The British Citizenship Test: The Case for Reform

Immigration presents a daunting challenge to successive British governments. The public ranks immigration as one of the leading policy issues after the economy and employment. There is also greater public support for stronger immigration controls than in many other countries. In response, government strategy has included the use of a citizenship test. While the citizenship test is widely acknowledged as one key part of immigration policy, the test has received surprisingly little critical analysis. This article is an attempt to bring greater attention to serious problems with the current test and to offer three recommendations for its revision and reform. First, there is a need to revise and update the citizenship test. Secondly, there is a need to expand the test to include questions about British history and basic law. The third recommendation is more wide‐ranging: it is that we reconsider what we expect new citizens to know more broadly. The citizenship test should not be viewed as a barrier, but as a bridge. The focus should centre on what future citizens should be expected to know rather than how others might be excluded. The test should ensure that future citizens are suitably prepared for citizenship. There is an urgent need to improve the test and this should not be an opportunity wasted for the benefit of both citizens and future citizens alike.     

Migrants into Members: Social Rights,Civic Requirements,and Citizenship in Western Europe

How do the states in Western Europe turn outsiders into insiders? This article examines that question by introducing a new qualitative framework that we term national membership conditionality structures (MCS). This framework includes not only status acquisition rules, such as those governing naturalisation and settlement, but also, crucially, civic integration requirements and social benefit eligibility standards. The article illustrates how linkages across these policy sectors shape different membership-making processes for third-country nationals by examining the MCS variation in Great Britain and Germany, two countries that both experienced significant migration inflows beginning in the first post-war decades. As a contrast to these two ‘mature’ MCS cases, a study of Spain is also included as a ‘nascent’ case, whose recent experience with large-scale immigration provides an opportunity to consider an MCS under active construction. The article concludes that while EU-level policies and institutions have extended their reach to cover ever more sectors, the components of national MCS remain largely outside supranational purview. As such, membership remains a core imperative of the contemporary nation-state.     

Citizenship in the Netherlands: locally produced,nationally contested

The Netherlands is often considered an extreme example of individualism and multiculturalism, two factors that many politicians and social scientists consider to be the main causes for the alleged decline in citizenship. In this paper, we examine Dutch citizens' conceptions of citizenship to test these negative expectations. We found the fear that a modern, individualistic, and diverse citizenry only care for their own rights to be misplaced; citizens were willing to exert effort to uphold the society they live in. Their efforts, however, were conditional upon returns in terms of a responsive government and in improvements to their individual lives. Communitarian, local, and rather submissive notions of citizenship were deeply shared – with a liberal twist among many migrants. We also found that ‘nationalist’ republican notions of citizenship awaken latent uncertainties and divisions among citizens rather than creating ‘new’ unity. This imagination of citizenship leaves Dutch society wanting for the deliberative, political elements of citizenship.     

Citizenship policies and ideas of nationhood in Scandinavia

This article analyzes the recent changes in naturalization policies in three Nordic countries, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Considering the homogeneity of the region in terms of culture, social structure and polity, the discrepancy in current citizenship regulation is remarkable. Similar problem definitions have generated diametrical opposite solutions. This is even more striking as the three countries, hailing on perceived ideas of common interests and various experiences of shared rule in different political constellations for the best part of the last 500 years, also cooperated closely in forging their national citizenship legislation from the 1880s up till 1979. The article gives perspective to this novel variation, analyzing the interplay between aims and means in the naturalization policies. Basic questions like citizenship rights, the social and cultural cohesion of the nation state, national ideology and questions of identity will be addressed.     

Social Citizenship of Young People in Europe: A Comparative Institutional Analysis*

This article explains the diversity of young people’s access to social welfare by distinguishing between two models of social citizenship in a comparative analysis of 15 Western European countries. On the one hand, social citizenship can be familialized, when young people are considered as children and therefore do not receive state benefits in their own name. This form of citizenship is found in Bismarckian welfare states, based on the principle of subsidiarity. On the other hand, it can be individualized, in which case young people can be entitled to benefits in their own right, insofar as they are considered as adults. This form of social citizenship is found more in Beveridgean welfare states.     

Citizenship,enclaves and earnings: comparing two cool countries

This paper uses the Canadian 2006 Census and the Swedish 2006 register data to analyse the citizenship effect on the relative earnings of immigrants, using instrumental variable regression to control for citizenship acquisition. We ask: ‘Is there a citizenship effect and if any, in which country is it that we find the largest effect and for which immigrant groups?’ We add one further dimension, asking if the size of the co-immigrant population in the municipality has an effect on earnings. We find that the impact of citizenship acquisition is substantial in both Canada and Sweden. However, the place of birth of immigrants is important. In most cases, immigrant women in Sweden enjoy a higher citizenship premium than is the case for immigrant women in Canada. Amongst men the picture is more mixed. Most European groups receive a larger citizenship premium in Canada as compared to Sweden. Being in a city with more immigrants of the same background is better for earnings in Sweden than in Canada. However, being in a city with a lot of immigrants (regardless of origin) is better in Canada as compared to Sweden.     

