In this chapter, we move away from a discussion of citizenship theory and focus on the practice of citizenship in liberal democracies. We consider several dimensions of citizenship practice, some of which include: the historical “determinants” of citizenship; the obligations imposed by states on their citizens; and the norms that govern naturalization policies (such as length of stay, ties to citizens of the receiving state, “points” calculators, and so on). In other words, this chapter focuses on the question: who gets to be a citizen of a given country?
Eligibility for citizenship varies by country. Historically, the “determinants” of citizenship have typically been: blood lineage, birthplace, naturalization, adoption, and matrimony. States can, and do, sometimes change the determinants that inform their citizenship policies. Thus, although jus sanguinis laws, or citizenship by blood lineage, have constituted an enduring tradition in liberal democracies, most states have relinquished the practice of using this as an exclusive system of granting citizenship – and have come to also allow, in practice, birthplace/birthright citizenship, naturalization, and citizenship through matrimony. We illustrate below the specific justifications for the use of each of these “determinants” to grant citizenship.
States also attach various combinations of compulsory duties and obligations to the status of the citizen. In some countries – like Australia, Brazil, Singapore, and Peru, for example – political participation in the form of voting is mandatory for adult citizens (with some exceptions) and is strictly enforced.1 In most liberal democracies, however, voting is not mandatory. Below, we also discuss the justifications for these obligations imposed on citizens.
In addition, liberal democracies differ in the ways in which they structure their naturalization policies. Most countries require aspiring citizens to spend a specific duration of time in the status of a permanent resident before they can apply for citizenship. But states vary in the specific length of this durational requirement. They also vary in the durational requirements of “physical presence” within the sovereign borders of the receiving state during this period of permanent residence. Some states even allow migrants to “invest” in the receiving country and make this investment count as, or toward, eligibility for permanent residence or naturalization.
Finally, in some countries naturalization policies favor familial ties and in others they favor skills-based migration. For example, in recent decades, the United States’ naturalization policies have heavily favored an applicant’s familial ties to US citizens and permanent residents. Countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, on the other hand, place a significant emphasis on the skills of the aspiring migrants, and each of these countries uses a formal “points” calculator to determine eligibility for naturalization. We discuss these various naturalization strategies and their major implications below.
We begin with a discussion of eligibility for citizenship or determinants of citizenship claims. After that, we address the question of obligations imposed by states on their citizens. In the chapter’s final section, we examine the predominant norms that govern naturalization policies in high-immigrant receiving states.
The question of eligibility for citizenship is as old as democracy. It preoccupied the Athenians as much as it does today’s populations, especially in high immigrant-receiving countries. The ancient Greeks drew distinctions between who was eligible for citizenship rights and who could only receive a subset of those rights. They also had different statuses that categorized different members of their polities, each associated with its own concomitant set of rights; some examples of these categories were citizens, metics, helots, slaves, and so on.
The rights of citizenship were attached to freedom of thought, public deliberation, and indeed participation in government. But only a handful of people who lived in the Greek city-states typically had access to all the rights of citizenship. Others, like women, denizens, or residents, had some but not all of the rights of citizenship; in other words, they were semi-citizens.2 Slaves, famously, had few or no entitlements, and it was widely accepted that slaves labored so that free men could participate in public life and thus fulfill the obligations of citizenship. Some also consider the role of military service to have been integral to the concept of citizenship in ancient Greece. Slaves could not fight in an army. Only citizens, and in some cases certain classes of outsiders, could.
One of the primary ways of becoming a citizen in ancient Greece was through blood lineage. This principle of “nationality law” is called jus sanguinis, Latin for “right of blood.” In contemporary society, countries or states that accept jus sanguinis as a principle of nationality law grant citizenship to those children born to one or both parents who are citizens of that state. Another common determinant of eligibility for citizenship is jus soli (“right of the soil”), a tradition that grants citizenship on the basis of birthplace. If a nation-state grants jus soli citizenship, it bestows this status on to all those who are born on territory over which that nation-state claims sovereignty. The difference between the two would be irrelevant if the members of a particular “people” and the territory they inhabit were to match and correspond exactly and if no one crossed sovereign boundaries.3 But because people do, in fact, migrate across sovereign territorial borders, a pure regime of jus sanguinis is often seen as exclusionary, especially in contemporary western, liberal-democracies, and jus soli is looked upon as more egalitarian. This, however, was not always the case.
