Columbia University Press

“The real problem with citizenship laws is not their manipulation by lawmakers or entrepreneurs, much less by mythical “anchor babies.” The problem is more fundamental: the age-old, irrational linkage between citizenship and birthplace.” — Jacqueline Stevens

In “Citizenship to Go,” a recent article published in the New York Times, Jacqueline Stevens argues that the system of giving citizenship based on birth is antiquated and unjust, and that the very idea of having strictly defined national borders perpetuates inequality. Stevens is a professor of political science at Northwestern University and the author of States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, as well as the States Without Nations Blog.

In “Citizenship to Go,” Stevens acknowledges that the connection between birth and citizenship is an old and celebrated tie. However, she argues that today this connection causes more harm than good:

From ancient Athens to South Sudan, birth to certain parents, or in a certain territory, has been the primary criterion for citizenship. The word “nationality” comes from the Latin nasci, or birth. America is no exception, notwithstanding the enlargement of citizenship to encompass non-Europeans and women.

Archaic membership rules have made life miserable not only for Mexican migrants in the United States, but also for people who cannot persuade their governments to accept their claims of citizenship, as a recent conference at Boston College, titled “Citizenship-in-Question,” made clear. Scholars discussed cases in England, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, South Africa, Thailand, Togo and the United States in which governments rendered their own legal citizens stateless.

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David Brotherton and Luis Barrios authors of Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile were recently on the Brian Lehrer Showon what they learned having followed thousands of Dominicans deported following the 1996 U.S. Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act.

(To download a copy of the copy of Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile, “rent” a copy of the book for a month, or buy individual chapters, please visit Columbia University Press Online Access.)

David Brotherton and Luis Barrios on the “Brian Lehrer Show”:

“Migration control is the last bastion of open discrimination in the modern world.”—Adam McKeown

The following is an interview with Adam McKeown, author of Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders. The book is now available and paper and the cloth edition is on sale during our Spring Sale.

Question: What is Melancholy Order about?

Adam McKeown: Melancholy Order argues that immigration restrictions and border control have by no means been indispensable to national sovereignty. In fact, their origins go back only to the late nineteenth century—to the exclusion of Asians from liberal white settler nations. Before that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, international opinion and laws favored free mobility as one of the rights of man and a cornerstone of economic progress. Attempts to justify Asian exclusion to international and domestic critics helped establish the basic principles of modern migration control: that migration should be controlled at national borders; that it was entirely a domestic issue and not the concern of international diplomacy; and that humans have no rights at national borders. The enforcement of these laws also produced the basic mechanisms of migration control and identification, especially the extraction of migrants from social networks that produced identity and their reinsertion into a matrix of bureaucratically defined categories. By the 1920s these principles and methods, originally forged in a burst of racist segregation and believed to be a temporary expedient, became the norm in most countries around the world.

Q: Everyone talks about globalization these days. What is the globalization of borders?

A.M.: Globalization is often understood as a challenge to national borders. In fact, the dramatic growth of global flows in the past two centuries has come hand in hand with the modern international system, well-policed borders, and the imagination and enforcement of difference. The very act of proclaiming that we live in a “new” age of globalization (a proclamation heard repeatedly since the 1830s) is an act of forgetting the extent to which the world is already a product of dense interaction. The creation of legal, physical, political, and cultural borders has been crucial to that forgetting.

Similarly, the regulation of migration has both facilitated and restricted flows. The creation of standardized and streamlined passports, visas and inspection procedures has greatly facilitated the movement of a “globalizing class” of people who can obtain such documents and are free to move around the world. It has simultaneously created a class that is not free to move except under conditions of close surveillance and promises to return. The regional differences in wages and skill created by such restrictions help to make the movement of goods, money, and information even more lucrative and necessary.

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Jacqueline Stevens, author of States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals was recently on Democracy Now! to discuss the misconduct of U.S. immigration judges who have more concerned about deportation quotas rather than immigrants’—and citizens’—rights.

Here’s an excerpt from her appearance:

Now, the problem is that the immigration agents are not always accurate in their arrest reports…. The purpose of an immigration hearing is to review whether or not the claims that are being made in the arrest reports are accurate. But instead, the Department of Homeland Security is taking advantage of the discretion afforded them under our law and deporting people through a process that does not require them to appear before an immigration judge…. The vast majority of the immigration judges who review these do not review them carefully, and they just sign these orders by the hundreds. And as Rachel Rosenbloom, a colleague of mine at Northeastern Law School, points out, they are likely also ordering the deportation of US citizens among them.

In a piece published on the Huffington Post, Jacqueline Stevens, author of the forthcoming States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, recounts the remarkable case of Mark Lyttle, a U.S. citizen who was temporarily deported. (For more on the Mark Lyttle case you can also visit Stevens’s excellent blog, also called “States without Nations.”)

As Stevens shows, through a series of bureaucratic and administrative miscues and cover-ups, Mark Lyttle, who has a history of mental illness, found himself sent to Mexico despite the fact that his citizenship is easily verifiable. What is even more astounding is that Lyttle’s case is hardly unique:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been deporting over a million people each year. Most are Mexican citizens residing here without legal status. But thousands of those being detained and even deported are US citizens.

This sounds unbelievable, and it should…. Even more shocking are the several thousand of US citizens each year who are not only detained, but also deported. This occurs either because of ICE bullying, a fear of indefinite detention, or because the US government gave their US citizen parents, mostly of Mexican ancestry, incorrect information about their legal status and issued them green cards instead of telling them they were US citizens at birth.

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Immigration, a contentious issue among Republicans during the primaries, is sure to surface again in the general election. The recently published Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement argues that while the focus on enforcement has intensified in recent years, current anti-immigration tendencies are not a knee-jerk reaction to the events of September 11th. Rather, they have been gathering steam for decades. Moreover, instead of finding effective ways of integrating newcomers into American society, the U.S. has focused on making the process of citizenship more difficult.

In their introduction Brotherton and Kretsedemas note the contradictory character of current U.S. immigration policy:

This enforcement focus has come to dominate in an era when the United States is becoming increasingly more reliant on immigrants for workforce replenishment and population growth in general. Given this context, it is telling that the predominant form of social spending on immigration focuses on routing out so-called undesirables and that most of the state and local legislation on immigration is geared toward capturing unauthorized migrants and other immigration violators. The dismantling of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the incorporation of its duties within the Department of Homeland Security, provides as good a metaphor as any of this shift in emphasis. . . . It is possible however to reinterpret security as pertaining to improving the legal rights, social mobility, and well-being of all U.S. residents—immigrants and native born alike.

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