1 Introduction: Migration, Borders and Citizenship
Migration has been the focus national and international debate owing to its unsettling impact on the main tenets of Western democracies, such as regulated borders and citizenship. Of late, the interdependent relationship between migration, borders and citizenship has become especially accentuated. This increased attention is due to the perceived contradiction between the need to come together internationally for managing migration (mostly through regional and international agreements and policies), vis-a-vis the revival of sovereigntist agendas that are hostile to surrendering any control over the entry of aliens. The âmigration crisisâ has prompted a large body of literature dealing with the emergence of Trumpism, Brexit and various neo-nationalist movements, on the mismatch between a transnational legal framework and the expression of identities that remain territorially bounded.
At the same time, long-term processes of migration have laid bare the romantic fiction of the ânation-stateâ as established throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Western democracies are faced with a process in which migration endlessly changes the ânationâ, to such an extent that they must allow for continuous transformation of foreigners into citizens not only as equal individuals under the rule of law, but also as bearers of their own claims that permeate the nation itself, whatever the recipe (salad-bowl, melting-pot, interculturalism, and the like).
The supposedly deleterious impact of migration on borders and citizenship has thus stood out as the âultimate security threatâ (LĂ©onard 2010: 231), nurturing a growing demand for national security (Newman 2006). The surveillance of borders, the identification of migrants and the selection of those admitted to the national community, have gained acute attention among policy-makers and the general public. Security concerns have mixed in with the regulation of international migration (Faist 2002), and they have elevated the control of migration to the highest priority among state policies in this field (Balibar 2012). Recent scholarship has emphasised the multiplication and complexification of borders (Balibar 2012); their relocation, dissemination and modification (Agier 2014); their âdenaturalizationâ through the endowment with technological apparatus (Dijstelbloem and Broeders 2015); and their evolution towards remote and virtual forms of control (Tsianos and Karakayali 2010). Borders are seen as the last redoubt for national sovereignty (Opeskin 2012: 551), while âneo-nationalismâ increasingly informs international relations, enhancing the ability of states to control migration (Schain 2009). This common trend across Europe and the United States is also evident in the externalization of migration controls, which establish agreements to engage countries of origin and transit to control migration (Lavenex 2006). In this light it suffices to mention the European agreements with Turkey, Niger and Libya, or the Programme Frontera Sur between the United States and Mexico.
While the proliferation of fences and walls to fortify borders in nearly every part of the world shows the growing accentuation of national boundaries and the associated policy investments to oppose migration and the production of ânew citizenshipâ (Cinalli 2017), the border at the centre of this book is not just a border in its prosaic senseâin as much as citizenship is not taken in the narrow function of territorial membership. Rather, borders and citizenship in the migration âfieldâ occupy the key interface between the policy sphereâwhere the main institutional actors and political elites engage in decision-makingâand the public sphereâwhere movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and civil society engage in discussion over decision-making and its actual practice (Cinalli 2004).
Accordingly, the notion of âfieldâ is crucial to comprehend this plurality of positions, agents and discourses. Since the seminal studies by Jacobson (1996), Sassen (1996) and Soysal (1995), we know that human rights and democratic norms (either enshrined in international conventions or in national constitutions) may hamper the practicing of harsh policies in the public sphere, in as much as bottom-up mobilization by movements, NGOs and civil society may hamper restrictions by norms, institutions and policies (Gurowitz 1999). The contributions of this book converge not only on postnational interaction across territorial borders but, especially, focus on the field interactions across policy and public spheres.
The extent to which policy and public spheres communicate (or not) within the migration field allows for processes of multilevel governance, pushing the policy-public divide upward toward intergovernmental and downward towards grassroots politics at the local level (Hooghe and Marks 2001). Thus, potential divergences across the policy and public spheres may intersect with differences across territorial levels. This can be expressed, for example, in increasing spaces of uncertainty when local policies over bordering practices and protection of undocumented migrants differ markedly from national policies (Oomen et al. 2016).
As such, this book gives significant attention to multi-level interactions across the local and the national level. As we will show, borders are not only a concern at the national level, but they can also be established and challenged at a local level. They are not only drawn and enforced by public authorities, but they are in some way negotiated with a wide range of social actors. Citizenship, in turn, is not a fact, but a process. It does not only descend from above, but it is also negotiated from below; it is not only a political institution, but a set of social practices. Citizenshipâs beneficiaries are not mere passive subjects of concessions granted by the host state; rather, they are actively engaged in the process of widening the legitimate social base of the society in which they choose to join (Ambrosini 2013).