As Patrick Weil has observed, jus soli was the dominant approach in both the United Kingdom and in France in the nineteenth century.4 It originated in the feudal tradition of bestowing a link between the human being and the lord through the land where one was born.5 Rejecting this feudal tradition, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, France adopted the new Civil Code of 1804, which bestowed French nationality on children born to French fathers either in France or abroad.6 Various other countries, such as Spain, Russia, and Belgium, followed the French example.7 The British tradition, on the other hand, influenced Portugal and Denmark, and, unsurprisingly, Britain’s colonies in the United States, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, and Australia.
In his comparative analysis of citizenship policies in France and Germany, Rogers Brubaker discusses the different implications of the jus soli and the jus sanguinis approaches. According to Brubaker, the French understanding of citizenship underwent a set of mid-century reforms during the nineteenth century. Jus soli was first proposed in 1831,8 originally motivated by a resentment of foreigners who were exempt from military service. During debates in the 1880s, the state adopted, first, jus sanguinis citizenship and rejected jus soli as a residue of a feudal tradition.9 However, by 1889, the French state also came to accept jus soli, motivated by what Brubaker has characterized as “a distinctively state-centered and assimilationist understanding of nationhood” that was also interested in extending the Republican program of primary education and military service for all.10
The German state, on the other hand, defined citizenship, starting in 1913, as a community of descent.11 German emigrants were included in this definition of citizenship but non-German immigrants were not. Jus sanguinis laws had been around and were gradually consolidated in Germany since the early nineteenth century.12 By 1913, jus sanguinis had become so well entrenched that the new reforms did not even consider jus soli to be an option as a determinant of citizenship. Even the proponents of jus soli advocated the right to naturalization and not the straightforward birthright jus soli citizenship as it had existed in, say, the United States since at least 1868.13 The situation was so extreme that jus soli was not even available to third-generation immigrants in Germany.14 It was not until 1998 that Germany finally started adopting some forms of jus soli policies.15
In the twenty-first century, most countries of the global North bestow citizenship using a combination of methods that include jus sanguinis policies, jus soli policies, jus matrimonii policies, and adoption and naturalization policies.16 Jus matrimonii policies enable foreign nationals to seek citizenship on the basis of their marriage to citizens of a particular nation-state. Naturalization policies, on the other hand, are an assortment of immigration policies (that vary by state) that grant immigrants the right to gain access to citizenship on the basis of their ties to the receiving state. These ties can be familial, but they can also relate to length of stay. They may also be, as we have indicated above, contributions that these immigrants make to the societies of these receiving states. These contributions, in turn, can be economic – in terms of job creation or investment – or they may be through extraordinary abilities that these individuals possess and that they will add to the pool of resources in the receiving state. Very highly skilled or highly talented immigrants can sometimes fall into this latter category of immigrants. (We will return to a fuller discussion of the norms of naturalization below.)
