Rethinking Emigrant Citizenship

Abstract

\\server05\productn\N\NYU\81-1\NYU105.txt unknown Seq: 1 21-MAR-06 RETHINKING EMIGRANT CITIZENSHIP D AVID F ITZGERALD * The relationship between states and absent citizens is an object of increasing interest in law, history, and the social sciences. On a world-historical scale, what appears unprecedented is the legitimate prevalence of dual nationality, and in many source countries, the government’s active promotion of dual nationality and dual cultural nationalism. While interest in extraterritorial citizenship fades over time and the course of generations, there are important exceptions for a core of activists whose trans-state political participation actually increases over time spent outside the home country and for migrants in contexts where the relative fortunes of sending and receiving countries reverse over longer time frames. An increasingly common way of framing a sending “nation” is to include members living outside the state’s territory in a way that reinforces the domestic and even international capacity of the sending country’s government. This Article argues that most legal means by which emigrants are incorporated maximize individual liberty, but their extraterritorial political participation comes at the cost of allowing members to make policies to which they are not directly subject and to tilt citizenship towards claiming rights rather than fulfilling obligations. Kim Barry’s Home and Away 1 makes an important contribution to the growing literature on citizenship and international migration by showing how international mobility ruptures the neat coincidence of territorial presence and state membership. Migrants are often citizens of a country in which they do not reside, and reside in a country in which they are not citizens, raising normative and sociological ques- tions about citizenship in both destination and source countries. Immigrant citizenship has received far more attention than emigrant citizenship, probably because the dominant organs of international academia are located in countries of immigration. Barry’s paper addresses this deficit by attending to citizenship in the context of emi- gration. By moving deftly between the contours of nationality law and the actual content of political participation through voting, lob- bying, and cross-border financial contributions, Barry’s paper joins the formal and substantive practices of citizenship without conflating them. The paper focuses on the critical case of Mexican emigration to the United States, “the largest sustained flow of migrant workers in * Copyright  2006 by David Fitzgerald. B.A., 1995, M.A., 2000, University of California at San Diego; M.A., 2002, Ph.D., 2005, University of California at Los Angeles. Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California at San Diego. 1 Kim Barry, Home and Away: The Construction of Citizenship in an Emigration Con- text, 81 N.Y.U. L. R EV . 11 (2006).