Simply put, migration obliges western democracies to reconsider sovereignty over borders and citizenship. These democracies do so in the context of responding to the continuous interactions across the local, national and transnational level, including the interplay between institutions and decision-makers in the policy sphere and the civic practices and discourses in the public sphere. In so doing, the book unpacks the established function of borders as a fixed tool, which, by separating migrants from (the territory of) citizens, supposedly reinforces national sovereignty (Balibar 2003).
At the same time, this book comprehends a whole field wherein fluid and cross-level dynamics take place across the policy and public spheres. Our conceptualisation of migration, borders, and citizenship as interconnected elements of the same field serves to bring together elites and institutions side-by-side with civil society and the broader public. It is thus propitious for the study of the plurality of structures, relations, and agents who lead to a consensual field that pre-empts contentiousness (Cinalli 2007) or, alternatively, to a âbattlegroundâ that is open to different outcomes (Ambrosini 2018; Fassin 2011). A detailed examination of policy and public spheres across territorial levels gives proper light to institutions, policy actors and state elites in general: decision-making over migration, borders, and citizenship taps into the most traditional prerogatives of national sovereignty, while also tapping into actual experiences of solidarity and exchanges among movements, civil society, and individual citizens themselves.
Our ultimate task is that of reconnecting the policy and public spheres in a way to emphasize the variable dynamics linking institutions and civil society within different forms of multilevel governance. This goal fits ongoing studies of emerging forms of governance across the national and the local level, including the involvement of grassroots public movements âfrom belowâ alongside decision-making by central policy elites and institutions. No doubt, actors may aim to access different social positions so as to strengthen their role in the dynamic renegotiation of boundaries between the policy and public spheres. For example, central policy-makers may be interested in the support that grassroots public groups can provide in terms of provision of services, production of knowledge and public legitimisation, while grassroots public organizations, in exchange, may obtain a privileged access to higher political positions and financial resources (thereby playing a greater role in wider processes of governance).
Hence, our focus on multilevel dynamics across the policy and public spheres facilitates the scrutiny of the main tensions and contradictions in the migration field. For example, the fact migrants are usually net contributors to pension systems (Razin and Sadka 2001) means that restrictions over migration, borders and citizenship may conflict with state interests such as the provision of an effective welfare and an efficient communication across the national and the local level (Ambrosini 2018); or that the same restriction, albeit designed to counter criminality and violence, paradoxically ends up targeting civil society and solidarity mobilization rather than real acts of trafficking crime. This book discusses these tensions and contradictions in depth.
2 Between Policy and Public Spheres
The book is divided into three primary parts, addressing migration, borders, and citizenship in first, the policy sphere; second, the public sphere; and third, the multilevel dynamics across the policy and public spheres. While each part of the book can be read and understood in its own terms, the three parts are a-piece in addressing how multi-level governance highlights, and sometimes overcomes, tensions and contradictions taking place across the policy and public spheres.
2.1 Policy Sphere: The Impact of Citizenship Regimes, Borders Politics, and Human Rights
The policy sphere has to address a particularly complex set of demands and, in certain respects, even contradictions between contesting forces. Not only are the main institutional parties, actors and elites in essence responding not only to competing movements (some of which different policy elites may represent), NGOs and civil society in the public sphere, but also to a variety of national and international considerations. These include the growing international legal instruments that may constrain their actions (notably regarding human rights in areas of migration and refugees) and national constitutional and judicial constrains (and occasionally enablers). Furthermore, transnational and corporate actors also impress upon the policy elites their own interests, as well broader concerns of economy in a globalised economic environment.
The postnational citizenship scholars, noted previously, brought to the fore the growing impact of human rightsânot only as a legal regime but normatively in the extraordinary growth of human rights norms in discourse, from court cases to social movements to everyday claims. Other scholars have contested the postnational shift (Joppke 1999; Bloemraad 2006). However, what is clear is that various actors are acting transnationally and through sets of claims that supersede classic sovereigntist models. This is evident, to give one example, in the dramatic growth of dual citizenship both in recogn...