The vast majority of the citizens in countries of the global North are citizens because of jus soli or jus sanguinis policies. On the surface, this seems relatively unproblematic. But, as Dominique Leydet has pointed out, this may lead to some “counterintuitive results.”17
[W]hile a regime of pure jus sanguinis systematically excludes immigrants and their children, though the latter may be born and bred in their parents’ new home, it includes descendants of expatriates who may never have set foot in their forebears’ homeland. On the other hand, a regime of jus soli may attribute citizenship to children whose birth in the territory is accidental while denying it to those children who have arrived in the country at a very young age.18
It is because of these seemingly unreasonable outcomes and indeed exclusions resulting from relying heavily on jus soli and jus sanguinis policies that some have called for citizenship to be bestowed on the basis of a thicker, more substantive, set of connections between a member of a polity and the state that governs it. Thus Rainer Bauböck has pointed out the value of a “stakeholder principle” in granting citizenship.19 The idea here is that only those individuals “who have a stake in the future of a politically organized society have a moral claim to be recognized as its citizens.”20 Equally, Ayelet Shachar has proposed the concept of jus nexi 21 to suggest that citizenship in contemporary liberal democracies should be granted on the basis of an “alternative framework” that emphasizes “actual membership in the community” and the “core meaning of the method through which political membership is conveyed: by connection, union, or linkage.”22
It behooves us to take seriously the idea behind this call for a real and substantive link between a person and the society of which they claim to be, or in which they intend to become, citizens. This is especially so because citizenship, as we have explained throughout this book, although often looked upon as a status that confers a set of entitlements or rights, may sometimes also be accompanied by a set of duties and/or obligations. For countries that do impose duties and obligations on their citizens, a substantive connection between a citizen and the society may seem especially pertinent because, in the absence of such a connection, there will be very little desire or incentive for citizens to fulfill their citizenship duties and abide by their citizenship obligations. We now turn to a brief discussion of these citizenship duties and obligations.
Citizenship, as we have pointed out throughout this book, is not merely about rights but also about privileges, duties, responsibilities, and obligations. While rights and privileges represent items that citizens can claim entitlement to or simply enjoy, the other three items – viz., duties, responsibilities, and obligations – represent conduct that is expected of citizens in lieu of, or in conjunction with, the rights and privileges they are granted by the state. Duties and responsibilities typically take the form of moral obligations that serve as guidelines for citizens, whereas obligations typically take the form of constitutionally or statutorily mandated conduct. Failure to abide by the latter can trigger, in some cases, prosecution and/or penalties.
Here is a classic case of a stipulation of moral duties without any threat of punishment for failure to abide by them: the Indian Constitution was amended in 1976 to add a set of moral obligations known as fundamental duties of citizens, well after the Constitution of India was adopted in 1949. This list has since been amended. At the present moment, these “fundamental duties” range from broad and vague guidelines, such as the duty “to cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national struggle for freedom,” to some things that are a bit more concrete, such as the duty of “a parent or guardian to provide opportunities for education of the child or ward between the age of six and fourteen.”23
Some responsibilities and obligations specifically belong to citizens while others apply to all members of a given polity, whether they are citizens, residents, guest workers, or any other kind of person who has domicile in that country. It is not always easy, however, to disaggregate responsibilities from obligations. So, for example, the American agency responsible for shepherding aspiring citizens through the naturalization process, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, enumerates a list of rights and responsibilities for US citizens.24 Among rights are included: the freedom to express yourself; to worship as you please; to be given a prompt, fair trial by jury; to vote in elections25; to apply for federal employment requiring US citizenship; to run for elected office; and to pursue “life, liberty, and happiness.” Responsibilities, on the other hand, include the following: to support and defend the Constitution; to stay informed of the issues affecting your community; to participate in the democratic process; to respect and obey federal, state, and local laws; to respect the rights, beliefs, and opinions of others; to participate in your local community; to pay income and other taxes honestly, and on time, to federal, state, and local authorities; to serve on a jury when called upon; and to defend the country if the need should arise.
We cite these two lists here to highlight the slippages that seem to be codified even in the state’s own articulation of the “rights” and “responsibilities” associated with US citizenship. What is not immediately obvious from this enumeration of responsibilities of citizens is that several of these responsibilities are also obligations. One example of such a responsibility/obligation is the injunction to “pay income and other taxes honestly, and on time, to federal, state, and local authorities.” Failure to do so can lead to a criminal prosecution. In this sense, it is different from participating in one’s local community, failure to do which does not trigger a penalty. It is also not the case that the obligation to pay taxes is the result of the acquisition of citizenship. It results, in fact, simply from residence in the United States. Tax paying is an obligation for all sorts of people, including international students, guest workers, some tourists, and permanent residents, and there is even evidence that some unauthorized migrants pay at least federal income taxes.
