The Meanings of Citizenship
Kerber, Linda
Atracted by the appeal of living in the United States as a comfortable member of the community and driven by threats to make legal residency an insecure status, the number of immigrants who have...
...to institute and maintain actions of any kind in the courts of the state . . . . After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment expanded the concept of national citizenship...
...But I could go to the copy shop (plenty of them in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City) and copy my statement and sell it on the street corner for a nickel, or I could give it away free...
...Congress staged an apparent debate over the Gulf War in January 1991, but by the time of the debate, Ely reminds us, "the President had massed over 400,000 troops in the area—the same order of magnitude as Vietnam at its peak...
...All too many American citizens now live like aliens in their own land—passive, sour, anxious, suspicious of civic engagement...
...Thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) flourish, harnessing civic energies in transnational contexts...
...They `enjoy' the common liberty and seek no further enjoyment...
...It is in citizenship that the personal and political come together, because citizenship is about how individuals make and remake the state, and it is through this making and remaking that we will sustain the ideals of the democratic revolutions, the rights that Bushrod Washington thought were the common sense of the matter nearly two centuries ago: the right to life and liberty, the right to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, the right to travel freely, and the right confidently to expect that justice will be done...
...What elements of citizenship are needed in this postnational world, where there are plenty of universal declarations of rights but precious few instruments to enforce them...
...dual citizenships...
...once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless...
...Among the "long train of abuses" catalogued against George III in the Declaration of Independence was the complaint that he had obstructed the laws for naturalization of foreigners and failed "to encourage their migration hither...
...Fluidity can mean advantage: travelers holding the burgundy-colored European passport whisk through checkpoints...
...The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in his favor, holding that "aliens within the United States— including those who are unlawfully present [my italics] are persons entitled to constitutional protection . . . the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws...
...In such a world, Appadurai reminds us, individuals need multiple memberships: "Chinese from Hong Kong buying real estate in Vancouver...
...A 1907 statute— not fully reversed until the mid-thirties—provided that when an American-born woman married a foreign man, she lost her citizenship...
...There was a silence, and then a young man rose and said, "Would you tell us, please, about freedom of the press...
...For increasing numbers of us, writes Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal (Limits of Citizenship, 1994), they have replaced national rights: "the rights and claims of individuals are legitimated by ideologies grounded in a transnational community, through international codes, conventions, and laws on human rights, independent of their citizenship in a nation state...
...that freedom of the press had to be enacted through engaged civic work, that there was a history to these principles...
...it's multinational citizenship that we need...
...Decline of Civic Engagement In this atmosphere, we risk losing connection with the tradition that basic values are available to all persons in the landscape and that the distinguishing mark of citizens is active engagement in civic life...
...I moved through the country cautiously, troubled by much of what I saw, and although people were gracious and never once made me feel as though their recent history were my personal fault, I dragged my younger self with me, aware that in that place America had stood for misery and violence...
...The decision in Yick Wo was not a chance event...
...We hear voices announcing that national citizenship will be a thing of the past...
...Haitians in Miami, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Moroccans in France"—citizens of one country, legal permanent residents of another...
...And then, toward the end of my visit, I found myself in an English language college classroom...
...The basic international distinction remains the experience of ease or anxiety at the checkpoint...
...Repeatedly the Supreme Court has sustained the right of even undocumented aliens to due process—and also their right to bring suits in the courts of the United States...
...The principle was tested in 1886 at a time when all Chinese were excluded from citizenship...
...Suspicion is again on the rise, as virtually every poll on the subject shows...
...Congress specifically authorized each of the phases of the war—but accompanied everything it did by what the constitutional lawyer John Hart Ely, in War and Responsibility, has called "studied ambiguity...
...they did not even have to take an oath of allegiance...
...At the end of the cold war we again find ourselves in a time of extraordinary political fluidity...
...Ask the citizens of California who voted for Proposition 187, which would deny public education and nonemergency health care to children of undocumented immigrants...
...In a postnational world we will need more, not fewer, expanded, not narrower, networks of civic engagement...
