Citizenship 2.0

Dual Nationality as a Global Asset

Yossi Harpaz

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691194578
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Citizenship 2.0 focuses on an important yet overlooked dimension of globalization: the steady rise in the legitimacy and prevalence of dual citizenship. Demand for dual citizenship is particularly high in Latin America and Eastern Europe, where more than three million people have obtained a second citizenship from EU countries or the United States. Most citizenship seekers acquire EU citizenship by drawing on their ancestry or ethnic origin; others secure U.S. citizenship for their children by strategically planning their place of birth. Their aim is to gain a second, compensatory citizenship that would provide superior travel freedom, broader opportunities, an insurance policy, and even a status symbol.Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, Yossi Harpaz analyzes three cases: Israelis who acquire citizenship from European-origin countries such as Germany or Poland; Hungarian-speaking citizens of Serbia who obtain a second citizenship from Hungary (and, through it, EU citizenship); and Mexicans who give birth in the United States to secure American citizenship for their children. Harpaz reveals the growth of instrumental attitudes toward citizenship: individuals worldwide increasingly view nationality as rank within a global hierarchy rather than as a sanctified symbol of a unique national identity. Citizenship 2.0 sheds light on a fascinating phenomenon that is expected to have a growing impact on national identity, immigration, and economic inequality.

1

Dual Citizenship as a Strategy of Global Upward Mobility

Since the 1990s, states have become increasingly tolerant of dual citizenship. Who benefited from this new state of affairs? What are the forces that drive demand for dual citizenship? Social scientists have studied how immigrants in the West acquire and use dual citizenship, focusing on questions of ethnic and national identity, integration, and transnationalism. At the same time, they have tended to overlook a crucial element that plays a key role in the acquisition and use of dual citizenship: disparities in the practical value of different countries’ citizenship. In this chapter, I introduce a new approach that posits that global inequality in citizenship value is the main factor that shapes the acquisition and use of dual citizenship.

The world’s citizenships are not equal. Some citizenships–say, Canadian or Swedish—provide access to a secure and prosperous territory, guarantee extensive social and political rights, and come with a prestigious, high-mobility passport. On the other end of the spectrum, some citizenships are practically worthless in terms of economic access, social welfare, and political rights—and, moreover, mark their bearer as an automatic suspect when trying to cross international borders. This is the situation for citizens of most African and many Middle Eastern countries. Other citizenships occupy an intermediate position between those two poles, providing some degree of opportunities and entitlements but falling short of the ideal set by the rich West.

In this chapter, I take this global hierarchy as the point of departure and use it to explain variation in the way dual citizenship is understood and used. I introduce an index of citizenship value and analyze extensive data on the prevalence of dual citizenship and its acquisition. The analysis demonstrates three points. First, individuals’ responses to the possibility to obtain dual citizenship are shaped by their position in the global hierarchy of citizenship value. Second, individuals are motivated to acquire a second citizenship if it is ranked higher in the global hierarchy than their primary, residence-country citizenship. Third, acquisition of dual citizenship is particularly high in countries that are in the middle of the global distribution (mostly in Eastern Europe and Latin America), where many citizens have both the practical incentive and the opportunity to obtain citizenship from a North American or an EU country.

The data show that millions of persons in middle-tier countries have acquired dual citizenship without immigrating; these persons draw on their ancestry, ethnicity, or economic capital to secure a second, Western citizenship. This second citizenship—which I call compensatory citizenship—is used as an enhancer of opportunities, an insurance policy, a premium passport, even a status symbol. In other words, compensatory citizenship operates as an instrumental strategy of global upward mobility.

Dual Citizenship: An Actor’s Point of View

Most authors who have studied dual citizenship have focused on the legal and policy dynamics that led to its acceptance or prohibition by countries. Fewer works have studied it at the level of individuals: the motives and interests behind the acquisition of dual citizenship and its meaning and use once acquired. The existing individual-level, bottom-up literature mostly examined a particular set of cases: immigrants to North America and Western Europe who naturalized while retaining their origin-country citizenship. This literature explored the factors that lead some immigrants in the West to become dual citizens as well as the impact of dual citizenship on their social and political integration.¹ The analytical focus has been on the decision to acquire resident (i.e., primary) dual citizenship in the country where the immigrant lives.

In the context of immigration, nonresident dual citizenship (i.e., secondary citizenship) is created passively through the retention of origin-country citizenship or by transmission jure sanguinis from immigrant parents, without requiring any special action on the part of the dual citizen. Furthermore, for immigrants in the West, a secondary citizenship from their origin country (say, from Mexico or Morocco) typically carries relatively limited practical value. Nonresident secondary citizenship has been characterized by David FitzGerald as “citizenship à la carte,” in reference to the autonomy that dual citizens enjoy in deciding when and how to use its benefits. However, it appears that, for dual citizens in the West, such uses typically remain only a potential.²

No more than a small minority of immigrants use dual citizenship to engage in transnational entrepreneurship—5 percent, according to an analysis by Portes, Guarnizo, and Haller—while other economic uses, such as inheriting property or relocating for work or lifestyle, are very specific and remain irrelevant for most immigrants.³ Absentee voting in immigrants’ country of origin is more common, but carries limited practical benefits for the voters. Many first- and second-generation immigrants (e.g., Algerian-French) retain dual citizenship to secure visa-free access to their countries of origin as well as safeguard their right to own and inherit real estate.