The story is the same with rights. It is clear that there are some rights on this list that are usually the exclusive prerogative of a citizen, voting rights being a classic case. However, nobody seriously thinks that all the other rights on this list are the exclusive prerogative of citizens. In the United States, for instance, freedom of worship is guaranteed to all residents because secularism is codified in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. There are two clauses of the First Amendment that are relevant here: the Establishment Clause, which bars the federal government from establishing any national religion; and the Free Exercise Clause, which forbids the prohibition of the freedom of worship. As a textual and practical matter, neither proscription is restricted in its application to US citizens. This right, therefore, belongs to whoever lives within the sovereign boundaries of the United States. And the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees due process and equal protection under the law to all “persons” – not just citizens.
What this preceding discussion means is that it is not always easy to isolate specific obligations that a person incurs on the basis of their citizenship, nor is it always easy to delineate the exact set of rights that results from one’s citizenship status. This is not to say there are no obligations whose exclusive provenance is citizenship. In the United States, for example, the obligation to serve on a jury is exactly such an exclusive obligation. No noncitizen can serve on a jury. In the remainder of this section, we focus on some salient examples of obligations that accrue exclusively from citizenship. These include payment of individual income taxes, military service, voting, and jury duty. Our intention here is to provide some illustrative examples of justifications that states have provided for imposing these obligations on their citizens and to demonstrate how states can vary in the ways in which they conceptualize and impose the same obligations. Let us now look at some specific examples of obligations.
Some but not all countries impose taxes (personal income, corporate, sales, etc.) on their residents and citizens. Taxing personal incomes is the primary vehicle of revenue generation for most liberal democracies and supports the provision of social rights as well as other government programs that are integral to Marshallian rights-based citizenship. Others, usually states with significant alternative sources of revenue, choose not to impose this obligation on either their citizens or their residents. Kuwait,26 the Cayman Islands,27 and Bahrain28 are examples of countries that impose no personal-income tax burden at all – on either their citizens or their residents. States with significant alternative sources of revenue have sometimes been called rentier states.29 Some argue that rentier states are less obligated to be accountable to their citizens because they are not dependent on their citizens for revenue. This might be one reason why a clustering of several rentier states in the Middle East and North Africa has impeded the prospect of democracy in the region.
Most countries in the world, however, end up imposing taxes on personal incomes for one or more of the following categories of individuals: nonresident individuals earning local incomes; resident foreigners earning local incomes; resident citizens earning local incomes; resident citizens earning foreign incomes; resident foreigners earning foreign incomes; and nonresident citizens earning foreign incomes. It is usually the case that countries base their taxation on individuals’ residency and not on their citizenship.30 There are, however, some countries, like the United States and Eritrea, which do insist on making their citizens pay taxes on their worldwide incomes, no matter where they live.31 US green-card holders also owe US taxes, even if they are no longer resident in the United States, despite not having other rights of US citizens such as the franchise. (Many people consider this sort of an obligation to be unduly burdensome and, as a result, in recent years, record numbers of people have been renouncing their US citizenship.32)
Serving on a jury has been an obligation of citizenship since the early Athenian city-state.33 It is widely seen as a way for citizens to participate in a democracy and actively contribute to it. In this view, making punishment contingent on judgments made by one’s peers is critical to the egalitarian promises of democratic citizenship. It is for this reason, in the United States,34 Canada,35 United Kingdom,36 Australia,37 and various other countries and jurisdictions, eligible residents and citizens are obligated to serve on a jury when called upon to do so. However, as Dennis Hale has shown, the use of juries has not always been for democratic purposes. In fact, in England, it was once a way for the monarch to extract vital information from local subjects.38 It is also the case that juries represent a major democratic paradox: “only the wise are capable of judging rightly, but only those who have experience at judging can learn the wisdom that judging requires.”39 Many libertarians also criticize jury duty as a form of “involuntary servitude.” These libertarians compare this obligation to conscription and decry the fact that citizens are compelled to serve and have little choice or autonomy in the matter.40
