Language, Immigration and Naturalization

Legal and Linguistic Issues

Ariel Loring, Vaidehi Ramanathan

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783095148
• eBook ISBN: 9781783095179
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Psycolinguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume focuses on the everyday legalities and practicalities of naturalization including governmental processes, the language of citizenship tests and classes, the labelling and lived experiences of immigrants/outsiders and the media's interpretation of this process. The book brings together scholars from a wide range of specialities who accentuate language and raise issuesthat often remain unarticulated or masked in the media. The contributors highlight how governmental policies and practices affect native-born citizens and residents differently on the basis of legal status. Furthermore, the authors observe that many issues that are typically seen as affecting immigrants (such as language policies, nationalist identities and feelings of belonging) also impact first-generation native-born citizens who are seen as, or see themselves as, outsiders.

1 Introduction: Language, Immigration and Naturalization: Legal and Linguistic Issues

Ariel Loring and Vaidehi Ramanathan

Purpose of this Volume

This volume aligns the research of scholars from a wide range of specialties who focus on the cutting-edge topics of citizenship, naturalization and immigration while accentuating language. These issues are relevant and important areas of investigation due to their controversial interconnection with governmental policies, naturalization testing, news and public discourse, and pedagogical practices. In all these realms, citizenship and immigration are entrenched in issues of national identity, language status, marginalization of minority and immigrant languages, distribution of community and educational resources, gatekeeping, linguistic discrimination and assessment. The primary objective of this volume is to explore how language and ideologies of naturalization and immigration are reflected and applied in current practice. We are particularly interested in the consequences of such positionings for those seeking naturalization.

While sociopolitical dimensions of contemporary citizenship have been well researched (Extra et al., 2009; Hogan-Brun et al., 2009; Shohamy & McNamara, 2009), less studied are everyday practices, tensions and micro structures that empirically demonstrate how citizenship is practically negotiated (Blackledge, 2005; Joppke, 2007). Using various methodological approaches, each of the chapters raises nuanced issues regarding the complexities of immigration and citizenship for those within the citizenship infrastructure, and one doesn’t need training in sociolinguistics to comprehend the extent to which language plays a role in these debates. Many of these concerns involve entry and resettlement in the US or other English-speaking countries and affect people for whom English is a second or third language. These issues often remain unarticulated or masked in the media and non-sociolinguistic circles.

In immigration policy, naturalization refers to the conferment of a legal status on foreign individuals who fulfill legislated requirements. While administrative discourse often frames this process as a symbolic demonstration of attachment and assimilation, there are various reasons why permanent residents choose to become citizens. These reasons are shaped in part by language policies and ideologies, and they not only affect the attitudes of prospective citizens, but also the attitudes of the host country’s population.¹ Because these issues are never straightforward or decontextualized, this volume follows a scholarly trajectory of interpreting citizenship more holistically. By shifting away from a discussion of legal documents, this newer orientation to citizenship allows us to ask: What policies keep individuals from participating fully? Where do languages and immigrant groups fall in this framework? The scholars writing in this volume analyze naturalization and immigration concerns in ways that both look at and move beyond legal definitions of ‘rights and responsibilities,’ raising issues of access, participation, engagement and culture.

What characterizes this volume in particular is both its focus on the everyday legalities of naturalization (such as the process of becoming an American citizen and the language of citizenship tests and classes), as well as a broader consideration of identity and social concerns (the labeling of who is or isn’t ‘American,’ the lived experiences of immigrants in bordered areas and the media’s interpretations of this process).² For some authors in this volume, this demarcation of ‘American’ and ‘non-American’ is based on legal status, in which governmental policies and practices affect native-born citizens and permanent residents differently. But other authors observe that many of the issues that are typically seen as affecting immigrants (language policies, American identities and feelings of belonging) also impact native-born citizens who are seen as or see themselves as outsiders.

Not addressed in this volume is the differentiated treatment of specific populations of migrant people, for instance, undocumented immigrants and refugees. In this vein, resettlement and welfare allotments are also not pursued (but see Feuerherm and Ramanathan [2016] for a detailed discussion of refugeehood and resettlement as they relate to language issues).

The questions this volume explores are:

(1) What does the process of becoming a citizen look like?

(2) In what ways are people excluded from full participation?

(3) How does language position and frame insiders and outsiders?

In addressing these issues, the authors draw from their research in educational policies, naturalization exams and preparation, and community and public discourse.

This introductory chapter provides background information concerning the history of citizenship, scholarly debates in the field and naturalization policies around the world. It outlines key terms which citizenship researchers draw on, especially the authors in this volume. This terrain will foreground a legal discussion of citizenship.

