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Taken together these essays reveal both synergies and contradictions between and within immigration and welfare policies. Several common themes emerge. Firstly, while access to the welfare state is an important signifier of membership, in practice claiming certain state benefits is accompanied by suspicion, surveillance and stigma. The good citizen is a worker citizen. Secondly, the importance of the welfare state in putting the nation into the nation-state: the normative national community imagined as the rightful subject of welfare states is racialised and classed. Thirdly, deservingness functions in both welfare states and immigration regimes to prioritise victimhood rather than rights and redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the lens of state control over mobilities of residents both migrants and citizens to move away from assumptions that position them as competitors for the privileges of membership. I begin by critiquing the migrant/citizen binary, claiming that it promotes as actuality Fantasy Citizenship of equality and accessible rights when the reality is one of banal citizenship. This Fantasy citizen is a Worker Citizen. However, the substance of the 'right to work' is the right to the welfare safety net and the banal citizen finds access to this safety net restricted by the 'duty to work'. Taking the example of the UK and specifically, England, I examine how citizens' mobility is restricted and controlled, firstly by social housing allocation policies which effectively turns citizens into 'migrants' via worker citizenship, and secondly through the restrictions of COVID-19 including its racialised policing. In this way, I suggest closer attention to state restrictions on the mobilities of citizens can help draw out connections in practice between the citizen and the migrant, connections that are obscured by Fantasy Citizenship and the migrant citizen binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent migration ‘crises’ raise important geopolitical questions. Who is ‘the migrant’ that contemporary politics are fixated on? How are answers to ‘who counts as a migrant’ changing? Who gets to do that counting, and under what circumstances? This forum responds to, as well as questions, the current saliency of migration by examining how categories of migration hold geopolitical significance—not only in how they are constructed and by whom, but also in how they are challenged and subverted. Furthermore, by examining how the very concepts of ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are used in different contexts, and for a variety of purposes, it opens up critical questions about mobility, citizenship and the nation state. Collectively, these contributions aim to demonstrate how problematising migration and its categorisation can be a tool of enquiry into other phenomena and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the category of "migrant" and the consequent exclusion of some from citizenship. It argues that citizenship is a normative category as well as a legal status, and it is not only about passport formalities but entry into what can be called the "community of value." This means that citizenship in a country does not only exclude migrants. It also excludes many of those who are formal citizens but who fail with respect to the community of value: criminals, prostitutes, those claiming welfare, and so on. "Migrants" are usually distanced from these "failed citizens," and claims are often made that they are hardworking, not criminals, and so on. The paper argues, however, that it is productive to use the same lens to analyse those who do not belong formally (migrants) and those who are less formally excluded but excluded nevertheless (failed citizens). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how differences between 'migrants' and citizens are forged and sustained in law and social practice with reference to welfare benefits. It explores how citizenship is made and what this reveals about citizenship as a legal status through considering firstly naturalization, i.e. the laws and policies that govern how foreigners become citizens, and secondly immigration and enforcement practices, the flipside of naturalization in the ways they literally make the difference between migrants and citizens. The article argues that enforcement promotes an equation between legal citizenship and full inclusion. Yet citizenship is being evacuated of much of its social content and there are multiple exclusions within formal citizenship. Attention to the position of naturalizing migrants and welfare benefit claimants indicates the rise of the worker citizen. The article concludes by suggesting that, as well as a free standing subject of study, migration can be a lens through which to study societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking the growing use of deportation by many states, including the UK and the USA, as its point of departure, this article examines the implications of deportation for how citizenship is understood and conceptualised in liberal states. We follow scholars such as Walters (2002, Citizenship studies, 6 (2), 265-292) and Nicholas De Genova (2010, The deportation regime: sovereignty, space and freedom of movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 33-65) in seeing deportation as a practice that is 'constitutive of citizenship', one that reaffirms the formal and normative boundaries of membership in an international system of nominally independent states. However, we draw on the UK to show that, as a particularly definitive and symbolically resonant way of dividing citizens from (putative) strangers, deportation is liable to generate conflicts amongst citizens and between citizens and the state over the question of who is part of the normative community of members. Such conflict is, we show, a key and everyday feature of the many local anti-deportation campaigns that currently operate in support of individuals and families facing expulsion in liberal states. Although often used by governmental elites as a way to reaffirm the shared significance of citizenship, deportation, we suggest, may serve to highlight just how divided and confused modern societies are in how they conceptualise both who is a member and who has the right to judge who belongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now more important than ever to consider migrant mobilizations and how political communities are constructed. This paper describes how Waling Waling, a migrant domestic workers' organization, and their support group, Kalayaan, forged citizenship 'from below' and waged a successful campaign to change the immigration status of domestic workers in part through turning constraints into opportunities. It also discusses how the logic of state sovereignty can recapture radical undertakings, and the opportunities and challenges that are faced in the new political climate of migrants as victims of trafficking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several papers published within the issue including one about the struggle of migrants to obtain citizenship and another regarding immigration regulations in Great Britain.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including citizenship and deportation, the historical roots of expulsion as a practice, and a legal investigation of British deportation system.