Caught between two worlds: mainland Chinese return migration,hukou considerations and the citizenship dilemma

Issues about migrant rights and protection are raised in cases of return migration when the country that migrants return to prohibits dual citizenship although the migrant has naturalised elsewhere. This article explores the politics of membership and rights faced by former citizens returning to reside in the society they had left. Returning Mainland Chinese migrants with Canadian citizenship status have to navigate China's dual citizenship restriction and the impacts on their Chinese hukou status that confers residency, employment and social rights. This analysis also keeps in view their relationship with the country in which they have naturalised and left, namely Canada. Migrants shuttling between the two countries face a citizenship dilemma as they have limited rights in China whereas their status as Canadian citizens living abroad simultaneously removes them from some rights provided by the Canadian state. This paper thus introduces new and pressing questions about citizenship in the light of return migration trends.     

Dual citizenship and theories of democracy

Dual/multiple citizenship has become a widespread phenomenon in many parts of the world. This acceptance or tolerance of overlapping memberships in political communities represents an important element in the ongoing readjustment of the relationship between citizens and political communities in democratic systems. This article has two goals and parts. First, it evaluates dual citizenship from the perspective of five normative theories of democracy. Liberal and republican as well as multicultural and deliberative understandings of democracy deliver a broad spectrum of arguments in favour of dual citizenship. Only communitarians fear that dual citizenship endangers national democracies. Nevertheless, empirical evidence and national policies largely contradict these fears. The second part of the article reverses the perspective and shows that most theories of democracy do not only legitimate and facilitate the acceptance of dual citizenship – the phenomenon of multiple citizenships induces innovation in democratic theory in turn. A second look at the relationship between dual citizenship and theories of democracy reveals that dual citizenship stimulates refinements, expansions and reconceptualisations of these theories for a transnationalising world.     

Borders,citizenship and change: the case of the Sami people, 1751–2008

The Sami, an indigenous people in north-western Europe, today faces the challenge of having their territory, Sápmi, partitioned among four nation states; Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Whereas borders and citizenship are generally used to defend cultures, interests and territories, separating those who belong from those who do not, this perspective does not include how a non-dominant indigenous people such as the Sami is affected by the partitioning of their territory. Initially, when the first borders were established, the states showed respect and consideration for the Sami and their rights, but during the following centuries, more and more restrictions were being placed on the trans-border movement of the Sami people. In this process, the Sami also had to become citizens in one of the states, and even though the process of changing citizenship remained relatively uncomplicated up until the early twentieth century, the partitioning of the Sami into separate national arenas caused divisions within the people. This article focuses on how the establishment of state borders partitioning Sápmi and the enforced citizenship in the states affected the Sami, and how they acted in response to this development.     

When the exception becomes the rule: borders,sovereignty, and citizenship

Borders are a unique political space, in which both sovereignty and citizenship are performed by individuals and sovereigns. Using the work of Agamben and Foucault, this article examines how decisions made at the border alienate each and every traveler crossing the frontier, not simply the ‘sans papiers’ or refugees. The governmentality at play in the border examination relies on an embedded confessionary complex and the ‘neurotic citizen’, as well as structures of identity, documentation, and data management. The state border is a permanent state of exception that clearly demonstrates the importance of biopolitics to the smooth operation of sovereign power.     

The limits of local citizenship: administrative borders within the Italian municipalities

This article explores residency, a form of municipal membership that plays a strategic role in Italy. Residency is a formal status and a means to have access to rights. Therefore, it is a sort of local citizenship that, at least in part, equalises citizens and non-citizens. Due to its strategic role, many local authorities have paid serious attention to it recently. Municipalities have illegally tightened the requirements provided for by national laws for obtaining the status of resident or introduced new requirements. Stressing the different mechanisms of exclusion from residency, this article explains that they often work as administrative borders. These are bureaucratic barriers that, by denying residency, aspire to regulate, symbolically and sometimes materially, the composition of the people living within municipal territories and to redistribute rights between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ individuals. As such, administrative borders fragment individual statuses and provoke an increase in civic stratification.     