In practice, in those countries where it exists, jury service typically functions without generating a great deal of controversy. The vast majority of jury trials occur in the United States. The United Kingdom and the other countries mentioned above have increasingly fewer instances of jury trials.41 In the United States and Canada, this obligation is restricted to citizens only. In Australia, the federal system relies on state laws to determine the composition of juries while, to be sure, there is a federal law that clearly states who may not serve on a jury. Therefore the “legal consequences” flowing from citizenship are not consistent because each state makes its own laws.42
Several of these countries also make exemptions for those who cannot or do not want to perform jury duty. Sometimes the state allows people with conscientious objections to be excused. Some examples in the United States include the Amish, some Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mennonites.43 In the United Kingdom, you are allowed to delay or ask to be excused if you have one of several approved excuses.44 One is also allowed to ask to be reimbursed for expenses related to performance of these duties.45 But one can also be fined as much as £1,000 for trying to avoid jury duty.46
In many countries, citizenship comes with an obligation to perform some kind of national, usually military, service. A belief in the ideal of military service can most likely be traced all the way back to ancient Greece – particularly to the practice of citizenship in Sparta. As Derek Heater has observed, a Spartiate mode of citizenship that combined, among other things, the principles of equality, rigorous upbringing and training, and military service might indeed have been the originator of the idea of citizenship.47 In a similar spirit, several countries today stipulate that military service, at least among men, remains a core element of citizenly obligations.
Thus countries like Turkey48 and Israel49 make it mandatory that, other factors remaining constant, all able-bodied male (also female, in the case of Israel) citizens will devote a designated amount of time to military service. In the United States, military conscription (commonly known as the draft) was in effect until 1973. These days, the United States has an all-volunteer military but at the same time it is required by law that almost all males, whether citizens or noncitizens (including undocumented migrants and excluding those on non-immigrant visas), register with the Selective Service System50 so that, in case of an emergency, a ready list of potential military draftees can be easily identified.
In most views of citizenship, the right to participate in self-rule via a vote is non-negotiable. This is, in fact, the prevailing view in most democratic states. However, there are states that also consider voting to be an obligation and not, in fact, a right. Underlying this latter view is the assumption that a democracy voting by all will lead to a proper identification of the people’s choice. Therefore, voting should be mandatory for all citizens (and, depending on the country, other members of the polity, including denizens, guest workers, and long-term permanent residents).
Some of the arguments in favor of compulsory voting are: voting is a civic duty; it teaches the benefits of political participation; it more accurately reflects the will of the electorate; and so on.51 On the other hand, some of the arguments against compulsory voting are that: the ill-informed should not be forced to vote; it is undemocratic to force people to vote; and it leads to wasted resources in trying to determine who is breaking this law.52
As a practical matter, in Australia voting (in federal elections) has been compulsory since 1924.53 You may incur a fine if you do not vote.54 Argentina, Singapore, and Peru also make it mandatory for all citizens to vote during elections, and this law is strictly enforced.55 Other countries that have these laws on the books but enforce them less strictly include, but are not limited to, Greece, Panama, Turkey, and Chile.56 There are some exceptions made for the elderly and the otherwise incapacitated – including those who are not literate.57 These exceptions vary by jurisdiction.
In the preceding passages, we have discussed a range of citizenly obligations. We turn now to questions of how people change citizenships, naturalize, and acquire a second or even third citizenship. Here we see some of the normative patterns established in chapter 2 disrupted. As described in chapter 2, the citizenship obligations delineated here are predicated on the assumption that there are good and bad ways to perform citizenship and that citizenship should involve a civic republican commitment. But it is not the case that the civic republican approach clearly weighs in favor of one set of norms regarding naturalization while the liberal approach prefers a radically different one. For example, the liberal and civic republican approaches do not give us different species of responses to questions about whether family reunification or labor market skills should be emphasized in immigration/naturalization policies. In the next section, we connect these approaches to the various norms regarding naturalization that are commonly in circulation.
