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The determinants of whether or not an immigrant seeks to become a citizen are still largely invisible to scholars; as are the decisions made during the naturalization process by street-level bureaucrats. Research on the acquisition of citizenship has incorporated a number of determinants of naturalization outcomes over the past decades, but lacks the contextualization of immigration law in its relation to criminal law. This systematic literature review of the 140 most-cited papers across the naturalization and crimmigration literatures seeks to construct a theoretical bridge between the disciplines in an effort to illuminate the blind spots challenging naturalization scholarship. I argue that the inclusion of crimmigration as a factor impacting naturalization is essential for scholarship in order to accurately use citizenship policies as an indicator of a state's overall approach to immigration - particularly regarding residence requirements. The conceptual utilization of crimmigration in the context of citizenship acquisition offers new insights into the underexplored relationship between citizenship policy and the individual migrant, potentially uncovering some of the factors hindering immigrants' ability to seek formal membership. Evidence within recent crimmigration scholarship points towards the role played by racialization within the functioning of a crimmigration system. This paper reviews the prominent streams of both strands of literature first utilizing a bibliometric analysis of the respective citation networks and second, diving into the substantial developments and parallels in naturalization and crimmigration research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article, I define and measure the new phenomenon of defensive citizenship in Europe. The literature suggests that defensive citizenship engagement is related to attempts by entitled citizens to preserve their threatened interests. It has been on the rise worldwide, especially in Europe. Based on studies and reports on the phenomenon, I argue that defensive citizenship can be assessed among entitled citizens (those born in the country, whose both parents were born in the country) based on mistrust towards political institutions, anti-immigration attitudes and a challenging personal situation. The analysis, based on European Social Survey data, ranks European countries and uncovers concentrations of countries with high levels of defensive citizenship in Eastern Europe. I contend that this phenomenon has significant implications for the democratic functioning of European countries and the stability of the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on affective citizenship amongst young immigrants without formal citizenship. Citizenship studies use the 'affective turn' to address the central role of affect in current integration and citizenship policies of many Western nation-states, but the lived affective experiences of new immigrants without formal citizenship status concerning these policies remain poorly understood. We advance an analytical framework of 'affective liminality' for examining differences in the collectively patterned affects of young immigrants, according to their specific situations of liminal legality and in relation to governmental 'feeling rules'. An ethnographic study in Belgium reveals that, in general, fear, frustration and hope are key features in the lives of these young people, reflecting the insecurities and ambiguities of their 'in-between' legal statuses. Different situations of liminal legality are entangled with different affective outcomes. Counter-intuitively, as young people progress along the path towards formal citizenship, their feelings become more 'unruly', and thus less likely to comply with the feeling rules of the state. In addition to being paralyzing or disciplining, their affective experiences might thus be emancipatory as well, inciting them to fight exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis builds on previous research exploring the impact of far-right support on citizenship policy. Using Bayesian analyses, this research evaluates the impact of far-right success on citizenship policy restrictiveness and citizenship policy outcomes per year across 29 European countries between 2003–2014. Results reveal that far-right success is a statistically and substantively significant factor in determining citizenship policy restrictiveness as well as rates of naturalization. However, differential levels of impact suggest that far-right influence is not uniform throughout the policy process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the U.S. Congressional debates in 1981 and 1982 over the Amerasian Immigration Act (AIA), which provided preferential immigration status for the Amerasians of Southeast Asia. The debates exposed conflict on issues of American identity, race, and nation and the gendered nature of U.S. immigration and citizenship policy. This article considers how lawmakers on both sides of the debate justified accepting the Amerasians as American children or rejecting them as Asian. In each case, lawmakers in the post-Vietnam War era struggled to reconcile the physical appearance of the Amerasians and their racial hybridity with an American national identity. The AIA is evidence of the confusion. While the bill defined Amerasians as children of American citizens, it failed to grant them American citizenship. This article argues that although the rhetoric of inclusion and kinship within the AIA recognized the Amerasians as children of American fathers, the exclusion of citizenship from the bill formalized their status as the children of "others," and thus foreign children. Ultimately, the bill exposed the problematic existence of mixed-race populations in the United States, and a history of exclusionary immigration and citizenship policies against people of Asian descent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the rise in terrorism after the turn of the millennium, multiculturalist countries such as Australia, Britain and Canada introduced policies