Chapter 1
Mapping the soft borders of citizenship
An introduction
Roberto G. Gonzales and Nando Sigona
On 10 August 2016 the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that some renewal requests for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) filed between 14 February 2016 and 16 May 2016 were delayed due to technical difficulties and could fall outside of expected processing times. As a result of the delay, hundreds of undocumented immigrants who were granted work authorization under a 2012 administrative action under U.S. president Barack Obama were prevented from receiving renewed work authorization cards and fell out of status. For many who were forced to quit their jobs this âliminal legalityâ (MenjĂvar 2006) was a stark reminder of the fragility of their temporary and partial status.
By mid-2016, more than 741,500 undocumented young people had been granted a DACA status, and more than 526,000 had been approved for renewals.1 In the short term, DACA beneficiaries had taken giant leaps from the margins. Their new status had opened up new avenues of access: many had found new employment, had increased their earnings, had received driversâ licences, had started building credit, and had received health care through their jobs (Gonzales, Terriquez and Ruszczyk 2014). Whatâs more, the deportation relief provided by DACA gave beneficiaries a sense of belonging and eased their worries about being apprehended and removed from the country.
But DACA was not without its problems. As an executive memorandum that shifts bureaucratic practices and priorities, DACA has limited inclusionary power. It does not offer a pathway to citizenship or other forms of legal status. It does not provide its beneficiaries with the ability to bypass legal exclusions from federal financial aid. And, it is temporary and revocable, an empirical reality that casts some troubling doubt on beneficiariesâ futures. In the fall of 2016, Gina Hernandez felt this when she fell out of status due to USCISâs technical issues.2 A 31-year old history teacher working at a public high school in the borough of Queens, New York, Gina was forced to take a leave of absence from the classroom after her new employment authorization card failed to arrive on time.
Gina was working under a work authorization that expired on 6 August. On the advice of an attorney to apply for renewal between 120 and 150 days of the expiration date, she submitted her application in early May. Despite receiving a letter notifying her that her renewed DACA status had been approved, Ginaâs work authorization card still had not arrived. When the new school year began she was not allowed to enter the classroom. When we asked her about her predicament she expressed frustration and worry:
âI feel like Iâm back to where I was before, you know, undocumented. I think I had a false sense of security with DACA, like that I actually had status. Now, I donât know. I mean, at any moment it can all be taken away just like that. [DACA] is something, right? Like I can now drive and work legally. Well, I mean, I can and I canât, you know. I used to think that it solved a lot of my problems. I know the renewal will come through and I can get back to my classroom. But I feel more cautious now, like a bird with only one wing.â3
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom following the referendum that saw 52 per cent of British voters casting their vote to leave the European Union, three million non-British EU residents woke up on 24 June 2016 to find out the world around them was going to change and they had very little control over the direction these changes were going to take. The European citizenship, the âworldâs first example of fully institutionalised trans, or post-national political rights beyond the nation stateâ (Favell 2010: 187), that had granted them the quasi-unrestricted freedom to live and work in any of the EU member states since the early 1990s, but gave them no right to vote in national elections and referenda, was going to evaporate and their legal status and their life in the UK had become uncertain. But, even worse than that, shocked EU residents found themselves turned into a âbargaining chipâ in the negotiations between the British government and the EU and, as never before, felt the weight of their exclusion from the British polity. The new British Prime Minister, Theresa May, repeatedly refused to guarantee residence rights to EU citizens. âAs part of the [Brexit] negotiation we will need to look at this question of people who are here in the UK from the EUâ, she said in a broadcast interview.4 Following the referendum announcement and at a faster pace after its outcome, hundreds of thousands of EU citizens sought legal advice on their status and discovered that just a few months before the referendum Theresa May, the then Home Secretary, had introduced an 85 page-long form for EU residents willing to see their permanent residency (PR) status acknowledged. Among the instructions provided, applicants were required to count the days they had spent outside the UK in the five years preceding the application. To many this was not just a veritable nightmare in practical terms â why would one keep such a detailed record of oneâs visit abroad if there was no need to? â but also troublesome on a more existential level. Such is the distance between a normative construction of the EU citizen as someone who feels at home everywhere in the EU and is valued for embracing freedom of movement within the EU, both long and short term, and that of the immigrant in the UK who may see their chances of permanent residency jeopardised if they happen to have spent too many days abroad. The discovery of the application form came to many as a shock as up until March 2016 EU residents had become permanent residents automatically after five years. The PR certificate has become a necessary prerequisite for applying for British citizenship â something few felt compelled to consider until June 2016.
