Search

This paper examines domicidal practices against illegalized border crossers in Calais, France as a technology of citizenship and migration governance. It addresses recent calls to include actions and interventions which restrict citizenship in the context of illegalized migration within critical citizenship studies literature. Studying the state violence upholding and spatializing normative citizenship allows for a deeper understanding of citizenship's implication in the European border regime, and raises questions on the concept's continued application to theorizations of migrants' political movements and spatial manifestations. The paper proposes anti-citizen politics as an alternative before arguing that the presence of this politics within the city's squats and jungles, more than the physical occupations as such, is what the French state seeks to eradicate through acts of domicide. Working from empirical examples, the article describes a 'carrot-and-stick' domicide currently at work in Calais where the eviction and destruction of autonomous forms of migrant inhabitance is combined with a simultaneous offer of state managed accommodation. These tactics operate together to drive migrants out of the city of Calais, away from the UK border, and ultimately into a determination of their detain/deport-ability via citizenship's scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship largely sees fraud-based citizenship stripping as a tool for guaranteeing the consistency of the naturalisation process against applicants who do not respect the rules. This implies that the line between 'desirable' and 'undesirable' citizens is drawn in accordance with procedural norms. In contrast, this article argues that deprivation on grounds of fraud aims to create a virtuous and responsible political subject. Drawing on the cases of France and the UK, the paper shows how government officials and judges understand citizenship deprivation not simply as a means to safeguard the procedural integrity of naturalisation, but as a mechanism for the moralisation and responsibilisation of applicants. The article further contends that not everyone is made the subject of 'renationalisation'. British and French deprivation policies reproduce suspicions and stereotypes against specific categories of migrants, constructing them as second-class citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]