil. In a referendum that year, following a strong influx of migrants from Eastern Europe and Africa, voters overwhelmingly approved limiting birthright citizenship; under the new laws, children born in Ireland to non-Irish parents have the right to Irish citizenship only if at least one of those parents has lived in the country for three of the previous four years.6 The U.S. Congress briefly debated a 2007 bill to end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to unauthorized immigrants.
In some countries, birthright citizenship depends on the parents’ specific countries of birth and has been used as a tool to marginalize ethnic groups. The Dominican Republic’s constitution, for example, has long granted citizenship to all children born on Dominican soil except for children of diplomats or parents “in transit.” For decades, citizenship was systematically denied to children born to the large minority of Haitian migrant workers who had emigrated in large numbers from the country sharing an island with the Dominican Republic. Reacting to pressure from international human rights groups to recognize the citizenship of children born on Dominican soil of Haitian parentage, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court recently issued a ruling interpreting the country’s constitution in such a way as to specifically deem Haitian migrant workers—even those in the country for decades—to be “in transit” and their children thus ineligible for citizenship.
As migration and intermarriage have increased, rules governing acquisition of citizenship by marriage have been a particular locus for change—especially in terms of a woman’s right to pass her citizenship to a foreign-born husband or even to her own children if the father is a foreigner. Until surprisingly recently, laws in countries including the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and even the United States once held that women marrying foreign nationals automatically lost their nationality. The Netherlands, for example, rescinded the automatic loss of citizenship for women married to a foreigner only in 1964.7 Canada did not allow married women to give their citizenship to their children until 1977.8
These changes have been framed as human rights issues. Across the Middle East, citizenship rights are inseparable from women’s rights. In Morocco, where women must hold a minimum of thirty legislative seats, the law changed in 2005 to allow women to pass on citizenship to their children and to spouses. Algeria also allowed women these citizenship rights in 2007. Egypt now allows women to pass their citizenship to their children, though not yet to their spouses. Overall, however, citizenship trends have been mixed where women and children are concerned. Even as women gained some rights, as described above, many countries have restricted access by rescinding automatic citizenship by marriage, lengthening the waiting period for citizenship and putting in place other measures to discourage naturalization. Others have implemented citizenship tests and other standards—often clothing and appearance based, as illustrated in July 2008 when France’s highest court denied the citizenship application of a Muslim woman from Morocco because she wore a hijab that covered her face. Citing its impression that the woman lived in total submission to her husband, the court framed the decision in terms of the need to protect women’s rights and in terms of adaptability to French norms. Yet on both counts, the stated intentions are unlikely to match the consequences. Paradoxically, the decision limited the Muslim woman’s rights, rather than expanding them. It also renewed attention to the veil, which had become in some cases a symbol of resistance to France in the face of challenges to Muslim identity. The practical consequences may then be that more Muslims insist on the veil and that fewer Muslim women have access to citizenship—a case in which the consequences of citizenship policy may counter the very goals that the policy was intended to support.
Where nations have liberalized laws, practical considerations typically are at the forefront, with a heavy emphasis on attracting skilled migrants and promoting immigrants’ embrace of host-country values and practices. Japan, for example, in the 1980s eliminated the prior requirement that naturalizing citizens adopt a new Japanese name. With a shrinking and aging population, Japan has been concerned with the question of how to attract needed workers to its labor force and to promote their embrace of Japanese culture.
Singapore is actively using liberalized citizenship policies as part of its plan, announced in March 2007, to raise the population from 4.5 to 6.5 million. Already, one in five residents of Singapore is foreign-born, and that number is rising. With a falling birthrate—1.25 per woman in 2006—that is well below replacement rate, Singapore recognized the need for immigration and integration for economic reasons. In 1999 it created the Accelerated Citizenship Scheme for “professionals, entrepreneurs, skilled personnel and other qualified persons.” The program reduces the waiting period for certain permanent residents to qualify for citizenship and the processing time for citizenship applications.
