Routes to Citizenship

Abstract

Citizenship ceremonies are the moment of marking a particular stage in the complex processes of migration and international mobility. For individuals, it signifies the successful navigation of the nation-states’ multiple technologies of identification and filtering. As I argued in Chapter 2, the legal framework of nation-states needs to be understood as emerging out of a history of Western imperialism, which is also gendered, classed and raced. There have been suggestions that national citizenship is no longer the most critical membership and affiliation that shapes access to rights. For Yasemin Soysal, the increasing acceptance of a universal concept of citizenship which is based on individual personhood — rather than national belonging — means that resident workers share many of the rights of national citizens (Soysal 1995). Nonetheless, recently there has been increased attention given to the reassertion of state control of borders and the spread of practices of bordering from the external frontiers to locations such as medical practices and universities within the state. Citizenship status within the nation continues to have important consequences. Aiwha Ong claims that ‘the multiple passport holder is an apt contemporary figure: he or she embodies the split between state-imposed identity and personal identity caused by political upheavals, migration and changing global markets’ (Ong 1999: 2).

A passport does not make a person. A passport is just a book. You know, a document that you travel with.

Simone