Citizenship without states: rehabilitating citizenship discourse among the anarchist left

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, it seeks to give expression to the trends of an important debate that has not been formally articulated among anarchist theorists, namely whether or not the concept ‘citizenship’ can be meaningfully salvaged and repurposed. While many anarchist theorists have gestured at such a debate, the dimensions of this discourse have not been clarified. Secondly, in identifying the features of this debate, this paper seeks to show that citizenship can be meaningfully rehabilitated by the anarchist left. And finally, this essay seeks to provide some preliminary reasons why anarchist theories of citizenship may provide a fruitful partnership with theorists of citizenship today, especially those engaging in critical citizenship studies.     

Foreign,criminal: a doubly damned modern British folk-devil

An association of strangers with danger and criminality is one of the most enduring social myths. However, in the UK, it was only after a media outcry 10 years ago over the release of foreign nationals from British prisons, that the ‘Foreign Criminal’ exploded into political and popular consciousness. Despite the small numbers of people involved, the location of this folk devil at the intersection of legal and moral assessments of ‘wickedness’ and alterity imbues it with considerable potency and has ensured that its reverberations are still felt strongly a decade later. Drawing on qualitative research with immigration detainees, deportees and irregular migrants, the article considers some of the many faces of the Foreign Criminal and illuminates their racialised, classed and gendered natures. It argues that a twin set of developments – coalescing around Operation Nexus and curtailed Article 8 right protections – work together to taint a growing number of non-citizens with criminality, whilst simultaneously undermining their claim to belong. Case studies are presented to demonstrate the fault lines of this malleable and expanding category, and to argue that the Foreign Criminal is paradigmatic of both social disorder and national boundaries, and is fundamentally shifting the lines of citizenship and belonging.     

(Un)Worthy: Latina battered immigrants under VAWA and the construction of neoliberal subjects

In the United States recognition as a battered immigrant can lead to legalization and citizenship for abused women when provisions in the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) are applied. To successfully utilize VAWA towards these ends, however, a battered immigrant woman also receives a lesson in cultural restructuring required of citizenship; VAWA establishes the regulations and standards necessary to remake abused immigrants into neoliberal subjects. This essay examines the experiences of undocumented Latina immigrants within the VAWA legal paradigm and explores the ways in which the process artfully crafts the good neoliberal citizen.     

Cultural citizenship and performing homecoming: Russian Jewish immigrants decipher the Zionist national ethos

The paper explores the mutual relation between cultural citizenship and national homecoming. Using the case study of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Israel, it refines the theoretical debate over cultural citizenship by showing how homecoming migration shapes the homecomers' bargaining power over the local cultural tenets. In particular, the research examines the ways in which the ‘Russian’ immigrants negotiate the national ethos of homecoming that constitutes the Israeli civic, discursive field, while dismantling it into its root components: affinity to the place, collective memory, and the warrior ethos. Each of these components constitutes a sphere of action that embodies the tension between Israeliness and Jewishness, nationalism and citizenship, and the personal and the collective. Our main contention is that in the case of homecoming migration, the inextricable affinity between citizenship and nationalism shapes the homecomers' cultural citizenship: on the one hand, it secures their right to participate in the local cultural discourse and avails bargaining power, while on the other hand, it neutralizes the homecomers' subversive voice, and reduces their capacity to undermine the constitutive, national tenets. The analysis is based on immigration stories gathered via in-depth interviews that were conducted with 43 Jewish university students who immigrated to Israel from the former USSR in the beginning of the 1990s.     

Knowledge of the Earthquake and School Education in the Perspective of Active Citizenship

This paper presents part of a larger research on the consequences of an earthquake on the scholastic life of children aged 3-11. In May, schools abruptly closed due to the earthquake in Emilia Romagna and Lombardy （Italy）. Children and teachers fled from them, leaving school backpacks and books in the classrooms. Daily life was disrupted and the community gathered in tents set up by civil defence. Immigrant families returned to their countries of origin or shared life in the tent cities. The focus of theoretical sources of the research considers mainly： the vulnerability of the persons concerned; measures for risk reduction; environmental sustainability; community resilience; controversial human development between freedom of the person and economic globalisation. From methodological point of view, the interviews with teachers, school rectors, and citizens revealed the impact of the earthquake on community identity. Unexpected human solidarity and local responsible participation were part of the new educational plan of reconstruction based on hope, active citizenship, and historical memory.     

