Law and the Citizen: Volume 84

The legal status of citizenship is constitutive in that it determines the boundaries of formal membership of a nation-state and, by implication, the lines of exclusion. The ways in which Australian law has defined membership over time – from subject status to citizen – provide a case study of the factors at play in understanding citizenship within a constitutional setting. We see that the constitution of citizenship may be a complex and unsettled evolutionary process.

This chapter re-assesses the stories of three important Asian American women in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Like many undocumented migrants in our current day, they each “discovered,” as children and as young adults, that they and other members of their families had a “pariah status,” as immigrants, as women of color, and as persons who could not enjoy the rights and opportunities of citizens of the United States. This chapter explores how they coped with being “unlawful,” with their precarious status, both by evading the law and then also by becoming critics of the law itself.

In the current era of intensified immigration enforcement and heightened risks of deportation even for long-term lawful permanent residents, citizenship has taken on a new meaning and greater importance. There is also growing evidence that citizenship denials in their various forms have become inextricably linked to immigration enforcement. Who is denied citizenship, why, and under what circumstances? This chapter begins to address these questions by developing a typology of citizenship denials and providing an empirical overview of each type of citizenship denial. Taken together, the typology of citizenship denials and the accompanying empirical overview illustrate the close connection between immigration enforcement and citizenship rights in the United States.

This chapter proposes a sociological reconstruction of the emergence of citizenship as a source of legitimacy for political institutions, and it focuses on examining the historical processes that first gave rise to this concept. It explains how citizenship has its origins in the transformation of feudal law, a process that culminated in patterns of military organization that characterized the rise of the early modern state in Europe. On this basis, it describes how the growth of constitutional democracy was integrally marked by the militarization of society and explains that military pressures have remained palpable in constitutional constructions of citizenship. In particular, it argues that, through the early growth of democracy, national citizenship practices were closely linked to global conflicts, and they tended to replicate such conflicts in national contexts. It concludes by showing how more recent processes of constitutional norm formation, based largely in international human rights law, have acted to soften the military dimensions of citizenship.

Immigration enforcement along the Southwest border between United States and Mexico has long channeled migrants into perilous desert corridors, where many thousands have died, out of general public view. In response to this humanitarian crisis, activists from organizations such as No More Deaths (NMD) trek deep into the treacherous desert, hoping to save lives, honor the remains of those who did not survive, and influence public opinion about border enforcement policies. NMD’s activism is not merely utilitarian but also deeply expressive; ultimately, they hope to convey the message that all lives – including those of unauthorized migrants – are worth saving. The Trump Administration has escalated repressive tactics intended to silence these forms of border-policy dissent. Some federal land managers now blacklist NMD, preemptively denying requests for access permits. Meanwhile, the US Attorney’s office has aggressively prosecuted members for humanitarian activities. This chapter explains the expressive components of humanitarian activism in this context and of the government’s attempt to suppress it, suggesting the need for constitutional scrutiny and legal change.