Reconfiguring citizenship and nationality: dual citizenship of Taiwanese migrants in China

Many researchers have redefined citizenship to better understand the membership status aspired and demanded by contemporary migrants. As a result, the concept of ‘membership’ as opposed to citizenship was proposed in delineating the decoupling between citizenship and nationality; immigrant demands for rights and state policies in response can thereby be interpreted without considering the political meanings of citizenship. However, the decoupling of citizenship and national identity can be challenged when it comes to dual citizenship, especially when the homeland and host states are engaged in political tensions. This article examines the shifting policies of China (the People's Republic of China, or PRC) and Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) towards the citizenship conferred to Taiwanese migrants in China. The findings of this research suggest that political dimension (including political rights and obligations) should be regarded as an integral part of citizenship (i.e. national membership) especially in the rival-state context. The Taiwan–China case can contribute to our understanding of citizenship policy changes under the double pressure of inter-state rivalry and globalization. The globalizing forces help create conditions for ‘flexible citizenship’ in the ‘zones of hypergrowth’, while in the case of Taiwan–China inter-state competition draws governments and people back to zones of loyalty, the nationally defined memberships.     

Asylum seekers,citizenship and reality TV in the Netherlands: quizzing refugees in jeopardy

This article interrogates a Dutch jeopardy style TV show, Weg van Nederland, featuring young, well-educated asylum seekers about to be deported. The TV program, devised in collaboration with the advocacy group ‘Defense for Children,’ performed the paradoxes resulting from the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of asylum seekers. Yet, its strategy of inscribing the contestants into the space of citizenship by highlighting their ‘rootedness’ through the quiz format also lent support to the exclusivist, essentialist understanding of national belonging that is produced in contemporary Dutch citizenship and integration law. Moreover, the show's focus on successful, thoroughly integrated and career driven young adults, while pragmatic from the perspective of the show's (limited) political objectives, also reproduced the preferred template of neoliberal citizenship, which drives the European migration regime and its policy of selective in/exclusion. These contradictions expose the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of humanitarian appeals working within the contemporary media regime, including reality TV, which imposes its own generic terms (and ideological inflections) on the justice claims launched within its public arena.     

Re-thinking urban citizenship for immigrants from a policy perspective: the case of Barcelona

This article proposes that the role of cities in immigrant integration be reconsidered through the prism of urban citizenship, looking at how local policies co-regulate immigrants’ status, rights and identity. It argues that urban citizenship connects two dominant understandings of citizenship, as city governments are under pressure to reconcile the normative perspective of formal membership of the state with the claims for rights expressed by excluded parts of the urban citizenry. A case study of an inclusive way of regulating citizenship in Barcelona illustrates how a citizenship perspective can cast light on the specific ways in which cities regulate immigrant citizenship in interaction with higher levels of government, and highlights some of the levers cities possess to modify the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion of immigrants locally.     

Labor migration,ethnic kinship,and the conundrum of citizenship in Turkey

This paper explores the ambiguous purchase that claiming Turkish ethnicity has in Bulgarian Turkish migrants' attempts to access formal and social citizenship. I suggest that despite the new Citizenship Law, which appears to eliminate ethnic privilege, the emphasis on Turkish ethnicity continues to play a significant role in the migrants' attempts at inclusion. I seek to resolve this seeming tension between, on the one hand, the continuing significance of ‘Turkishness’ in migrants' discursive claims, and, on the other hand, the failure of most of these claims to materialize in practice by addressing the question of social and economic capital. Although ethnic belonging continues to be an important facet of citizenship, social class makes a significant difference in determining who qualifies as a citizen and has access to social citizenship. I thus argue that we need to expand the current terms of the debate on the inclusiveness of citizenship in Turkey, which revolve around ‘denationalization’ and ‘postnationalism,’ to include questions of class-based exclusion.     

