Gated Citizenship

This provocative paper, prepared for the 25th anniversary issue of the journal Citizenship Studies, examines the plight of those members of the global population whose access to citizenship is denied or severely restricted. While 97 percent of the world’s population gains access to citizenship solely by virtue of where or to whom they are born, a growing number of people worldwide need access to what the author calls the “secondary allocation” of citizenship. Countries, however, use “the trinity of the territorial, the cultural, and the economic” to block access to citizenship especially for the less privileged.  Wealth requirements harken back to the days when citizenship was severely restricted even for those born into a particular state jurisdiction. However, “The bolted gates of admission, so carefully guarded when it comes to the many, are swung open when it comes to the select few: the global 1%.”  Not only are economic restrictions erected as a barrier to citizenship, so, too, are the cultural. A new emphasis on “cultural integrity” has produced a “philosophical shift from naturalization as a tool of integration to naturalization as the end-point of successful integration.” As world migration continues to grow, especially as climate-induced disasters displace millions of people, the world will need “new answers, new tools, new international conventions that are not yet written,” to reduce the inequities of current citizenship policy.