Already a significant migrant-receiving nation, Germany changed its jus sanguinis–based citizenship regime after deciding that it was not in its own best interest for a large minority population, making significant economic contributions, to be permanently marginalized and disinterested in adopting the host country’s culture and customs. In making its nationality regime more flexible in 1999, Germany allowed descendants of Turkish guest workers to become citizens—though resulting naturalization rates have been lower than hoped for, in part because of restrictions on dual nationality. Germany’s case is particularly interesting in that it also relatively recently reined in the right to citizenship of ethnic Germans whose families have been living in other countries for generations. The combination of legal changes illustrate well the French scholar Patrick Weil’s contention that citizenship regimes are converging, with jus solis nations becoming more restrictive and jus sanguinis countries becoming somewhat less so.9
Not all citizens hold the same status and rights. Many countries distinguish between native-born and naturalized citizens, particularly on the question of eligibility to run for national office. In the United States, there was a brief and unsuccessful campaign to change a law to allow Austrian-born California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for president. More recently, some observers questioned U.S. presidential candidate John McCain’s eligibility, since the office of president is reserved for “natural-born citizens” and he was born on a military base in Panama.10
Many countries require one or both parents of a citizen to be native-born before a candidate can run for president. Until 1999, for example, this was the case in Mexico, which changed the law so that Vicente Fox, whose mother was born in Spain, could run. Still, foreign-born Mexicans are barred from holding seats in either house of the congress, state legislatures, the Supreme Court, and all governorships—although tellingly, Mexicans living abroad have been welcomed to office within Mexico in recent years. Nearly all federal positions, including the military and merchant marines, bar naturalized Mexicans and noncitizens. And in recent years, the Mexican government has encouraged cities to extend this restriction even to local government posts.11
For naturalized immigrants or for citizens born to immigrant parents, legal status or even full citizenship do not necessarily reflect inclusion in society and thus access to broader economic and social rights. Following the fall 2005 riots in Parisian immigrant housing projects, it became clear that the young men who were setting cars on fire were protesting their “on-paper only” status as French citizens who faced dim job prospects, held little hope for real inclusion, and felt that the French values of liberty, equality, and fraternity did not apply to them. (Many of them also were excluded within their own immigrant communities as well.) The July 7, 2005, London subway bombings were carried out by young Muslim men of Pakistani descent who were born in England. Both events showed that a nation can be demographically diverse without fully integrating diverse populations. The British bombers and the French rioters were citizens who enjoyed equal rights, at least on paper, yet faced the strictures of the class-based British system and the ethnic-based French culture. The British bombers were widely described as middle-class and educated, while the French rioters were said to exhibit even higher unemployment rates than French citizens. Such dramatic incidents reinforce stereotypes that likely played a part in alienating the young men in both episodes. Nevertheless, the vast majority of British and French immigrants and their descendants have not resorted to violence.
Unequal citizenship sometimes leads to outright denial of citizenship rights, which in the extreme leaves the target groups and individuals without any state that claims them for its own. According to the Justice Initiative at the Open Society Institute, more than 11 million people around the globe are effectively stateless.
Some states are systematically challenging the nationality status of specific social and ethnic groups—for example, in elections in which ethnic minorities’ eligibility is questioned and prevents them from voting—as a way of legally institutionalizing marginalization.12 These nations can—and do—use proof of identity as a way to effectively withhold the rights that go with citizenship. In Kenya members of the Nubian minority tribe are systematically denied national identification cards, even though those cards are required for everything from traveling outside the country, to holding a job, to obtaining free medical care and schooling.
While Kenya has used bureaucracy as a subtle but effective tool, the Democratic Republic of Congo has threatened the nationality of ethnic minorities who have been in the country for generations by outright revoking the national identity papers of certain ethnic groups as an attempt to render their status ambiguous. The rationale is based on a 1981 nationality law passed by Mobutu Sese Seko limiting citizenship to those who could demonstrate ancestral ties going back to 1885—a rule expressly designed to disadvantage more recent arrivals. In Côte d’Ivoire in 2003, the government encouraged harassment of “foreigners” under its restrictive definition limiting citizenship to those born to two Ivoirian parents—again, under a rule expressly designed for a political purpose, in this case to make a political opponent ineligible to run for public office. This law excluded nearly a third of the country’s residents from citizenship. Similar policies were applied against the Bihari in Bangladesh and the Bedoon in Kuwait.
Denial of citizenship—whether in ongoing cases of minorities and migrants who are not granted papers, or of refugees who have lost proof of citizenship, or of ethnic minorities who are victims of political conflict or moving state border lines—has led to increasing concern over statelessness and its implications.13 As the Ogata Report points out, “The willful denial of citizenship for whole communities has major implications for other states, due to the potential large-scale population movements and the spread of conflict and poverty.”14
Threats to deny or revoke citizenship of entire groups can be accompanied by challenges to individuals who upset the status quo. Pressure groups in the Dominican Republic have pressured their governments to revoke the citizenship of activist Sonia Pierre and in the Netherlands of Somali-born parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Though the circumstances were distinct—Pierre defended the rights of immigrants and their descendants and Hirsi Ali openly derided religious minorities—the message behind both cases was similar: sticking one’s neck out can get an ethnic minority in trouble.
