Abstract
The growth of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe over the last two decades is pushing towards the renationalizing of particular features of membership politics (Giugni 2006; White 1999; Vertovec and Peach 1997; Weil 2008; Body-Gendrot and de Wihtol de Wenden 2007; Delanty 2011). Yet, this renationalizing of membership, even when ideologically strong, is institutionally weak given the increased formalization of the EU level. And although the EU level is still thin compared to that of the national state, it is beginning to alter the underlying conditions, which have fed the articulation between citizenship and the national state (Baubock 2006). At its most formal, the institutional development of the European Union and the strengthening of the European Human Rights Court, push the question of political membership towards a kind of European universalism (Jacobson and Ruffer 2006; Rubenstein and Adler 2000). I prefer to think of it as a trend towards the denationalizing of European politics. This is a denationalizing that (a) is fed by the emergence of multiple actors, groups, and communities increasingly keen on broader notions of political membership and unwilling automatically to identify with a national state (Soysal 1997; Tunstall 2006), and (b) can coexist with virulent nationalisms, a subject I have developed at length elsewhere (2008: ch 4).
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Notes
- 1.
Individuals, even when undocumented immigrants, can move between the multiple meanings of citizenship. The daily practices by undocumented immigrants as part of their daily life in the community where they reside – such as raising a family, schooling children, holding a job – earn them citizenship claims in the US even as the formal status and, more narrowly, legalization may continue to evade them. There are dimensions of citizenship, such as strong community ties and participation in civic activities, which are being enacted informally through these practices. These practices produce an at least partial recognition of them as full social beings. In many countries around the world, including those of the EU, long term undocumented residents often can gain legal residence if they can document the fact of this long term residence and “good conduct.” Liberal democracies recognize such informal participation as grounds for granting legal residency. However, such inclusion is limited in systems where immigrants are not actively incorporated into the body politic, as the chapter on Denmark by Shahamak et al. demonstrates.
- 2.
According to Coutin (2000) and others, movements between membership and exclusion, and between different dimensions of citizenship, legitimacy and illegitimacy, may be as important as redefinitions of citizenship itself. Given scarce resources the possibility of negotiating the different dimensions of citizenship may well represent an important enabling condition. Undocumented immigrants develop informal, covert, often extra-state strategies and networks connecting them with communities in sending countries. Hometowns rely on their remittances and their information about jobs in their countries of immigration. Sending remittances illegally by an unauthorized immigrant can be seen as an act of patriotism back home, and working as an undocumented can be seen as contributing to the host economy. Multiple interdependencies are thereby established and grounds for claims on the receiving and the originating country can be established even when the immigrants are undocumented and laws are broken.
- 3.
At some point we are going to have to ask what the term immigrant truly means. People in movement are an increasingly strong presence, especially in cities. Further, when citizens begin to develop transnational identities, it alters something in the meaning of immigration. In my research I have sought to situate immigration in a broader field of actors by asking who are all the actors involved in producing the outcome that we then call immigration. My answer is that it’s many more than just the immigrants, whereas our law and public imagination tend to identify immigrants as the only actors producing this complex process.
- 4.
Immigrants are estimated to be under 3 % of global population. From an estimate of 85 million international immigrants in the world, or 2.1 % of world population in 1975, it rose to 175 million or 2.9 % of world population by 2000, and an estimated of between 185 and 192 million in 2005 (International Organization for Migration (IOM) 2005, 2006). It is important to note the increased concentration of migrants in the developed world, and generally in a limited number of countries. About 30 countries account for over 75 % of all immigration; 11 of these are developed countries with over 40 % of all immigrants.
- 5.
The EU adds its own complexity to boundary questions given continually redrawn jurisdictional boundaries to mark the relative authority relations among the diverse administrative levels and domains. This brings with it shifts in the meaning of who is incorporated, who is not, and who falls in-between. See Murad’s and Geiger’s, Chaps. 13 and 14, in this volume on how the recent accession states play in this process in that they provide migrants and become corridors for those outside the EU.
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Sassen, S. (2014). Anti-Immigrant Politics Along with Institutional Incorporation?. In: Walton-Roberts, M., Hennebry, J. (eds) Territoriality and Migration in the E.U. Neighbourhood. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6745-4_2
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