that make it easier to revoke the citizenships of dual nationals. These policies primarily target naturalized immigrants and their descendants. Ongoing debates indicate that more countries plan to follow suit. Some scholars argue that easy revocation policies create two-tiered political communities, where one group of citizens have a stronger status security than the other. This study builds on their perspectives, and argues that majority members should be more likely to hold anti-immigrant attitudes in countries where state policies discriminate against citizens in terms of status security. To test this hypothesis, this study employs multilevel regression analysis. Data come from European Values Study (2008), European Social Survey (2014), and Eurobarometer (2015), and cover thirty European countries. Findings offer support for the proposed hypothesis. In countries where immigrants have low status security, majority members are more likely to have negative attitudes toward immigrants. The results hold not only for immigrants in general but also for Muslim immigrants in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2012, residents of Chino Hills, California--a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles--exposed a maternity hotel in their city. Subsequently, controversy erupted as protesting residents argued that Chinese birth tourism is an immigration loophole, where foreigners took advantage of jus soli birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This paper uses this controversy as a springboard to explore how temporalities--both the past and the future--come to shape politics in the present. Considering reproductive futurism in the contexts of citizenship and migrations, this paper argues that the figure of the fetal citizen emerges as the defining site of struggle between preserving, or exposing, the fantasy of a national future. Reports of panic over Chinese birth tourism, then, show how ''backwards'' racialized citizenship is continually brought to this present struggle, especially vis-a-vis discourses of the ''worthy immigrant'' and ''anchor babies'', to determine who may give birth to citizens in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the development of laws of naturalization in both Mexico and the United States beginning in the 19th century. The author comments on the evolution of immigration policy, from the so-called Open Door Era, to increasingly more strict regulations. She analyzes the representation of political authority through the strengthening of immigration law into the 20th century, as well as the ideals of republicanism felt by those who successfully became naturalized, which eventually faded away as the policies changed.

This article examines how the change in Ireland's demographic condition from a country of emigration to one of large-scale immigration has affected citizenship attribution. The article outlines the origin of Irish citizenship laws, with particular reference to the pure ius soli system applied to those born on the island of Ireland until 2005. While significant changes in citizenship attribution have emerged in response to increasing immigration, the specific character of these changes has been shaped also by other forces, including the issue of Northern Ireland, the relationship of the Republic of Ireland to the UK, and the development and expansion of the European Union. These have influenced recent notable changes in the attribution of citizenship at birth and on the basis of marriage, and proposed changes in requirements for naturalisation. The article examines whether and to what extent these changes represent a convergence towards a European norm and whether they signify a changing conception of citizenship in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the empirical study of national citizenship policies has emerged as a fast-growing area of research. This article contributes to that literature by focusing on the question of continuity and change in the 11 'historically restrictive' countries within the 15 'older' member-states of the European Union. It explains why six of the countries have liberalised their citizenship policies since the 1980s, whereas five have not. The article develops an explanation that focuses on the politics of citizenship. The main finding is that, while citizenship liberalisation is more likely to occur with a leftist government, the most important factor is the relative strength of far-right parties, which can serve to mobilise latent anti-immigrant public opinion, and thereby 'trump' the pressures for liberalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several countries in Europe have recently adopted obligatory language and country-knowledge requirements for settlement, naturalisation and immigration. Integration tests, courses and contracts are only a few examples of the new 'civic integration policies' states are using to promote individual autonomy and common values for newcomers. Are these requirements in response to concrete problems of immigrant integration? Do they enable, or actually inhibit, integration? This paper examines the various pressures behind attaching mandatory integration requirements to status acquisition. To systematically examine these policies, I develop a civic integration index (CIVIX) to measure language, country-knowledge and value-commitment requirements across the EU-15. While there is a general shift toward civic requirements across Europe, evidence reveals important differences in the degree of policy change. Finally, I explore how new civic requirements complement or challenge existing citizenship practices, identifying where integration is facilitated and rewarded with citizenship. I also show where civic requirements fill strategic goals, mainly controlling the inflow and impact of immigration. The arguments made here support a critical rethinking of the conventional wisdom about national models of integration and a dynamic understanding of state citizenship strategies, where policies define not only the rules but also the content of national membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]