Grassroots practices of citizenship and politicization in the urban: the case of right to the city initiatives in Barcelona

This article aims to produce an analysis of the politicization of the citizens after Spain’s Indignados movement from a citizenship framework. The article suggests that claiming the right to the city involves more than issues of access to urban amenities: it is also about claiming the right to participate in the formation and transformation of the city and the right to appropriate the city center. This positions these rights within the larger issue of citizenship by defining it as a collective practice rather than a state-sanctioned status. Our analysis is based on the empirical evidence derived from the semi-structured interviews, politicians’ speeches, information based on media resources and official websites, and participant observation during three months of fieldwork in Barcelona in 2016.     

The rule of law and citizenship in central India: post-colonial dilemmas

This article argues that the ‘rule of law’ has become a central goal in popular struggles the world over, and it is citizenship struggles which infuse the rule of law with substantive, as against a thin procedural, meaning. This is especially true in post-colonial societies like India, with a tradition of inherited colonial law designed for subject-hood rather than citizenship, growing inequality which affects both the enactment and interpretation of law, and the violation of law by those who are meant to protect it. Demanding implementation of existing laws, breaking laws that are patently unjust whether through armed struggle or non-violent social movements, or seeking to change laws in favour of new and more democratic laws, are all major avenues by means of which people express their aspirations as citizens. However, law's mutually constitutive relation with social practice means that people enter into political and legal negotiations already constituted as certain kinds of legal subjects, which constrains their imagination in certain ways.     

Contesting privilege with right: the transformation of differentiated citizenship in Brazil

This paper suggests that new understandings of rights associated with right to the city movements in many cities around the world are subverting special treatment rights (understood as privilege) and the systems of differentiated citizenship that support them. To make this case, it examines the Brazilian formulation of differentiated citizenship as a telling historical example of a politics of difference based on a combination of universal membership and special treatment rights. It argues that by denying the expectation of equality and emphasizing that of compensatory equity in the distribution of rights, Brazilian citizenship became an entrenched regime of legalized privileges and legitimated inequalities. This paper then analyzes the insurgence of an urban citizenship in the poor peripheries of Brazilian cities since the 1970s, which promotes new kinds of contributor rights, the text-based rights, and the right to rights. It ends with a discussion of the entanglements and contradictions of these formulations of citizenship and rights.     

An overview of the ethics of immigration

This essay discusses the ethical issues raised by immigration to rich democratic states in Europe and North America. The article identifies questions about the following topics: access to citizenship, inclusion, residents, temporary workers, irregular migrants, non-discrimination in admissions, family reunification, refugees, and open borders. It explores the answers to these questions that flow from a commitment to democratic principles.     

Social citizenship and ethnicity around a public sector steel plant in Orissa,India

This article is about a modern public sector steel plant in the state of Orissa and its promise to set standards for post-colonial India's citizenry at large. These steel plants were to provide their workforces with superior social and economic citizenship rights, which in turn were to serve as exemplary industrial relations for the industrialising nation. The steel plants were also intended to forge multi-ethnic workforces into exemplary Indian citizens by transcending their manifold ethnic differences. The trajectory of the public sector steel plant in the town of Rourkela confirms that enhanced social and economic citizenship rights detached public sector steel workforces from labour at large and produced a ‘labour aristocracy’. The trajectory, furthermore, reveals how in Rourkela policies designed to accommodate ethnic differences constantly recreated these differences and hampered the access of large sections of the local population to these enhanced social and economic citizenship rights.     

Melancholic citizenship in the south Tel Aviv protest against global migration

Combining anthropological analysis with the discipline of urban studies and the theory of melancholy, this article offers the concept of ‘melancholic citizenship’ to describe the emotion of sadness aroused among a discriminated group of citizens in light of a process that highlights their social marginality. The case study explored is the struggle of old-time Mizrahi (Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries) residents of the Hatikva neighborhood – a lower income neighborhood of south Tel Aviv – against the inflow of African migration to the area. Based on anthropological field work I conducted in the neighborhood between the years 2010–2013, I argue that the struggle of the longstanding residents aroused melancholic feelings among them when they realized that the global migration is a current indication of their discrimination as lower income Mizrahim who inhabit the city periphery and are located at the margins of Israeli society.     