Interpretations of Citizenship

The next section of this chapter is a review of evolving legal and scholarly interpretations of the word citizenship, punctuated by key quotes, to highlight its nuanced and multidimensional meanings:

The nature of citizenship, like that of the state, is a question which is often disputed: there is no general agreement on a single definition. (Aristotle, as quoted in Brubaker [1992: ix])

Ancient Greece is usually considered by scholars to be the first society where citizenship was enacted. Aristotle’s conception of an ideal citizenship was based on a communitarian model, where all citizens within a city state knew one another. When a state or city became too large for direct citizen participation, Aristotle believed there would be less incentive to be good citizens, which he defined as men who demonstrated ‘temperance, that is, self-control; the avoidance of extremes; justice; courage, including patriotism; and wisdom, or prudence, including the capacity for judgment’ (Heater, 2004: 19).³ However, as this quote demonstrates, Aristotle himself acknowledged the plural meanings of the word citizenship.

Whereas Aristotle perceived citizens as natural (and man as a ‘political animal’), the Ancient Romans saw citizens as legal entities (Heater, 2004). Being a citizen of Rome involved a legal relationship with the state, in which the law guided and protected its citizens. In return, citizens had duties, such as military service and paying taxes, and rights, such as the right to marry and trade. These rights were denied to non-citizens, who could not marry into a citizen-family and were subjected to higher taxes. Roman citizenship included a tiered system compared to Greek citizenship; there were opportunities for slaves and residents of conquered Latin cities to become ‘second-class’ citizens, without the right to vote or hold office (Heater, 2004).

In the feudal system of Medieval Europe, the relationship between lords and vassals was hierarchical. The vassal’s loyalty and allegiance was to the lord, not to a law or nation. Thus, vassals were seen and treated as subjects who passively obeyed, not as equal citizens who participated (Heater, 2004; Jacobson, 1996). Without concepts of domesticity and internationality, migration was inconsequential (Jacobson, 1996), and during this time period a transition began from subject to citizen (Ullmann, 1967). Unlike a monarchy, the lords in the feudal system were contractually bound to fulfill certain obligations to their vassals, ‘giving rise to the idea of the individual and the citizen by implying reciprocity of obligation’ (Leca, 1994: 161). In the subsequent Renaissance period, people were no longer seen as subjects, but rather as citizens of a city, and later as citizens of a nation (Leca, 1994). According to Toby Miller (1993: 6), ‘at a sociopolitical level, the sovereign state and the citizen of suffrage are perhaps the defining signs of modernity.’

Citizenship and nationhood became linked in the 18th century (Heater, 2004) when nation states replaced city states in Europe (Davidson, 1997). Citizenship was even extended to foreigners, as in France’s Constitution of 1791. After a five-year residency requirement and if other conditions were met, French citizenship could apply to those born to foreign parents outside the kingdom, as well as to those born in France to a foreign father (Heater, 2004). Thus, the meaning of citizenship grew from a shared network of individuals within the same city, municipality or ethnic region, to a much larger, more abstract imagined community (Anderson, 1983). In an imagined community, one way to foster a sense of community is through a shared language.

Summarizing the various directions that scholars have taken in analyzing citizenship, Bloemraad et al. (2008) have outlined four trajectories: status, rights, participation and belonging. Research within these domains relates to the topics of national identity and borders, exclusion, multiculturalism and immigrant integration. Still highly influential (as well as critiqued) in this regard is Marshall’s (1950) seminal essay ‘Citizenship and social class’:

Citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed. (Marshall, 1950: 28)

This view of citizenship reinforces citizenship as a status and highlights the rights and duties associated with citizenship. From this interpretation, not only do inhabitants have a responsibility to the nation state (duties), but the nation state has an obligation to its inhabitants (rights). Marshall is well known for dissecting three types of citizenship rights, which he describes as evolving chronologically through Britain’s history (Marshall, 1950). These rights are civil (concerned with individual freedom, such as freedom of speech and the right to own property), political (referring to political participation) and social (encompassing economic welfare and social security).

This is the interpretation that the US federal governmental office Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) seems to share. Its website includes a document entitled ‘Citizenship rights and responsibilities’ (2008) that divides the rights the US provides its citizens and the responsibilities of Americans into two columns (reproduced below):

Rights	Responsibilities
• Freedom to express yourself. • Freedom to worship as you wish. • Right to a prompt, fair trial by jury. • Right to vote in elections for public officials. • Right to apply for federal employment requiring US citizenship. • Ri...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• 1 Introduction: Language, Immigration and Naturalization: Legal and Linguistic Issues
• Part 1: Policies
• Part 2: Pedagogies
• Part 3: Discourses
• Afterword
• Index