What does it mean to be part of a national community, but to have only partial access to the polity? And how does the redefinition of the boundaries of the polity transform the hierarchy of membership within society? In contemporary Western societies, these questions are at the centre of heated debates about the boundaries of society and the place of immigrants in it, and on the minds of many migrants with partial or incomplete forms of status (Anderson, Gibney and Paoletti 2011). The presence of growing populations across the globe without formal legal immigration status â but with varying degrees of rights â compels us to rethink long-held assumptions about the ways in which participation and inclusion are tied to legality.
The experiences of contemporary migrants â whether undocumented, irregular, precarious, or temporary â powerfully demonstrate that while current social science frameworks offer some utility, notably around the concepts of membership and incorporation, these approaches require revision.
Unpacking the migration and citizenship nexus
Contemporary societies have become increasingly diverse, layered, and interconnected. Indeed, the processes of neoliberal globalization have loosened labour protections, restructured the welfare system, delocalized state borders, and led to widening inequalities (Piketty 2013).
Whatâs more, these processes have fractured the connection between state, territory and residents, triggering a significant transformation in the experiences of membership in Western democracies while also giving rise to a host of new non-state actors operating transnationally.
All of this is occurring at a time when nation-states are also undergoing significant demographic and social changes as a result of aging populations and international migration (Sassen 2006; Castles 2013).
The contemporary proliferation of immigration statuses â or âfigures of membershipâ â for non-citizens is one of the manifestations of this transformation (cf. Zetter 2007). However, little is known about two important aspects of this phenomenon: firstly, the impact of the proliferation of legal statuses on the citizens of these societies and citizenship more broadly and, secondly, how immigration statuses intersect with social cleavages such as age, class, gender, race, and national origin.
This book provides some answers to these vexing puzzles. Through a range of theoretically innovative and empirically rich case studies that cover the experiences of a multitude of figures of membership, including undocumented migrants, Roma, mixed status families and new citizens, it investigates the interplay between forms and modes of contemporary membership, immigration and citizenship regimes, and the meanings and practices of belonging.
As globalization scholar Saskia Sassen (1998: 56) validly notes, âmigrations are not autonomous processes; they donât just happen, they are producedâ. Indeed, citizenship and alienage are mutually constructed (Bosniak 2006; McNevin 2011, 2013) and, as this book illustrates, are also intimately connected, both in theory and in everyday interactions.
Conceptions of state membership have been traditionally based on a notion of a bounded community whereby rules of legal citizenship determine community belonging and set the parameters for exclusion. This approach examines the role formal and informal state structures and practices play both in creating populations who fall outside the bounds of formal membership â those who are constructed as âillegalâ or âtemporaryâ â and in enforcing and sustaining these groupsâ legal vulnerability. Scholars have been keen to point out that illegality is more than a juridical status; it is also a sociopolitical one (Coutin 2000; De Genova 2002). From this vantage point, illegality is historically and legally produced and is situated within a broader framework of a global economy (Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard 2009; MenjĂvar and Kanstroom 2013). In other words, it is produced and, for many, experienced as a âmaster statusâ (Gonzales 2015).
Sociolegal anthropologist Susan B. Coutin (2000) argues that the combination of legal regulations and the threat of deportation render undocumented immigrants âlegally non-existentâ â legally outside the United States while physically present within the country. And anthropologist Sarah Willen (2007) further deepens our understandings of illegality by drawing attention to the effects of daily perceptions of uncertainty, danger, and the threat of deportation. These ongoing worries produce specific kinds of fear and anxiety that often have physical as well as emotional effects â what Willen aptly terms the âembodimentâ of illegality. These personal, repetitive manifestations of illegality and semi-legality (Kubal 2013) remind us of the inherent contradictions between the needs of capital and the drawing and defining of national boundaries: migrants may be centrally incorporated into local labour markets, but immigration laws and practices constrain their daily lives.