Even as some nations experiment with restricting citizenship, many others have expanded its parameters in such a way as to allow multiple citizenships. In the United States alone, between 25 and 40 million U.S. citizens hold passports of other nations as well. Since the State Department grudgingly recognized dual citizenship in 1990, many countries have rushed to allow émigrés to retain their birth citizenship—so far, over 150 nations and counting—with fascinating results. A retired U.S. government official became Lithuania’s president in 1997. Following the Philippines and Dominican Republic, Mexico and Ecuador in 2006 adopted overseas absentee voting. Cape Verde and Colombia reserve seats in their national legislatures for their dual citizens. In April 2006 Italians living abroad elected twelve deputies (out of a total 630) and six senators (out of 315) who represent four areas of the world outside of Italy. Jesús Galvis, a Hackensack, New Jersey, city councilman, ran for a newly created seat in Colombia’s Senate in 1988 for what he told me were two reasons: because he felt that it was important that Colombians abroad have a say in policies that affected them, such as the excessive time and cost for renewing passports and delays in getting packages through customs, and because he wanted to prompt other Colombians to seek the seat. He never expected to win, but if he had he would have had to give up his U.S. citizenship, as have other dual citizens elected or appointed to national office.
The trend in dual citizenship is not wholly toward opening. After a brief experiment with dual citizenship, the Netherlands withdrew that right in 1997. A 2004 proposal in Hungary to allow dual citizenship provoked ferocious debate yet ultimately failed because turnout was not high enough to validate the referendum. In December 2005 a group of U.S. legislators proposed penalties on dual citizens who voted in their home countries. Opponents of dual citizenship argue that it is dangerous because it can lead to conflicting loyalties. They fear that immigrants’ efforts to improve their homelands represent misplaced allegiances that are bad for the host country.15
While dual citizenship has huge symbolic significance on the national level, for individuals it often involves practical matters such as land inheritances, airport entry fees, rules on transmission of money, contracts, business arrangements, and freedom of travel. In the United States, Michael Jones-Correa has argued that naturalization rates are likely to rise as countries approve dual citizenship.16 This has been consistent with my own experience with Dominican and other Latin American immigrants who want to hold onto a symbolic emotional tie and to avoid logistical nightmares.
For countries rejecting dual citizenship, practical issues also come into play. In Hungary, for example, the concern was over the 3 million ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring Slovakia, Romania, and Serbia—a lingering result of the way borders were redrawn following World War I—and the nationalist backlash that the proposal had provoked in those countries, whose economies lagged Hungary’s. Loyalty to another government can cause problems, especially in times of conflict. It is impossible to predict whether conflict may arise in the future, and it may well be the case that a dual citizenship regime that works well in peacetime may need to be modified at some point. In this case, it was not a good omen that the dual citizenship proposal itself was causing tension.
India—where festering border issues with Pakistan cause particular security concerns involving dual citizenship—splits hairs by creating an entirely new form of allegiance that is similar to dual citizenship but that does not confer all of the rights that full Indian citizens enjoy: for example, the right to vote or to hold elected or appointed government office. In 2006 India conferred the first Overseas Citizen of India certificate. Members of India’s diaspora are not technically dual citizens and still must carry their “foreign” passports.
In World War I the military service requirement for German and Austro-Hungarian subjects added to xenophobia in the United States over those immigrants who at the time could renounce those obligations only in mind and practice, but not legally. More recently, international bodies have attempted to address the issue of mandatory military requirements for dual citizens through cross-border agreements, including the 1963 Convention on Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and the 1930 Hague Convention, under which signatories agree that dual citizens are obligated to serve only one state.
Another practical issue to be dealt with is the possibility that dual citizens might use their status to elude prosecution and extradition. This can—and, given the extent to which dual citizenship is increasing, must—be dealt with through the creation of common international standards on dual citizenship and extradition. Israel dealt with concerns in this area by altering treaties, but given the number of countries in the world, a comprehensive international approach would make far more sense than a patchwork of treaties.
Perhaps the greatest area of variation globally lies in the rights afforded to noncitizens. Some are granted recognition of rights based on ties to the host country that fall into a gray area between alien status and full citizenship. This category, as we saw earlier, is commonly called “denizenship” after a practice established in England in the sixteenth century for privileged foreigners. People so labeled may include children born abroad to nonresident nationals (from jus solis countries); refugees and asylees; and guest workers and other longterm residents who are unable to naturalize (as in jus sanguinis countries). The rights in question include the right to vote at various levels; to run for office; to own property; to be licensed in and practice certain professions; to receive state-provided services; and to own and operate a business.