Ethnicity,citizenship and reproduction: Taiwanese wives making citizenship claims in Malaysia

This paper focuses on the experience of one specific group of Taiwanese women married to Chinese Malaysian men to examine the contestational process of bidding for citizenship status in an ethnicized polity. Positioned within a trajectory of transnational linkages between origin and host countries, they achieve success through making use of networking links with co-ethnic Chinese Malaysian women who are well-positioned within government bureaucracy, while forwarding an argument based on familial ideology and the (reproductive) citizenship rights of their Malaysian husbands. As noncitizens, they nevertheless engage in socially contributive ‘acts of citizenship’ that signify their suitability as citizens, nonthreatening to social cohesion. Furthermore, they enhance their strategy by ethnic boundary-making efforts aimed at distancing themselves from People's Republic of China wives who constitute a stereotyped and stigmatized ‘other.’ The discussion makes a contribution to the literature on ethnicity, citizenship, and gender.     

The post-migration sexual citizenship of Latino gay men in Canada

The Cuéntame! study interviewed 25 Spanish-speaking gay and bisexual men in Toronto. Their migration experiences are traversed by economic rationales, security concerns and the embodied experiences of race, gender, culture and sexuality. Most express narratives of empowered opportunity in distancing themselves from restrictive sexual regimes of their place of origin, but at the same time, many migrants trade a new sense of social acceptance as gay for marginalized statuses defined by diminished social and economic capital. The social participatory rights of citizenship are particularly affected by sexuality and social class. The need and desire to establish social and sexual connections in a new environment often characterized by economic vulnerability shape experiences of social capital and citizenship rights.     

Assessing models of citizenship in the EU: the idea of responsive citizenship

There is an interesting debate about democracy and citizenship in the EU. Views diverge about the features of democratic deficits currently facing the EU and accordingly, about the scope for Union citizenship. The paper suggests an analytical distinction between asymmetric and symmetric normative models of dual – national and Union – citizenship. Moreover, it proposes an alternative model of dual citizenship that puts emphasis on the responsiveness of citizens vis-à-vis phenomena that undermine democratic governance and the claim for equal respect and concern. One of the main ideas of responsive citizenship is that effective democratic control should complement procedural legitimacy in the EU as a means to prevent phenomena of political domination and guardianship. This is possible through the combination of competences ascribed on citizens through national and Community legislation vis-à-vis national and Union executive bodies.     

Care-tizenship: precarity,social movements,and the deleting/re-writing of citizenship

A series of activist efforts across Europe have been organizing under the umbrella concept of precarity, with a long trajectory of movements facing flexibilization policies, austerity programs and migratory restrictions. The rise of precarity activism in Spain has worked at the intersections of increasing vulnerability and mobility producing a prolific body of activist literature and rich repertoire of strategies. This paper explores how alternative concepts of citizenship have developed within debates among precarity organizing prior to and after the financial crisis in Europe. Concretely, feminist precarity collectives in Spain came up with the play-on-words of ‘Care-tizenship’ to evoke a different notion of political belonging with updated collective rights. The original Spanish term is arguably the result of a typo: an accidental switching of the order of vowels in the word ciudadanía resulted in cuidadanía, which totally changed the root word: from city to care. Caretizenship suggests a community of practice forged by ties of caring relationships, mutually attending to basic needs in a context of increasing vulnerability among local, migrant and emigrant populations. While far from a working institution, this activist theorization provides a ‘horizon’ to work toward constituting an opening of political imagination.     

Multileveled citizenship and citizenship education: experiences of students in China's Beijing

With reference to three secondary schools in Beijing, this study investigates students' perceptions of multiple identities at four levels – self, local, national, and global – and the ways in which students form multiple identities. The study uses a mixed methodology of questionnaires and interview surveys to collect data, and identifies four patterns of Beijing students' multiple identities: a high value on self-identity, a strong affective orientation toward local and national identity, minimal distinction between local and national identities, and an imagined global identity. This study provides empirical data that both supplements and challenges the existing literature on citizenship and citizenship education in the context of globalization.