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The passage of the Lodge Act in 1950 enabled the United States to offer citizenship to foreign nationals in exchange for service in the U.S. Army. A chief objective was to further Cold War goals by enlisting Eastern European candidates to serve as special forces troops, linguists, cultural experts, and skilled technicians. The legislation sought to spread American values abroad and unify support at home. Its chief legacy, however, was to serve as a template for naturalizing those who served in the decades that followed. "Citizen Candidates" won first place in the 2021 VMI Adams Center Cold War Military history essay contest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

China's Minimum Living Standard Guarantee System (mlsgs) provides an unconditional cash transfer to poor households to alleviate poverty. During China's transitional period, the mlsgs has played an important role in the maintenance of social stability. However, beyond poverty alleviation and stability maintenance, other outcomes--particularly the strengthening of citizenship--have received little attention. This study explores the influence of the mlsgs on the perceptions of citizenship among aid recipients, and finds not only that the mlsgs has gradually promoted the social rights of the poor and strengthened state--citizen interactions, but also finds issues and challenges that may limit Chinese citizens' ability to fully exercise their new rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Traditionally, immigrants’ propensity to naturalize is attributed to individual characteristics and the origin country. Recently scholars increasingly recognise that naturalisation decisions do not take place in a vacuum: they are conditioned both by the individual life course of immigrants, such as the age at migration and family situation, as well as the opportunity structure set by citizenship policies of the destination country. Yet it is less clear what impact specific policy changes have, and to whom these changes matter most. In this paper we address these questions by analysing citizenship acquisition among first generation immigrants in the Netherlands in light of a restriction in citizenship policy in 2003. We employ unique micro-level longitudinal data from Dutch municipal population registers between 1995 until 2012, which allow us to track naturalisation among different immigration cohorts. We find evidence that indeed naturalisation is part of a larger life course trajectory: immigrants who arrive at a younger age in the Netherlands naturalise more often and so do immigrants with a native partner, or a foreign-born partner who also naturalises. Policy also matters: migrants naturalise later and less often under more restrictive institutional conditions, especially migrants from less developed and politically unstable countries of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greece has experienced significant economic immigration during the last 20 years without having been prepared for it. Greek migration management and migrant integration policies have been slow to develop and, despite rapid demographic change, native Greeks have largely retained a predominantly mono-ethnic and mono-religious view of the nation. Indeed, until recently, Greece had one of the most restrictive citizenship regimes in Europe. The situation changed in March 2010 when the socialist government passed a new citizenship law that has facilitated the access to citizenship of both first and second generation migrants. The same law also introduced local voting rights for third-country nationals that reside in Greece legally for 5 years or more. This paper discusses this new law and in particular, the issue of local voting rights in the Greek social and political context. It analyses who spearheaded the drive for change, who opposed the law and the concession of local voting rights and on what grounds. The paper reviews parliamentary debates, policy documents, data from the last local elections and the recent decision of the Greek State Council which annulled the law by deeming it unconstitutional. The analysis places developments in Greece in the context of relevant theoretical debates in the field of citizenship studies reviewing briefly the overall trends on the issue of local political participation of noncitizens in Europe. [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 the development and impact of German citizenship policy over the past decade. As its point of departure, it takes the 2000 Citizenship Law, which sought to undertake a full-scale reform and liberalisation of access to German membership. The article discusses this law's content and subsequent amendments, focusing particularly on its quantitative impact, asking why the number of naturalisations has been lower than originally expected. The article outlines current challenges to the law's structure operation and identifies potential trajectories for its future development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]