...But the founding generation left few explicit definitions of what it meant by citizenship...
...The truth, however, is that there is a political community within which many citizens live like aliens...
...And when Fauziya Kasinga fled genital mutilation in Togo last year, it was to the United States' practice of asylum that she appealed—with, after much delay and anguish, success—not to a court of international human rights...
...they may not become a burden to their host...
...refugeeoriented transnational philanthropies [that] constitute one part of the permanent framework of the emergent, postnational order...
...Citizens and Others Modern citizenship was created as part of the new political order courageously constructed in the era of the American revolution...
...Reaching back to the Greeks and reinventing what they found, the founding generation produced a new and reciprocal relationship between state and citizen...
...Nations themselves are embedded in postnational relationships, notably in Western Europe, where citizenship in one EU state brings rights in all the others...
...all were denied licenses...
...public does not vote...
...A woman from Guatemala told a National Public Radio reporter last year that taking the oath of citizenship meant for her simultaneously a commitment to the United States, where she had lived for decades, and the wistful abandonment of a dream that someday she would run for office in a democratic and stable Guatemala...
...The Boston Tea Party, after all, was set off by the recalibration of English trade with India...
...They permitted no formal categories of first- and second-class, or of active and passive, citizens...
...In 1994, 65 percent of eligible voters told pollsters that "public officials don't care much what people like me think...
...From the time that President Lyndon Johnson gave Senator William Fulbright "assurances . . . that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was not going to be used for anything other than the Tonkin Gulf incident itself," to the very last days of the withdrawal from Saigon when the U.S...
...A taxi driver from Zaire explained to me recently that although he was grateful for many opportunities, he had not become a citizen, unable to overcome his deep resentment of U.S...
...students in the European Union's Erasmus Project now wander across Europe as they pursue university degrees...
...q FALL • 1997 • 37...
...The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) unequivocally asserts that "all beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights...
...But many elements of destabilized citizenship remain problematic...
...We already have some powerful experiments in the building of trust and engagement in a transnational world...
...Last year the Republican Party, forgetting its own sponsorship of the Fourteenth Amendment, proposed to eviscerate it by denying citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents are undocumented aliens...
...Situated as they were on the fringes of an expansive empire, the original constructors of American citizenship understood the state in a global context...
...Defining all persons "born or naturalized in the United States" as citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside, and guaranteeing them the "equal protection of the laws," the Fourteenth Amendment was intended not only to break the linkage of citizens and white people made in the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, but also, in promising that "all persons" are entitled to equal protection of the law, to break the equally chilling linkage of basic rights to citizens rather than people generally...
...Until deep into the twentieth century, foreign women who married American citizens automatically became citizens themselves...
...Human Rights International conventions that ascribe universal rights to persons challenge nation-states not to make distinctions in granting civil, social, and even political rights...
...David Thelen (Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television, 1996) has pointed to the thousands of thoughtful letters constituents wrote to members of Congress during the Iran!contra hearings as evidence of their resentment of the management of opinion by spin doctors, pollsters, and advertisers...
...As we planned, the teacher offered only an open-ended introduction: here is Professor Kerber from America...
...Borders and immigrants were rarely far from the minds of the founding generation...
...During the McCarthy era, suspicion of aliens was embedded in the McCarran Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952...
...All Chinese laundries in the city were in wooden buildings...
...Recent welfare legislation substantially denies benefits to legal immigrants as well as to undocumented ones, although some members of Congress, among them New York Senator Alfonse D' Amato, seem to be reconsidering their support for this legislation...
...Citizens 36 • DISSENT Citizenship of European member states may move from one state to another, but must rely on their home state for social security and other social provision...
...This idea—that the United States is a nation in which basic values are available to all persons within the landscape—endured as the major principle of American life...
...One rare example of what everyone "knew" can be found in an opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington in 1823 in which he described what he understood to be the common sense of the "privileges and immunities" that all citizens share...
...We spent an enormous amount of social capital and social trust in the years 1965-1973, and we have not yet restored it...