Recently, however, a burgeoning line of scholarship in the social sciences, often across traditional disciplinary boundaries, is challenging the primacy of the nation-state for determining membership and endowing rights, arguing that recent trends in globalization, human rights, and diaspora politics have made state borders less consequential (Soysal 1994; Ong 1999; Benhabib 2004; Bosniak 2006). Focusing on non-citizensâ long-term presence and their status as persons, this scholarship argues that non-citizens create spaces of belonging that supersede legal citizenship (Rosaldo 1994; Reed-Danahay and Brettell 2008; Tonkiss and Bloom 2016). In doing so, it draws attention to the ways in which those formally outside the law lead everyday lives, form relationships, and participate in the communities in which they live. By deliberately uncoupling a sense of belonging from notions of formal citizenship, scholars have pointed out that immigrants often transcend the boundaries of territory and polity, carrying out their everyday lives in various social and political fields. This work on the informal modes of belonging provides a corrective for the limitations of dominant discourses of membership that over-emphasize formal, legal immigration status as a pre-requisite to an individualâs ability to assert a claim to belong, it also reverses the onus between belonging to a national community and being recognized as a formal member of it (cf. Isin 2008). Immigrants feel part of a community because of sentiments influenced by social relationships and cultural beliefs and practices (Coutin 2003).
Over the last several years, there has been considerable debate about the definition of citizenship, as some have questioned whether it should even be understood in relation to the nation-state (Marshall 1950).5 Scholars have coined phrases for alternative forms of citizenship: âglobal citizenshipâ, âtransnational citizenshipâ, âpostnational citizenshipâ, âsocial citizenshipâ, and âmulticultural citizenshipâ (Bosniak 2006). Some of these conceptions propose models of societies in which different populations participate through group membership rather than on the basis of individual rights. What gives these broad definitions of citizenship a particular credence is the empirical observation that there is seldom complete overlap between the boundaries of a particular nation and the boundaries of the population that lives in that nation (Yuval-Davis 2006).
Drawing distinctions between legal forms of citizenship that determine âthe full exercise of legal rightsâ, on one hand, and participatory forms of citizenship that denote an âeffective presence in the public sphereâ, on the other, scholars have revealed these routine manifestations of citizenship as both participatory and local in character (Balibar 1988: 724; cf. Reed-Danahay and Brettell 2008).
These more democratic articulations of citizenship have more to do with the community participation of citizens as social and political actors than with laws endowing them with the rights to do so. It is the being of citizenship that is emphasized over the becoming (Castles and Davidson 2000). Asserting cultural forms of citizenship involves agency. Sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) draws an important distinction between belonging as an emotional sense of home, and what she calls âthe politics of belongingâ. For her, these politics are not just about the ongoing work the state puts into maintaining and reproducing community boundaries. The politics of belonging are also about the ongoing challenges to those boundaries by members within the community.
To be sure, both the older and the newer definitions, while they disagree on the significance of states and state borders, raise critical questions as to when and how territorial presence constitutes membership, and the extent to which practices of membership âcreate and situate individuals in certain positions within the social spaceâ (Isin 2002: 25), producing new forms of belonging.
Recent scholarship has demonstrated that migrants living in spaces of exclusion do not experience its constraints uniformly. As one scholar has noted, migrants are seldom just undocumented (Kubal 2013: 11). Indeed, precariousness is experienced in various spaces and types of interactions: tight labour markets that are prone to abuse and harsh conditions, limited or no access to public and social services, costly and discriminatory housing markets, barriers to banking services and the acquisition of credit, and limitations in social relationships (MenjĂvar and Kanstroom 2013). However, on a daily basis, oneâs immigration status may be less or more salient to most of their activities. They may be regular in one sense and irregular in another; they may be fully excluded from the legal-political system but able to carry out a range of social interactions and activities (Sigona 2012; Sigona and Hughes 2012; Bloch, Sigona and Zetter 2014).
This observation draws our attention to the spaces, experiences, and moments where citizenship is more and less consequential. Access to each of these domains is differently shaped by a constellation of entry points and barriers across time, space, and place, offering a variety of configurations of rights and limitations. Where one resides, the absence or availability of resources, the attitudes of local actors and institutions, and in...