In recent years some countries have expanded special rights to certain denizens, as in the more than forty countries that allow noncitizen residents to vote, mostly in local elections but occasionally at the federal or regional level. European Union member states, for example, grant local voting rights to citizens of other EU countries. Spain took that principle a step further in 2008 when citizens voted to grant local voting rights to residents who were citizens of non-EU nations. Portugal had already extended not only local but also national-level voting rights to citizens of former colonies Cape Verde and Brazil. In the United States—which allowed noncitizens to vote in more than forty states and federal territories until the last state ended the practice in 1926—at least eighteen states had movements in 2008 to restore voting rights at the local level. Several Maryland jurisdictions allow some noncitizens to vote, as do Chicago’s school councils. For many citizens, the question of voting rights goes to the core of the question of what citizenship is. Yet historically, citizenship did not automatically confer voting rights—and still does not necessarily guarantee the right to vote. The noncitizen voting rights movement also highlights the way that citizenship can exist at many levels, not just the national level; individuals are part of communities from the block to the neighborhood to the city, state, nation, region, and world. It also raises the question of which affiliations constitute “citizenship.”
Noncitizens in the military are a special case. Some nations, including the United States, offer accelerated access to citizenship for denizens who serve in the military. Though there is no draft at present, the United States requires legal permanent resident aliens to sign up for the Selective Service, so that if a draft is reinstated, they will be the first called.
The most controversial denizens are those who provoke disagreement over what to call them: “irregular,” “illegal,” “unauthorized,” “undocumented.” In the United States, a three-tier system of rights has emerged: one tier for citizens, one tier for legal permanent residents, and largely since the mid-twentieth century a third gray area for unauthorized immigrants. This third tier was effectively created in the mid-twentieth century, after the United States imposed restrictive quotas in the 1920s but later needed a way to attract new low-wage workers without making a significant commitment to providing a way for them to join American society. Since the formal end of race-based admissions in the 1950s, “illegal” has come to serve as a euphemism to partially replace previous rhetoric based openly on racial and ethnic criteria for exclusion.
The practical issues involved in the rights extended to denizens are not insignificant, particularly in countries with generous social protections, which can be expensive and generate resentment among taxpayers if extended to noncitizens—particularly those without legal papers. At the same time, there is a high cost of not investing in providing services like education and preventive health care. The line between citizen and noncitizen can impact incentives or deterrents to naturalization. In countries with significant migrant populations, the disenfranchisement of large numbers of noncitizens can have a serious impact on communities and their ability to engage residents.
From the Chinese railroad builders of the nineteenth century to the Mexican field hands of the twentieth century, the presence of foreign-born workers has played a controversial role in battles over U.S. worker rights. As Mark Miller noted in the previous chapter, fear of immigrants—part economic, part cultural—played into the Know-Nothing movement of the mid-nineteenth century and became a major theme in urban labor organizing. In the 1950s large agricultural interests used undocumented workers in attempts to break United Farm Workers strikes, and both the Teamsters and the revered labor organizer César Chávez were involved in border demonstrations and turning in scab immigrant workers to the authorities for deportation.
Until relatively recently, the conventional wisdom was that the sheer number of foreign-born workers has negatively affected U.S. worker rights. This view has been reinforced by rhetoric that foreign-born workers threaten not only U.S. worker rights but also U.S. culture. This line of reasoning further appeared to justify restrictive measures making it more difficult for foreign-born workers to obtain work authorization, permanent resident status, and eventually citizenship. Since 2000, when the U.S. union leadership switched its long-standing opposition to legalization policies, conventional wisdom about the relationship between immigrant and U.S. worker rights has begun to change, reflecting the conviction that it is not only the number of immigrants but also the conditions under which they come. In 2003, for example, unions were instrumental in organizing the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, which drew a direct connection between the contemporary immigrant rights movement and the civil rights movement. This is just one instance of a sea-change in attitudes about the relationship between noncitizens and native-born citizens, in which the rights of each group are seen as increasingly complementary rather than as competitive. Strikingly, this evolution is taking place alongside an increasingly vocal strain of opinion in direct opposition to it, through the rise of vocal nativist populism that uses anti-diversity rhetoric in tandem with the argument that the native-born will benefit from the withholding of rights to foreign-born and ethnic minority populations.