...Ambassador gave repeated assurances of sanctuary to Vietnamese people whose lives were at risk because they had worked for the United States and then left them behind, everyone was given extensive lessons in distrust, in the frustrations and dangers of activism, in the weakness of the promises of citizenship...
...The National Consumers League has hardly made a dent in the exploitation of factory workers in a global context...
...Sixty percent of the eligible U.S...
...We will need much greater investment in networks of civic engagement that build social trust and allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved...
...California voters passed Proposition 187...
...Most people who become citizens do so by being born on American soil...
...Well, what did they want to know...
...This pattern was strengthened by long periods 34 • DISSENT Citizenship of absolute exclusion of Asians and by the definition of ethnic and racial intermarriage as miscegenation...
...Our world is flooded with refugees...
...We have seen within the last five years a successful campaign—energized, alas, by horrors in BosniaHerzegovina—to declare rape a war crime and to expand the boundaries of human rights to include women's right to be protected against violence...
...Virtually all laundries in wooden buildings owned by whites received licenses...
...citizens has quintupled in the last five years...
...Is national citizenship, a concept invented in the era of the American and French revolutions, sufficiently resilient in the contemporary world...
...A San Francisco city health ordinance required that laundries in wooden buildings be licensed...
...At its founding, the United States government assumed that any free person who had not fled with the British or explicitly denounced the patriots was a citizen...
...Yick Wo, a laundryman, refused to pay what he believed to be a discriminatory fine, challenging the courts to consider the tensions between the "privileges and immunities" that citizens may claim and the "equal protection of the laws," in which aliens as well as citizens participate...
...Do we need citizenship...
...These people look on the Statue of Liberty with a decidedly bifocal gaze...
...I]f the citizen is a passive figure," Michael Walzer observed some years ago (Obligations, 1970), "there is no political community...
...citizenship can also be had by naturalization...
...How can those figures be explained...
...The text takes for granted that we know what these "privileges and immunities" are...
...The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) The next time you are boarding an international flight, watch the difference between the experience of people with passports and people with international "travel documents...
...Others, born in other parts of the globe to parents who are American citizens, claim citizenship by descent...
...complicity in the destabilizations that accompanied the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and forced his family to flee...
...We are embedded FALL • 1997 • 35 Citizenship in postnational and transnational relationships that may be changing the meaning of citizenship beyond recognition...
...If there are answers to my question, they will not be found in modes of citizenship so passive that a citizen can easily be mistaken for an alien...
...It radically disconnected religion and political participation: Congress may make no religious test...
...Yes, in the United States people with enormous amounts of money might buy a newspaper or a television station to disseminate their views...
...It carries with it the activism of Aristotle's definition— one who rules and is ruled in turn...
...they claim jus soli, the common-law right of the land...
...the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and to pursue and obtain happiness and safety . . . to claim the . . . writ of habeas corpus...
...The status of citizen, which in stable times we tend to imagine as permanent and fixed, has become contested and variable...
...Many persuasive reasons are offered...
...No one would say it was safe or not safe to distribute...
...All over the globe individuals' rights as citizens are being recast...
...The exclusion of aliens from the United States on grounds of their race or their politics was a key to immigration and naturalization law for more than forty years, from the early 1920s to 1965...
...His vision was expansive and made no distinctions among citizens: Protection by the government...
...Whether in a transnational setting or a national one, a citizenship defined only by entitlement is not resilient...
...Or better yet, ask the citizen spouse of a legal immigrant...
...In such a world international human rights take on overwhelming significance...
...That link is more elastic than it was, but it remains in place...
...In 1982 the Supreme Court struck down a state attempt to deny free public education to children of undocumented immigrants...
...Congress who voted for the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act © 1997 by Linda Kerber how they have reconstructed the distinction between citizens and legal immigrants...
...The meanings of citizenship are expansive, and the need to understand citizenship in its historical context is as great as it has been at any time in American history...
