Citizenship Looks More Like a Privilege Than a Right

Citizenship Looks More Like a Privilege Than a Right

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Citizenship is becoming more of a privilege than a right
by Atosa Eroxia Abrahemian read by Mara Finnerty. In Donald
Trump's first term, he came for the emigrants. His administration
sowed chaos by separating migrant families, building parts of a
wall between the U S and Mexico, banning citizens of

(00:23):
Muslim nations from entering the country, and withholding funding for
sanctuary cities that would not help deport their residence. His
methods were ruthless, but the policies were part of a
growing hostility towards immigration around the world. Countries were getting
choosier over who belonged and more likely to send away
any one who didn't. This time around, Trump is raising

(00:47):
the stakes. He wants to repeal a hundred year old
law granting citizenship to any one born on US soil.
If he gets his wish, the population of undocumented people
could hit twenty four million in twenty fifty from eleven
million today, According to the Migration Policy Institute. A large

(01:07):
number of them would find themselves functionally stateless, unable to
obtain the basic documents they need to live a normal life.
These are demographics befitting a Gulf autocracy like the United
Arab Emirates or Kuwait, not a Western democracy. Legal scholars
have expressed skepticism that Trump can pull it off. Birthright

(01:29):
citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution's fourteenth Amendment, so it
can't simply be tossed out by executive order as Trump
is claimed. Amending the Constitution would require buy in from
the Supreme Court, which, reactionary as it currently is, would
have to bring itself to invalidate an interpretation of the
law put forth after the Civil War to recognize the citizenship,

(01:53):
if not equal rights of people who were formerly enslaved.
But whether or not it is successful, the future president's
proposal is coming at an inflection point for the institution
of citizenship. Over the last two decades, countries around the
world have started to redefine citizenship as we know it,
both to whom it is granted and the nature of

(02:16):
the rights and obligations it confers. Citizenship has enjoyed a
century long run as something most everyone basically agreed on.
To quote the legal scholar Peter Spiro, an anodyne synonym
for virtuousness in society and in individuals. The telegraphs the
shared equality among individuals in contemporary society. But today it

(02:39):
is no longer so easy to take these notions for granted. Statelessness, denaturalization,
mass deportation. These phenomena are not relics of post war Europe,
but thriving repression tactics employed by governments around the world,
from China to Bahrain to the US. Citizenship is once

(03:00):
again a blunt instrument for controlling populations, and increasingly it
is looking more like a privilege than a right. National
citizenship is by its very nature, random, contingent, and unfair.
Most of us obtain citizenship in one of two ways,
through our birthplace known as you solely, or through our

(03:23):
parents you sanguinous. There isn't much to romanticize about this system.
We don't choose where we're born, and we definitely don't
choose who our parents are, and yet citizenship has an
outsized impact on everything from how much we earn to
how long and where we live. Birthright citizenship can lead

(03:44):
to absurd situations. Because my mother gave birth to me
in Vancouver, I can call myself a Canadian for life
despite never having lived there. These quirks don't take away
from the fact that you solely is an unusually humane
and NAE inclusive way of granting rights that does not
discriminate based on race, ethnicity, immigration status, or income. Only

(04:08):
thirty three countries, most of them in the Americas, grant
unrestricted birthright citizenship based on birthplace. The rest of the
world relies largely on the nationality of the parent or
parents and naturalization. In the US, citizenship has long been
considered the legal right of the person holding it. As

(04:28):
Patrick Wilde details in his twenty twelve book The Sovereign Citizen,
it took decades of court cases, culminating in a nineteen
sixty seven majority opinion written by Supreme Court Justice HUGO.
Black to arrive at this security in our country, the
people are sovereign, and the government cannot sever its relationship

(04:48):
to the people by taking away their citizenship. Black wrote,
we hold that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to and does,
protect every citizen of this nation against a congresstional forcible
destruction of his citizenship, whatever his creed, color, or race.
The opposite can even be true. Uncle Sam is pretty

(05:10):
hard to shake off. Over the last decade, a group
of accidental Americans, people with no lasting ties to the
US who were nonetheless born here for whatever reason, have
protested the Internal Revenue Service's unique practice of requiring every
single citizen to file tax returns, regardless of where they live.

(05:31):
Trump has promised to end extra territorial taxation, but an
American dual national living abroad can, with some bureaucratic legwork
and a four hundred and fifty dollars fee, renounce their
status much more easily than a stateless person can gain one.
The benefits of birthright far outweigh their costs. For more

(05:52):
proof of its virtues, consider citizenship law in the United
Arab Emirates, where only around a tenth of residence or
now nationals because of restrictive naturalization rules and procedures requiring
even native families to prove they were registered in decades
old polls in Me and Mar, where the Muslim Rhina
population is denied participation in political and social life, or

(06:17):
for Palestinians in occupied territories who can only obtain travel
documents and ID cards if the Israelis give them their blessing.
These arrangements make life hard for ordinary people, but they
benefit the governments in charge by making large portions of
the population easier to exploit, control, and deport. It isn't

(06:38):
only dictators real and aspiring who impose a more transactional
vision of citizenship. International courts may well end up giving
them an unlikely boost. Last month, an advocate at the
European Court of Justice weighed in on a peculiar Maltese scheme,
the country's decade long citizenship by Investment program. Malta has