There are various norms that states use when they devise their naturalization policies and the rules that govern the granting of the status of citizenship. Some countries codify their preference for merit-based immigration by using “points calculators” that compute who gets easiest access to naturalization and who finds it the hardest to naturalize. Others emphasize the applicants’ familial ties with the receiving state. Countries also have quite a bit of flexibility in deciding rules governing other aspects of immigration, such as, “length of stay” rules, other “contributions” to receiving states including investment, job creation, and so on. Here we discuss the most salient of these rules governing naturalization policies. We begin with points calculators that prioritize skilled migrants.
Some countries welcome immigration applications from those who can make contributions to the receiving state in terms of the skills and other attributes they bring with them. Thus countries sometimes come up with a points-based schematic to identify potential immigrants who meet the state’s definition of someone who can make a contribution to that society. So, for example, a country might devise an immigration policy that favors those who have advanced degrees, work experience, who are multilingual, and so on. It is also worth noting here that an emphasis on skills in immigration policy contrasts with an emphasis on family reunification. And, because they are so specific and targeted toward attracting specific types of intellectual and creative labor, some consider these policies responsible for brain drain from sending countries, mostly those in the global South.
In addition, centering contributions to the receiving state as a core element of immigration policy has further implications. It can signify, for example, that the state thinks of citizenship as less related to accidents of birth and geography and more to jus nexi (see p. 81), emphasizing the idea of a concrete linkage between a citizen and the state. On the other hand, requiring contributions can also very easily be read as representing an element of transactionalism that is not appropriate in the sphere of citizenship. This is even more controversial in the cases of those who seek citizenship through a particular form of contribution: investment (see pp. 93–4).
Canada was the first to start a points-based system in 1967.58 The Canadian government has long focused on the influx of skills as a priority in its immigration policies. Therefore, both at the federal and the provincial levels, Canada invites applicants to stipulate how many skills they would be bringing with them. Prospective immigrants can fill out a form that assigns and calculates points for each application. Apart from skills, these calculations can also include ties to Canada that an immigrant can demonstrate, such as a job offer at a Canadian firm.59 The categories that constitute skills and ties include language skills, age, experience, education, adaptability, and arranged employment in Canada.60
Many countries have followed Canada’s lead. Australia,61 New Zealand,62 and the United Kingdom63 are some examples of countries that have reshaped their immigration policies to adopt a version of the points-based system that Canada has had on its books since 1967.64 In this “race for talent,” as Ayelet Shachar calls it, New Zealand has been the most aggressive recruiter of international talent in recent years.65 In addition, it is also already the case that, in most receiving states, a sub-type of skilled worker who is invited to apply for immigration is one who possesses some kind of “extraordinary ability” (US),66 distinguished talent (Australia),67 “exceptional talent” (UK),68 and so on. After 1973, Germany had a ban on the employment of foreign workers, which was eventually supplanted, in 2000, with a fast-track “green card” scheme to recruit foreign IT workers.69 Sweden, Norway, Austria, France, and the Netherlands have all implemented similar measures.70
Receiving states also vary in the stipulated length of time that one has to be a resident of (or physically present in) that country before one is said to have developed enough ties to it to legitimately demand the right to naturalize. As in the case of contributions, length of stay is also a signifier of one’s concrete connections to a state. It is also a measure of how politically informed one can reasonably be expected to be. Consequently, for countries like the United States that restrict voting rights to citizens, the aspiring citizen’s status as permanent resident can be said to be an incubation period for the development of and maturation into competence in the exercise of political rights. In addition, these lengths of stay are supposed to represent abstract ideas like immigrant loyalty toward, and acculturalization into, the society of the receiving state.71 They are, therefore, surrogates for political, social, and cultural assimilation.