Women in the driving seat: Eastern European immigrant women's citizenship,participation and educational inclusion in Portugal

This paper is a case study of Eastern European immigrant women's social inclusion in Portugal through civic participation. An analysis of interviews conducted with women leaders and members of two ethnic associations provides a unique insight into their migrant pathways as highly educated women and the ways in which these women are constructing their citizenship in new contexts in Northern Portugal. These women's accounts of their immigrant experience embrace both the public realm, in using their own education and their children's as a means of integration but also spill over into ‘non-public’ familial relationships at home in contradictory ways. These include the sometimes traditional, gender-defined division of labour within the associations and at home and the new ways that they negotiate their relative autonomies to escape forms of violence and subordination that they face as women and immigrants.     

Citizenship across generations: struggles around heteronormativities

This article argues for the importance of attention to intergenerational relations in understanding the conditions for access to citizenship rights and recognition for non-heterosexual people. The case of Italy, where individual entitlements and responsibilities are largely structured around intergenerational dependence, underlines the salience of intergenerational relations in relation to sexual citizenship. Drawing on a study of the families of origin of self-identified young gay men and lesbians carried out in Italy, this article explores how access to citizenship rights and the construction of the identities that can claim recognition are mediated by processes of mutual disclosure and negotiation within families. Beyond a shared notion of family ties as defined by unconditional love, a diversity of narratives are detected, linked to differences in gender, class and family cultures. It is especially when family narratives are informed by the middle-class ideology of the democratic family as a space for the development of authentic selves that access to rights becomes conditional upon compliance with the obligations of a ‘good child’, and the conditions for the reproduction of heteronormative citizenship are set.     

Constructing citizenship: framing unauthorized immigrants in market terms

We show how conceptions of ‘market citizenship’ hold a central place in three distinct arenas: political theory; mainstream cultural narratives, and the views expressed by middle class Latino immigrants. Our analyses of both print media coverage and interviews with middle class Latino immigrants demonstrate that the narrative of market citizenship has heavily influenced the collective US understanding of state membership. This project not only finds a clear market framing in news coverage of the immigration issue, but finds that members of the Latino community have directly engaged with this frame and use it to refute the largely negative contentions of the popular press.     

Through the European looking glass: citizenship tests in the USA,Australia, and Canada

Discussing new or recently reformed citizenship tests in the USA, Australia, and Canada, this article asks whether they amount to a restrictive turn of new world citizenship, similar to recent developments in Europe. I argue that elements of a restrictive turn are noticeable in Australia and Canada, but only at the level of political rhetoric, not of law and policy, which remain liberal and inclusive. Much like in Europe, the restrictive turn is tantamount to Muslims and Islam moving to the center of the integration debate.     

Citizenship in Palestine: a fractured geography

This article deals with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through an approach based on citizenship. The article considers the whole historical Palestine (Israel and the so-called Occupied Territories) as a unique unit of analysis, and suggests that the dynamics of citizenship in this area should be analysed through the exam of two fundamental dimensions, relating to membership and territory. In general, the example of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict offers the chance to address the conventional meaning of concepts such as ‘state’, ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’, underlying the complex dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of individuals and groups within a collective decision-making process. As far as Palestine is concerned, the centre of gravity and the horizons of the conflict are described through the notion of ‘ruptured demos’, suggesting new directions for comparative research and drawing the attention to the progressive demise of the so-called ‘two-state’ solution.     

Citizenship education in divided societies: teachers' perspectives in Northern Ireland

This article aimed to investigate in what ways teachers' developing understandings of citizenship education in a divided society reflect discourses around national citizenship and controversial issues. Based on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 13 post-primary teachers in Northern Ireland undertaking an in-service programme in citizenship, findings indicate that the controversial nature of past conflict maintains its sensitivity in the educational context though other categories of potential exclusion, such as race and sexuality, compete for space in educational discourse and teaching. Few teachers used controversial issues identified as challenging hegemonic beliefs as an opportunity for role modelling citizenship. However, teachers rarely explored the complex interlinkages between traditional and alternative categories of exclusion. It is argued that this may render teachers' understandings of citizenship and societal conflict disconnected, which in turn may hinder the potential for citizenship education to address societal divisions and to promote active peace in the long term.     

Citizenship agendas,urban governance and social housing in the Netherlands: an assemblage approach

This article combines recent conceptualizations of citizenship beyond the nation state with new perspectives on governance assemblages comprising both state and non-state actors. Focusing on Dutch social housing, this study explores how such governance assemblages produce agendas that attempt to shape citizenship. Employing an assemblage approach, this study first demonstrates how state and non-state actors amalgamate by providing a historical overview of the urban governance of social housing in the Netherlands. Second, taking account of the territory that the assemblage claims, it shows how underprivileged neighbourhoods become the spatial locus of these assemblages. Third, examining what this amalgam produces, the article shows how the assemblage imposes a citizenship agenda on the population of these neighbourhoods, distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. Acknowledging that citizenship agendas are produced by a multifaceted amalgam of state and non-state actors, this article emphasizes the need for rigorous academic analysis of such governance assemblages.