Earned Citizenship and Fully Human both examine the value of citizenship and advocate new ways of conceiving and distributing state membership and its rights. In a time when liberal democracy is constantly challenged by right-wing nationalism and post-truth politics with dire consequences for both citizens’ and migrants’ rights, these are timely, politically relevant discussions. Whereas Sullivan’s book is mostly focused on what states can expect from their citizens and from those wishing to join their community, Kingston’s book is more concerned with what individuals should expect from states. Although different in their styles, both books can broadly be read as theoretical contributions to citizenship and immigration studies.
Michael J. Sullivan’s book Earned Citizenship “draws heavily from U.S. historical experience” (p. 206) to advance an interesting argument about immigration policy with regard to unauthorized migrants. Normative analysis is interspersed with legal, policy, and historical discussions that dominate some chapters more than others.
The “central concern” of the book is that unauthorized immigrants should be able to “earn citizenship” in exchange for their contributions to the country and its citizens. States have a right to control their borders and exclude those who trespass, but unauthorized migrants should be allowed to make amends with the state they have wrongly entered. States, Sullivan argues, should be able to condition regularization and citizenship on three types of contributions in particular: military service, teaching, and parenting. Unauthorized immigrants serving in the army should have priority over others and be naturalized automatically because their service constitutes a “priceless” contribution (p. 54).
The book is interesting primarily as a discussion of the relationship between military service and citizenship. But normative political theorists may be unpersuaded. Sullivan’s treatment of soldiers as “caregivers” has a vaguely Orwellian ring—all the more so when other, more genuine caregivers like healthcare workers go unmentioned. Sullivan calibrates the value of a profession’s contribution to the community in terms of the risk of losing one’s life. But military death rates are actually lower than for the same age group in the civilian population and only marginally higher than for airplane pilots (https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/07/24/what-is-life-in-the-military-actually-like/). Sullivan talks of “defending one’s country.” Yet many wars, especially those fought abroad, are not clearly in self-defense. Neither are they clearly just wars. Supporting justice and just institutions may also be a hallmark of exemplary citizenship. If so, those fighting in unjust wars may have a weaker, not stronger, claim to citizenship than other migrants.
Furthermore, when Sullivan discusses how unauthorized immigrants serving in the military would have a moral claim to citizenship, there is slippage between two different logics: reparation for past wrongdoing (“restitution”) and “reward” for meritorious service (e.g., pp. 7, 33). Sullivan writes that unauthorized migrants should be “rewarded” for their military service with citizenship (p. 85), but if military service is reparation for past immigration offenses, does the state have any further obligation to grant citizenship as an additional reward to the unauthorized immigrant? For Sullivan the same thing (military service) used to make amends for illegal entry also creates a moral claim to citizenship, but this moral math is questionable, especially when those joining the military are compensated for their activity with a competitive salary, health care, tax breaks, educational allowances, and other benefits that may not be available to the rest of the citizens and migrants. One good deed may cancel the bad one. But does the state really still owe something more to the migrant in virtue of the same good deed?
Sullivan argues that military service is eminently a citizen’s duty and a form of exemplary citizenship (a “paradigmatic example of the civic membership as reciprocity ideal,” p. 32). If serving in the army is something citizens do, all those serving in the army should be (or become) citizens. But many states, including the United States, have voluntary armies. If military service is not eminently a citizen’s duty anymore (as it more clearly was in the older republican tradition), then why should immigrants who serve in the army have a stronger claim to citizenship than other migrants who do not?
If states have a right to control their borders and the allocation of legal residence and citizenship, then logically they can impose some conditions on their allocation. Yet not all conditions are morally legitimate. Can the state legitimately condition regularization and citizenship on military service? Military service is something that most states no longer require of their citizens: Why would it be permissible to ask this of immigrants in exchange for regularization? Why ask of immigrants what the states no longer ask of citizens? Indeed, on Sullivan’s account, military enlistment is dangerously close to selling oneself into servitude. Military enlistment requires one to “surrender his liberty and autonomy” for eight years, which is an “abdication of personal autonomy” and a sacrifice of “the right to autonomous self-preservation” (p. 104). If so, perhaps we should hesitate to let anyone sign such a contract. But we should be particularly hesitant to foist such a contract on someone who is vulnerable and has few if any other ways to gain something that is as desperately needed as regularization and citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Lindsey N. Kingston’s Fully Human aims to reframe debates around citizenship and statelessness using a new concept: functioning citizenship. The book relies heavily on international law, indigenous and migration studies, and critical theory and integrates a variety of positions on these issues.