As always, states vary in the length of stay they demand of aspiring citizens. Canada has the following requirement: under the “physical presence” criterion, in the five years immediately prior to applying for citizenship, immigrants have to demonstrate that they were physically present in Canada for a fixed number of days.72 In the United States, the general rule is that you have to be a permanent resident for at least five years before you can apply to naturalize, and during that period you have to be present in the country for at least 50 percent (or 30 months) of that time.73 Australia, too, has a “general residence” requirement that stipulates that a permanent resident can only apply to naturalize if they have lived in Australia (on a valid visa) for at least four years prior to submitting their application. They have to have been a permanent resident for at least 12 months before applying. In addition, they must not have been absent from Australia for more than 12 months during the relevant four years and for no more than 90 days in the preceding 12 months.
Here is something to think about: One might say that mandatory wait periods or durations represent, at least on the surface, a fairly egalitarian burden on all émigrés for demonstrating their assimilation. However, as should be evident from the preceding discussion, durations of time, when they are asked to be representative of something as abstract as assimilation and acculturation, can be notoriously hard to justify. Is it the case, for example, that immigrants, at the point of naturalization, are more assimilated in the United States than they are in Australia?
Sometimes countries devise immigration policies that favor those who already have ties to the receiving state. These ties can be family ties, or employment, or some other thing that binds these individuals to the societies into which they are trying to naturalize as citizens. Here we discuss family ties. Devising an immigration policy that is skewed in favor of family reunification is a controversial idea. One of the proposals for immigration reform that is currently in circulation in the United States is the RAISE Act, a move toward a points-based system. At least since 1965, however, the United States has given strong preference to family reunification and employment over skills in structuring immigration policy.74 Sometimes (often pejoratively) described as “chain migration,”75 these family reunification policies are intended to give families the ability to live in closer proximity to each other.76 Thus, if a member of your family is a US citizen, you can make a legitimate claim to acquire permanent residence first and then acquire citizenship in the United States on that basis. Critics, however, claim that this is a form of nepotism and that it is responsible for a major demographic transformation in the United States.77 Whether family reunification policies constitute a form of nepotism or not is an open question. But one thing that is incontrovertible is that the original justification for consolidating family-reunification policies in the United States in the mid-1960s was the fact that it was believed that this would create a naturally operating national origins system, given that it would favor immigrants from northern and western European nations. This, of course, turned out not to be the case.78
Family reunification policies have also recently become a matter of major controversy in New Zealand, which has tightened its restrictions on sponsorship of family members, especially for parents.79 New Zealand First, a prominent political party, has recently proposed an immigration policy that includes DNA testing in cases of doubt over refugee/immigrant family relationships.80 New Zealand has also recently imposed “minimum income requirements”81 for certain categories of family-sponsored visas, thus making it harder for family reunification, and even temporarily closed the Parent Category of family sponsorships in 2016.82 Review of the Parent Category is ongoing at the time we write, with recommendations said to be forthcoming.83 The state’s official justification for freezing parental visas includes the reasoning that, given the significant increase in applications from partners and dependent children of New Zealand citizens, the “only way to manage numbers within the family stream is to lower the cap on parents.”84
The debate about being more welcoming toward skilled workers as opposed to family members turns on various issues, but none perhaps more fundamental than the question of what contributions these immigrants are expected to make to the receiving state. While it is undoubtedly the case that contributions should be an important element of immigration policy, in the next section we focus specifically on the question of financial contributions to the receiving state. In the final and concluding section of the chapter, we turn to a discussion about refuge and asylum seekers, whose requests are predicated on humanitarian concerns rather than the contributions they make.