Some existing literature has attempted to draw a connection between economic well-being and “tolerant” or “modern” attitudes, broadly drawn to include gender, religion, and other values. In their 2000 analysis of a broad spectrum of World Values Survey data, Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker conclude, “Economic development is associated with shifts away from absolute norms and values toward values that are increasingly rational, tolerant, trusting, and participatory.” They acknowledge the circularity of the relationship in which development and tolerance are part of a feedback loop:
When survival is uncertain, cultural diversity seems threatening. When there isn’t ‘enough to go around,’ foreigners are seen as dangerous outsiders who may take away one’s sustenance…. Conversely, when survival begins to be taken for granted, ethnic and cultural diversity become increasingly acceptable—indeed, beyond a certain point, diversity is not only tolerated, it may be positively valued because it is interesting and stimulating. In advanced industrial societies, people seek out foreign restaurants to taste new cuisine; they pay large sums of money and travel long distances to experience exotic cultures.17
Similarly, the social theorist Richard Florida has attempted to quantify the impact of nations’ valuing of diversity on their economic fortunes, particularly in terms of their abilities to attract high-skilled migrants and in turn to achieve economic competitiveness. He argues that qualities that attract “creative”—that is, knowledge-based—individuals are a leading indicator of prosperity. His Euro-Tolerance Index, based on large-scale surveys of popular attitudes, ranks nations on varying indicators, including values placed on individuality and self-expression, attitudes toward minorities, and adherence to “traditional” as opposed to modern or secular values.18 Related work by Florida measures cities’ and countries’ ability to attract immigrants and knowledge professionals as leading indicators of underlying conditions that foster economic competitiveness.19 These surveys are useful in identifying the attitudes that lead to policies that include determining the rights of noncitizens as opposed to those of citizens.20 Yet they take only an indirect approach to the relationship between the well-being of the native-born and the rights afforded to guests.
The impact on citizens of the most extreme restrictions on the rights of noncitizens and ethnic minorities is most evident in the extreme cases. World War II Germany, say, or Sudan or Rwanda—it is clear that these nations would have been far better off had they taken a different attitude toward the treatment of ethnic minorities. Yet in those cases, citizens’ immediate survival often depended on quite the opposite: standing up for the rights of the persecuted, or even declining to participate in attacks against them, could cause a citizen to be arrested, tortured, or even killed. In the aftermath of Tito’s Yugoslavia, the consequences of his unity without true diversity resulted in civil war. The connection between the rights of the native-born and foreign-born citizens and noncitizens is apparent as well in countries that are not facing such dire situations—countries that demonstrate a wide spectrum of attitudes and policies toward noncitizens and ethnic minorities.
There is a reciprocal relationship between citizens’ and noncitizens’ rights and well-being. As Ingelhart and Baker have demonstrated, citizens are more likely to approve of rights for noncitizens if they feel that their own situation is more secure. There is a circular relationship in the way that political support for rights of foreigners depends on rights of native-born, while political rights for foreigners improve rights of native-born. Nevertheless, the emotional punch of nativist populism has obscured the positive impact of noncitizens’ rights on those of the economic and social well-being of the native-born. Given the undeniable reality of the existence of diverse populations, both in the United States and globally, this connection needs to be drawn more clearly and explicitly as a counterweight to the collective identity arguments that call for withholding rights from noncitizens.
As international efforts take place to rationalize migration across national borders at a time of record human mobility, countries and international bodies dealing with these human flows will need better tools to track and analyze trends and their consequences in the often contradictory changes to citizenship, immigration, and nationality regimes around the world.
In considering policies to deal with immigration today, countries would be remiss to ignore the rules governing citizenship. Migrant-sending countries clearly are aware of the power of expanding citizenship for reaching their goals of encouraging migrant worker remittances, investment, political support, and technology transfer. Certainly, migrant-receiving countries already have recognized nationality law as a tool—however blunt—to regulate the number of migrants who come or go.
Yet discussion of citizenship by the public and politicians still tends to take place on an emotional, reactive level with little regard to the practical consequences of citizenship laws for families, civic cohesion, integration, productivity, and workforce development. Even more significantly, migrant-receiving countries must consider the impact of their own citizenship and nationality laws on the abilities of migrant sending countries to build economies and political structures that might reduce the pressure on people to leave their countries and families merely to survive.
The rise of dual citizenship, the creation of new political entities such as the European Union, the relatively new recognition of the impact of citizenship laws on women and families, the issues surrounding the state’s role in social protection, the impact of citizenship status on worker rights, the continuation of ethnic conflict, the unresolved issue of statelessness, and the rise in labor mobility all make it essential that immigration policymakers take into account the impact of citizenship and nationality regimes on any policy aims they set out to achieve.