Nonetheless, for individuals who hold primary (i.e., resident) citizenship in a Western country, a secondary citizenship carries practical uses that are specific and personal. It makes it easier to capitalize on preexisting economic, political, or social ties, but does not usually act as an independent resource. Any additional citizenship beyond the primary Western one does not provide access to enhanced rights or opportunities on a global scale. Instead, it provides rights in an additional specific territory, one that is usually less prosperous and attractive than the country of residence (which is why those persons or their parents emigrated in the first place).⁴ Therefore, dual citizens in Western countries do not typically treat their secondary, origin-country citizenship in an instrumental manner, but rather see it as a mark of identity and sentimental attachment.⁵

This explains why demand for dual citizenship among immigrants and their descendants in the West is relatively low, as evidenced by the relatively low percentage of dual citizens among first- and second-generation immigrants in countries like the United States, Germany, and Canada, compared to the potential number of those who could take up a second citizenship.⁶ Moreover, the predominately sentimental value of dual citizenship in the West explains why the sociological literature has not developed a theory about the practical uses and meanings of dual citizenship and focused on its meaning as an indicator of assimilation and identity.

Beyond the Sentimental Approach

The noninstrumental approach to dual citizenship, that analyzes it through the prism of identity and sentiments, is theoretically valid within the empirical scope of the West. When applying this approach beyond the West, however, its limitations become apparent. Dual citizenship follows a different pattern in countries that occupy a lower position in the global hierarchy of citizenship value.

A number of recent monographs explore the meaning and uses of dual citizenship outside Western Europe and North America. Numerous researchers, including David Cook-Martin, Guido Tintori, Szabolcs Pogonyi, Pablo Mateos, Eleanor Knott, and others (including the author) have examined specific case studies of dual citizenship. These included Bulgarian, Romanian, and Hungarian EU dual citizenship in neighboring non-EU countries (such as Macedonia or Moldova), Spanish and Italian citizenship in Argentina or Mexico, and EU citizenship in Israel. Typically, individuals in those countries do not acquire their second citizenship by way of naturalization, but rather on the basis of their ancestry or ethnic identity. Some studies—including works by Aihwa Ong, Evren Balta, and Özlem Altan-Olcay—analyze the practices of strategic residence and birth by Chinese, Turks, and others who seek US or Canadian citizenship for themselves or their children.⁷

Those case studies represent highly diverse contexts and pathways. Nevertheless, they have two key features in common: eligible individuals exhibited high demand for Western or EU dual citizenship, and the relation to such citizenship was strongly instrumental. While a small number of applicants were inspired by sentimental motives, most of them sought citizenship in countries to which they had no real connection and whose languages they often could not speak. This stands in marked contrast to dual citizens in the West, who are first- or second-generation immigrants and often have real experience of the “homeland.” Many dual citizens outside the West denied feeling any identification or affinity with their countries of secondary citizenship (Israelis with German citizenship are a case in point). Moreover, most of them did not have concrete plans to immigrate to their new countries of citizenship.

Viewed from a traditional perspective that treats citizenship as a binding, socially significant tie to a specific nation-state, such attitudes appear puzzling. What could be the value of citizenship when detached from both residence and national identity? To answer this question, I propose an alternative way of looking at citizenship. This approach focuses on the function of citizenship as “marker in the international system of population management” (in the words of Barry Hindess) or, to put it differently, as position within a stratified global order.⁸ Viewed from this angle, it should come as no surprise that individuals from outside Western Europe and North America are eager to acquire citizenship from any Western or EU country.

When individuals outside the West make decisions about whether to acquire a second citizenship, sentiments and identity do not seem to be the main criteria. They often evaluate citizenship on the basis of its potential to provide better opportunities, more extensive rights, improved security, and greater freedom of movement. The secondary citizenship operates as compensatory citizenship because it makes up for limitations in one’s primary, residence-country citizenship. Given the practical usefulness of compensatory citizenship, we expect to find strong demand for it. This understudied type of dual citizenship is distinct from sentimental dual citizenship, which, thanks to its ubiquity in the West, has been the focus of the sociological literature. In the remainder of this chapter, I present a model of the structure of global stratification and explore how it produces different formations of dual citizenship in different contexts.

The Global Hierarchy of Citizenship Value

Nation-state citizenship is the key principle of stratification in today’s world.⁹ Therefore, the quality of the citizenship that an individual already has will affect the likelihood that he or she will acquire a second citizenship and the way that they will use it. Below, I introduce an index that ranks the world’s countries by the value of their citizenship and, moreover, groups them into three tiers (or classes) of citizenship that will differ in their relation to dual citizenship.

CITIZENSHIP: THE KEY TO GLOBAL STRATIFICATION

Citizenship is the most important factor that affects one’s life chances—more than class, gender, or race.¹⁰ In terms of income distribution, w...