(07:01):
been in the passport selling business since twenty fourteen, when
it began offering its citizenship to wealthy foreigners willing to
spend approximately one point five million dollars in investments, fees,
and real estate. Malta was not the first country to
sell itself in this way. A number of Caribbean states,

(07:21):
including Saint Kitts and Nevus and Dominica, had pioneered the
practice years before. CBI, as it's known, is a popular
way for small countries to pad their budgets. Other countries,
including the US, have long offered permanent residents to investors.
Jared Kushner's family business raised fifty million dollars from Chinese

(07:43):
citizens for a real estate development through the e B
five visa program. But there was something brazen about Malta's approach.
Its leaders weren't talking about citizenship the way you'd expect
government officials to as a precious, almost sacred status. It
was being pitched as a commodity, a bundle of perks

(08:05):
that could help the global ultra rich travel bank, transact, emigrate,
and in some cases save on taxes. These foreigners had
no birthright to a Maltese passport, but they could obtain
it with their privilege. The island country went all out
with its marketing campaign, advertising itself around the world with

(08:26):
glitzy junkets, and outsourcing the management of its program almost
wholesale to an outside consulting firm. Malta's then Prime Minister,
Joseph Muscott boasted in interviews that his way of thinking
about belonging was the way of the future. This is
the next big thing in getting the right people, he
told me in twenty thirteen. We want high net worth

(08:49):
individuals and highly networked individuals, people who can get things
done with a phone call rather than going through bureaucratic processes. Meanwhile,
Malta and its neighbors corralled growing numbers of asylum seekers
into detention centers. Evidently some people were more desirable than others.

(09:09):
The European Commission did not take kindly to this news
from the South, likening it to cheapening. Citizenship cannot be
taken lightly, said Vivian, reading then EU Justice Commissioner one
cannot put a price tag on it. The elephant in
the room, of course, was that as a member state
of the EU, Malta's citizenship was a by one get

(09:32):
twenty six for free package. All EU nationals have the
right to move freely within the block, as well as live,
work and transact in all of its jurisdictions. And after
years of pressure, public hearings and negative comments to the
press arguing that Malta was violating its rules and norms,
the European Commission, the EU's law making body, dragged Malta

(09:56):
to court, promising to put an end to the matter.
The law lawsuit has not gone according to plan. The
ECJ has yet to make a final decision on the case,
but on October fourth, Malta scored a big point in
convincing the Court's Advocate General, whose advice parties typically follow,
to urge the Commission to drop its case. There was

(10:18):
no EU directive that to find what it meant for
a person to have meaningful ties to their passport's nation,
let alone one requiring them to prove it, wrote the
Advocate Anthony Collins, states had sold access to their territory before,
and besides, Malta was a sovereign nation, and with national
sovereignty comes the right to choose who belongs and who doesn't.

(10:43):
This speaks to the tension at the heart of every
international treaty, agreement and alliance. The globalized world is made
up of states that work together until they decide it's
in their interest to go their own way instead. The
Advocate General's opinion is in no way an endorsement of
trump Ism or the restrictive citizenship and immigration policies taking

(11:06):
hold around the globe. If anything, it helps legitimize an
additional pathway to citizenship, one reserved for the very wealthy.
Call it use economicus. But the opinion does hint at
how transactional citizenship is today and how far it has
strayed from its democratic ideal, at least the version outlined

(11:27):
by the English sociologist th. H. Marshall in his nineteen
forty nine lecture turn Essay Citizenship and social class. Marshall
describes how English citizenship was gradually expanded beyond a small
group of well born men to include a much greater
proportion of the population, and in the process came to

(11:48):
represent a set of rights and responsibilities rather than a
simple mark of status. Per Marshall, who was writing about England,
not its colonies. This expansion first took the form of
civil rights, the acknowledgment of male people's equal right to
act and transact. Later it came to include political rights

(12:09):
like the right to vote, and eventually also social rights,
bolstered by the establishment of free, universal public education. As
time passed, more and more people became citizens, women, immigrants,
and later on even colonial subjects, depending on their circumstance,
and this set off a virtuous cycle of civic mindedness, unity,

(12:31):
and participation. Marshall was not entirely stary eyed about the
institution of citizenship. He noted that class divisions and economic
inequality had persisted even as the government endeavored to treat
all people as equals. But he believed that the state
took its responsibilities toward its citizens seriously, and that an expansive,

(12:53):
generous conception of citizenship could end up lessening the divide
between rich and poor. Clear by now that Martial's theory
had its limitations. If he wasn't entirely wrong about the past,
he certainly missed the mark when thinking ahead. It took
only a few short decades to materialize, But he could
not have imagined a universe in which a billionaire could

(13:16):
become a citizen having barely set foot in a country
while governments went out of their way to deny food
stamps to hungry children. In fact, we are now seeing
his trajectory play out in reverse through the defunding of
civic institutions like education, welfare, and social services, and in
the creeping restrictions governing who gets a chance to become

(13:38):
a citizen at all. It seems that governments have come
to see the costs of providing citizenship as outweighing their benefits.
It makes sense, then, to grant it to those they
deem worthy, whether that assessment is made based on race, religion,
national origin, or indeed wealth. In this century, citizenship is

(13:59):
becoming more of a status symbol then a great unifier.
It will be doled out sparingly, stingily to the highest bidder,
and the lucky ones will be sure to have a
passport in reserve, just in case.