In this Essay, Professor Patrick Weil reexamines the constitutional function of the passport in relation to American citizenship. The State Department recently developed a policy of passport revocation whereby some Americans are transformed into de facto stateless persons, like Edward Read More …
Western societies show varying reactions to the challenges of immigration. This is especially true with regards to voting rights for immigrants. This article shows that previous research has neglected generalized trust as a powerful predictor for different degrees of inclusiveness Read More …
This special issue brings together scholars from various disciplines to explore current issues and trends in the rethinking of migration and citizenship from the perspective of major immigrant democracies – Australia, Canada, and the USA. These countries share a history of Read More …
Present-day Americans feel secure in their citizenship: they are free to speak up for any cause, oppose their government, marry a person of any background, and live where they choose—at home or abroad. Denaturalization and denationalization are more often associated Read More …
Culling the Masses questions the widely held view that in the long run democracy and racism cannot coexist. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín show that democracies were the first countries in the Americas to select immigrants by race, and Read More …
Historically, citizenship has been the sine qua non for the franchise. Yet in the last several decades, dozens of democracies have created some form of voting rights for resident aliens. Noncitizen voting rights are conceptually important because they suggest some Read More …
This article brings to center stage the debate that is currently absent in larger discussions about citizenship and immigration: the reality that state and market forces are becoming increasingly intertwined in shaping migration selection criteria and membership-allocation priorities. The bulk Read More …
If migration studies in the 1990s were marked by the predominance of the “national models” approach, the early 2000s have seen an increasing rebuttal to this approach. This paper contributes to the debate by examining the politics of citizenship in Read More …
Ernst Hirsch Ballin discusses the significance of citizens’ rights against the backdrop of ongoing migration and urbanization in the beginning of the 21st century. The traditional view that each state has the sovereign power to give or withhold citizenship, puts Read More …
by Michael Collyer, Political Geography, xxx (2014), 1-10
It is increasingly common for political rights to be extended to citizens who are permanently resident outside their state of citizenship. In a small minority of cases (13 countries as of October 2013) emigrants are not only able to vote but also able to vote for their own representation. Such systems of ‘special representation’ introduce members of national legislatures who are responsible for emigrants across large parts of the world. These electoral systems highlight the problematic characterisation of states as territorial entities with an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, since the state would then be turning itself ‘inside-out’ by performing domestic functions on foreign territory without the intervention of foreign states. Drawing on data from a recent survey of electoral systems to highlight common patterns between the 13 countries in which special representation is currently operated, the paper highlights the role of inter-national migrants as emigrants, rather than as immigrants. It concludes that such developments cannot be explained territorially without serious problems for states that are manifestly not occurring. Special representation can only be understood as a re-emphasis of the significance of popular sovereignty. Democracy re-founds the legitimacy of the state in ‘the people’ but its extra-territorial performance results in a disarticulation between nation and state which states must creatively contain.
