Volume 9, Issue 1 - Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery

This introductory essay describes how the two remarkable books that are the subject of this Symposium, Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery, denaturalize familiar conceptions of citizenship. The essay then conveys how each of the ten interlocutors invited to respond to Bosniak and Shachar address one particular question raised by both books, namely the relationship between national membership and bounded territory, to showcase the depth and complexity of this interdisciplinary conversation.

The Citizen and the Alien and The Birthright Lottery are extraordinary books that analyze citizenship and alienage as heuristic categories through which to understand rights, subject formation, and political membership. This essay focuses upon the tension in both books between the normative and the practical. This tension could perhaps be resolved through a recognition that even the most formalized rights-bearing subject is incomplete: this incompleteness enables the active making of membership.

This review essay argues that citizenship in contemporary states exposed to migration should be understood and evaluated as membership in territorially bounded and intergenerational political communities that are no longer fully separate from each other. Linda Bosniak’s book exposes the ways in which the hard territorial border has been increasingly folded into the inside of the American polity but does not take sufficiently into account the complementary extension of membership boundaries beyond territorial borders through transnational citizenship links. Ayelet Shachar’s book is marked by a tension between a luck egalitarian critique of the privileges attached to birthright citizenship and a relational principle of jus nexi for determining claims to membership. I defend a principle of stakeholder citizenship that builds on the same intuition but includes a normative argument for birthright membership.

The Citizen and the Alien and The Birthright Lottery are outstanding works by scholars well informed on both law and moral philosophy. Their enterprises can be constructively carried further by increased engagement with the politics shaping modern nation-state citizenships. Bosniak’s seminal analysis of the inconsistencies in immigration and citizenship policies can be extended by further engagement with the range of arguments used to defend restrictively bounded national citizenships. Shachar’s bold and original recommendations for lessening the trans-national inequalities of the modern nation-state system might be furthered by building also on obligations stemming from the mutually constitutive past and present relationships between particular richer and poorer states.

Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery are important and provocative new works, each of which draws attention to the exclusions and inequalities bound up in practices of democratic citizenship. In my response, I argue that although each author articulates a powerful critique of the institution of citizenship, neither goes far enough in the political changes she proposes. Because power relations cross the boundaries that define territorially bounded political communities, neither extending nor redistributing the benefits attached to membership in those communities is enough. Democrats must find institutional means to define and secure rights, not according to citizenship understood as political membership, but according to participation in relations of power.

The assumption that the boundaries of justice and democracy coincide with the territorial boundaries of states is subject to increasing normative critique. Linda Bosniak and Ayelet Shachar’s recent books are part of this charge; their common starting point is the tension between a commitment to bounded citizenship that privileges citizens over noncitizens and the moral cosmopolitan claim that all human beings, regardless of their citizenship status, are entitled to equal concern and respect. Bosniak’s focus is on the territorial interior and the difference that citizenship status does and doesn’t make to the legal rights a territorially present person is entitled do. Shachar critiques birthright citizenship laws, which are a central mechanism by which global inequality is sustained. This review essay argues that while these authors identify important new challenges and offer innovative proposals, they only take us part of the way toward meeting the challenge of articulating citizenship’s ethical significance and the relationship between our national and global obligations.

This Essay sketches the idea of creedal citizenship, where citizenship results from a person’s agreement with a set of principles that define the nation of citizenship. Some nations already include elements of creedal citizenship in their self-definitions, and the common practice of requiring some degree of civic knowledge as a predicate for naturalization reflects some ideas associated with creedal citizenship. But, in its pure form, creedal citizenship would disconnect citizenship from territory entirely, yet without moving to “world citizenship” or requiring open borders. Creedal citizenship is of course not a realistic policy option anywhere today, but exploring its conceptual contours may illuminate some areas of current controversy.

This review explores the ways that Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery usefully expose gaps between permissible and prohibited realities and persons. Drawing on ethnographic research regarding immigration from Central America to the United States, the review also highlights the importance of analyzing the transnational, states’ property-like claims on their migrant citizens, and the transformative dimensions of jus soli. This ethnographic material suggests that discrepancies between inclusive social connections and confining legal statuses “fracture” persons, requiring them to exist in multiple yet incompatible worlds. The review concludes that notions of citizenship and alienage must take such fracturing into account.

These are lucid and challenging books. I take them as an invitation to think about how we lawyer citizenship. In response to The Citizen and the Alien, I consider how the two aspects of Linda Bosniak’s soft on the inside, hard on the outside understanding of citizenship remain in permanent and hierarchical contact for noncitizens, thereby shaping the process of their representation. In response to Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery, I look at what it would mean to use citizenship as a framework for lawyering that combats global inequality, and suggest a correlation between different dimensions of inequity and different models of citizenship.

These are two important books. The Citizen and the Alien provides a rigorous and illuminating scrutiny of the conundrum faced by making out current concept and politics of citizenship work within liberal moral and political philosophy. The Birthright Lottery, a book with many virtues, recasts birthright citizenship in a manner analogous to the end of entailed property transmission brought about by liberal reform. This essay suggests that Bosniak is unduly pessimistic about bounded communities and that Shachar is unduly optimistic about the relationship between property rights and democracy.

The Citizen and the Alien and The Birthright Lottery are impressive books. Both works provoke innovative ways for thinking about equality and justice within the concept of citizenship. This essay presses on the authors’ claims and assumptions about equality as they relate to citizenship. In particular, I raise questions about the treatment of borders, indigenous peoples, and what we could consider acts of global citizenship.

Linda Bosniak responds to her interlocutors.

Ayelet Shachar engages in dialogue with ten insightful commentaries on her influential book, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2009), written by leading experts in the fields of citizenship, immigration, and globalization.