For Kingston the reliance on legal nationality for human rights protection is the “Achilles heel of modern human rights” (p. 22). Legal status alone is not enough to guarantee full rights protection. And because some people’s rights and dignity are better respected than those of others, Kingston asserts that some individuals are treated as “more fully human” than others (p. 5). In her view these hierarchies of personhood revolve around two categories of rights: “rights to place” (geographical location, political space, and belonging) and “rights to purpose,” allowing one to live a dignified and fulfilled life (rights to education, employment, expression, religion, and family). Kingston claims that we should focus less on the presence or absence of legal status (nationality) as such and more on functioning citizenship. Many individuals lack functioning citizenship, citizens and noncitizens alike (stateless, irregular migrants, temporary labor migrants, displaced groups, indigenous and nomadic groups, and minorities).
Each chapter illustrates nonfunctioning citizenship by reference to a different group of people. Kingston starts from a human rights framework, which sees the world as one unified ethical community. Human rights and equal human dignity underpin the book’s arguments, although the overall analysis is more descriptive than normative.
Kingston points out that the grant of citizenship ameliorates some but not all problems of statelessness, especially those rooted in structural inequality and discrimination. Refugee law posits collective responsibilities that are distributed too widely to hold any particular state to account for the tragedies on the Mediterranean, for example. The same regime also neglects long-term responsibilities and the agency of those displaced. In affirming the principle of state sovereignty, international law leaves different migrants unprotected, rendering refugee law vulnerable to the state’s discretion and creating what Ayten Gündoğdu calls “hierarchies within personhood” (Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants, 2015, p. 123). Refugees’ “rights of purpose,” like education, remain precarious, Kingston points out; worldwide only 1% of refugees attend university. Kingston also objects that distinctions between legal and illegal migrants create categories of personhood and worthiness, such that legal migrants are more human than illegal ones. But temporary legal migrants may also lack functioning citizenship, being employed and living under a different set of rights from those of citizens. In many states, indigenous and nomadic people are also marginalized and treated as second-class citizens despite holding legal status.
Drawing on existing research, Kingston provides a wide-ranging review of how different groups of people are denied fully-functioning human rights on an everyday basis. What might raise eyebrows is the subtext of Kingston’s discussion. Although the book proceeds more through moralized description than moral argument as such, it is worth teasing out some moral implications of the sort of functioning citizenship that Kingston advocates.
When arguing that everyone should enjoy the same human rights, Kingston seems to adopt the view that any distinctions between citizens and noncitizens are morally illegitimate (at least if those noncitizens do not enjoy all of their “rights to place and purpose” in some other state). So too are any distinctions between citizens and illegal migrants. Every state owes the same legal “rights to place and purpose” to anyone who cannot in practice enjoy those rights in their birth state as the state owes to its own citizens.
Does what the community owe such a person depend at all on whether that person is a citizen, a legal resident, an illegal migrant, or a refugee? Should the community bear the exact same cost in securing functioning citizenship to each one of them? For Kingston the answer to the first question would be “no” and to the second question would be “yes.” The concept of functioning citizenship does not draw any distinctions between a stateless person, an economic migrant, or a poor citizen in a wealthy state who cannot find employment and struggles to make ends meet: they all have nonfunctioning citizenship and an equal claim to functioning citizenship. If people are equally human, then a state or community should treat everyone the same. In practice this would also mean that anyone has a claim to any given community’s resources, if her birth state cannot ensure fully-functioning citizenship.
The large number of equal claimants to rights to functioning citizenship could overwhelm some states while releasing others of their responsibilities. Suppose one-third of the world’s states have to ensure functioning citizenship for those (stateless, refugees, illegal migrants, temporary migrants) lacking functioning citizenship in the remaining two-thirds of states, as well as for their own citizens, of course. They may simply not have enough resources. May the states bearing the burden of ensuring functioning citizenship for the citizens of other states have a claim to a share of the latter’s natural resources, because birth states are the initial duty-bearers when it comes to ensuring functioning citizenship for those individuals? Or should functioning citizenship be ensured through a global mechanism by which states pool their financial resources, natural resources, and territory alike? In the absence of such a mechanism, states that fail to ensure functioning citizenship for their birth citizens may take advantage of other states, knowing that (under Kingston’s precepts) the former cannot make distinctions between their own citizens and another state’s citizens. Such an indiscriminate right to fully-functioning citizenship could potentially create some awfully perverse incentives.
Earned Citizenship and Fully Human try to answer important questions. What is the value, function, and limit of citizenship as we know it? What can states legitimately expect from illegal migrants as a condition to naturalization? What reforms of domestic and international law would the classic republican or cosmopolitan ideals call for? In doing so, they are instrumental in allowing us to reflect on these matters, even if in the end we are not fully persuaded by their arguments.