Some countries enable certain categories of immigrants to qualify for permanent residence and/or for citizenship on the basis of the economic or financial contributions they make to the receiving state. Sometimes termed as “economic citizens,”85 these persons are said to make contributions in the form of investment and/or job creation. The assumption here is that these high-net-worth (HNW) or ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) individuals are making a contribution to the receiving state which, in turn, establishes certain ties between them and the state.86 So, as a gesture of reciprocity and in lieu of their contributions, receiving states make an offer of residence and/or naturalization to investors. The United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom each have such policies in place.
In the United States, under the USCIS’s EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program,87 investors are expected to invest US$1 million or (for specific types of investment) US$500,000.88 Alternatively, these investors can either create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for qualified US workers.89 Some countries do not even have a residency requirement for their economic citizens, including some, like Cyprus,90 within the European Union, which provides visa-free travel access to all its citizens throughout the 26-country Schengen Area. Another EU country, Malta, has an official immigration policy for economic citizens called the Individual Investor Programme.91 It once implemented a no-residency requirement but, under international pressure, was forced to replace it with a nominal residency requirement for 12 months.92 In Austria, an official policy grants citizenship without residency to those who render “exceptional services in the interest of the Republic.”93 While some reports claim that an investment of US$10 million counts as such a service, Austrian authorities dispute this claim.94 Other countries with citizenship-for-investment programs include Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, Portugal, Dominica, and Singapore.95
Many people object to permanent residence (and a pathway to citizenship) being offered in exchange for cash/investment. For example, Ayelet Shachar worries that, when this situation occurs, “the basic connection between the individual and the political community is unfastened,” all expectations of “tangible connections” are replaced by “a wire transfer.”96 This was also the EU’s objections in the Maltese case when the EU insisted on a “genuine link”97 to be shown between the investor and the Maltese citizenship that they were intending to acquire. The lack of this genuine link in the no-residency requirement was viewed by the EU as a violation of the EU principle of sincere cooperation.98 Nor are these criticisms limited to the question of financial transactions. Indeed, any form of transaction or market calculation in the bestowal of citizenship, be it “Olympic citizenship”99 – a term used to designate the process of “picking winners” from the sciences, arts, and sports – or “cash-for-passport” programs, invariably triggers normative and ethical concerns about the extent to which the status of citizenship should cohere with a person’s membership in a political community.
On the other end of the spectrum from making contributions to a receiving state through investment is the category of refuge and asylum seekers. These are people who seek shelter in the receiving states not in exchange for an investment or contribution they have made but rather on humanitarian grounds. However, it is often asked how many refugees can a state accept before the influx of these migrants starts to tear the social fabric of the receiving state? This debate is now raging across countries of the global North, many of which are high immigrant-receiving states. Some states have generous refugee policies while others are wary of large influxes of refuge-seeking migrants. The United States, with an estimated population of 324 million,100 accepted 85,000101 refugees in 2016. Compared to the total number of refugees and displaced people around the globe, this is not a very high number. In recent years, the United States has admitted approximately 0.6 percent of the global refugee population.102 In comparison, in 2016, 46,700 refugees were admitted into Canada, a country with a population of 36 million.103
Such statistics give the lie to clichés about the United States as a country of refuge for the world’s downtrodden and oppressed. The Trump Administration has been particularly restrictive with regard to both refuge and temporary protected status (TPS). In fact, it plans to out TPS for several countries. Immigration restrictionists say the nature of temporary shelter is such that, once the factors that led the receiving state to offer this shelter have mitigated, there is no reason for these displaced people to continue to live in the receiving state. Others, however, contend that those with temporary shelter in a receiving country often find themselves making this receiving country their permanent domicile. Many develop roots in this new place of residence, buying homes, finding jobs, having and rearing children – who, in turn, qualify for citizenship in these receiving states if they are jus soli-granting states. Asking these immigrants to give up their ties to a country that gave them shelter and return to their place of origin is, in this view, a complicated matter that needs to be carefully weighed against all sorts of other competing concerns about human rights, ethics, and bureaucratic procedures. We return to a more detailed discussion about refuge, asylum, and temporary protection in the next chapter.