...The United States, writes Appadurai, "always in its self-perception a land of immigrants, finds itself awash in these global diasporas, no longer a closed space for the melting pot to work its magic, but yet another diasporic switching point, to which people come to seek their fortunes but are no longer content to leave their homelands behind...
...practice your English, ask her questions, anything you like...
...it does not sustain vibrant communities in which people understand that justice will be done...
...Atracted by the appeal of living in the United States as a comfortable member of the community and driven by threats to make legal residency an insecure status, the number of immigrants who have been turning themselves into U.S...
...Individuals need multiple memberships, but they also need reciprocal ones...
...In recent months we have seen a promising campaign to set boundaries to the extent of exploitation of workers by multinational corporations...
...In 1993 less than 13 percent of the public described "themselves as belonging to groups involved in any way in politics...
...The Vietnam War, wrote Russell Baker, "turned us into a people who know we can't believe anybody anymore, including ourselves...
...There was no doubt that there was going to be a war...
...So citizenship means what we make it mean, and its transnational possibilities are grounded in national practice...
...And it turned out that—in a country in which the state controls all television and radio stations (CNN and other international channels are fed only into hotels catering to international travelers, the homes of foreign diplomats and residents, and senior party and government officials), in which virtually all publications are censored, and tourists buy the International Herald Tribune for the price of a day's wages for a worker— what the students wanted to know were the details of how press freedom worked...
...No censor would read it in advance...
...And without planning I launched into the Zenger case and wound my way through Schenck and Abrams into the Pentagon Papers until I stopped midsentence, startled at the multiple ironies of lecturing on the Pentagon Papers to a transfixed audience in what had been Saigon...
...or slum clearance projects that bulldoze closely knitted neighborhoods...
...Local Citizenship Last winter I visited Vietnam...
...It may be that so many of us resent aliens because we are so much like them...
...But transnational civic life remains embryonic, even in its most developed formations, as in the European Union and the European Court of Justice or the United Nations itself...
...or gated communities and private athletic clubs that pull upper classes out of contact with the middle classes...
...But this practice of capacious definition has periodically been challenged...
...The citizenship acquired in each of FALL • 1997 • 33 Citizenship these three ways is essentially the same...
...Ask the members of the U.S...
...What Arendt wrote about the impact of World War I retains its appropriateness as a description of Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and 1980s and of Rwandan refugees today: "Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless...
...We describe rights and obligations in egalitarian language and generic terms: all citizens pledge allegiance to the flag, using a capacious rhetoric that ignores differences of gender, race and ethnicity, and class...
...Ask the citizens of Hong Kong...
...The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eliminated racial barriers to immigration...
...Many of the questions raised today about the multiple meanings of citizenship, particularly of civic obligation, and of what we owe to a government that misuses our trust, were first raised in the context of the Vietnam War...
...The federal Constitution says little more than, "The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States...
...Appadurai points to "refugee camps, refugee bureaucracies...
...To these I would add the squandering of public trust in all agencies of government that accompanied the Vietnam War and from which we have not yet recovered...
...In Modernity at Large (1996), the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai suggests that the United States is in transition from being "a land of immigrants" to being "one node in a postnational network of diasporas...
...Citizen" is an equalizing word...
...Other practices eased the transition to citizenship...
...And U.S...
...Long ago Hannah Arendt stressed that our inheritance from the era of the American and French revolutions is simultaneously an expanded understanding of the "Rights of Man" and a tight linkage of human rights to national identities...
...The languor with which so many immigrants seemed to approach the formalities of citizenship until threatened by the loss of Supplemental Social Security Income and food stamps would have surprised, even stunned, the generation of Americans who came to maturity during the 1930s, when floods of refugees from Nazi Germany challenged democracies to decide whom they would accept as fellow citizens...
...In some states and territories before World War I, aliens were encouraged to vote even before they became citizens...
...And then I found myself saying that all this didn't just happen...
...Robert D. Putnam ("Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy, 1995) and others have pointed to developments that undermine the building of social trust: among them the all-volunteer army and the fragility of public schools, which decrease the likelihood of cross-class encounters and friendships...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
