PALGRAVE POLITICS OF IDENTITY & CITIZENSHIP SERIES

Making Citizens

Public Rituals and Personal Journeys to Citizenship

Bridget Byrne
Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Series Editors: Varun Uberoi, Brunel University, UK; Nasar Meer, University of
Strathclyde, UK and Tariq Modood, University of Bristol, UK
The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing importance as
our polities have become significantly more culturally, ethnically and religiously
diverse. Different types of scholars, including philosophers, sociologists, political
scientists and historians make contributions to this field, and this series show-
cases a variety of innovative contributions to it. Focusing on a range of different
countries, and utilizing the insights of different disciplines, the series helps to
illuminate an increasingly controversial area of research, and titles in it will be of
interest to a number of audiences including scholars, students and other inter-
ested individuals.

Titles include:
Parveen Akhtar
BRITISH MUSLIM POLITICS
Examining Pakistani Biraderi Networks
Heidi Armbruster and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (editors)
NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURAL EUROPE
Borders, Networks, Neighbourhoods
Peter Balint and Sophie Guérard de Latour
LIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM AND THE FAIR TERMS OF INTEGRATION
Fazila Bhimji
BRITISH ASIAN MUSLIM WOMEN, MULTIPLE SPATIALITIES AND
COSMOPOLITANISM
Bridget Byrne
MAKING CITIZENS
Public Rituals and Personal Journeys to Citizenship
Jan Dobbernack
THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL COHESION IN GERMANY, FRANCE AND THE
UNITED KINGDOM
Jan Dobbernack and Tariq Modood (editors)
TOLERANCE, INTOLERANCE AND RESPECT
Hard to Accept?
Romain Garbaye and Pauline Schnapper (editors)
THE POLITICS OF ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN THE BRITISH ISLES
Nisha Kapoor, Virinder Kalra and James Rhodes (editors)
THE STATE OF RACE
Peter Kivisto and Östen Wahlbeck (editors)
DEBATING MULTICULTURALISM IN THE NORDIC WELFARE STATES
Dina Kiwan (editor)
NATURALIZATION POLICIES, EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP
Multicultural and Multi-Nation Societies in International Perspective
Aleksandra Lewicki
SOCIAL JUSTICE THROUGH CITIZENSHIP?
The Politics of Muslim Integration in Germany and Great Britain
Aleksandra Maatsch
ETHNIC CITIZENSHIP REGIMES
Europeanization, Post-war Migration and Redressing Past Wrongs
Derek McGhee
SECURITY, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Shared Values in Uncertain Times
Tariq Modood and John Salt (editors)
GLOBAL MIGRATION, ETHNICITY AND BRITISHNESS
Nasar Meer
CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND THE POLITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM
The Rise of Muslim Consciousness
Ganesh Nathan
SOCIAL FREEDOM IN A MULTICULTURAL STATE
Towards a Theory of Intercultural Justice
Therese O´Toole and Richard Gale
POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT AMONGST ETHNIC MINORITY YOUNG PEOPLE
Making a Difference
Momin Rahman
HOMOSEXUALITIES, MUSLIM CULTURES AND IDENTITIES
Michel Seymour (editor)
THE PLURAL STATES OF RECOGNITION
Katherine Smith
FAIRNESS, CLASS AND BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLAND
Paul Thomas
YOUTH, MULTICULTURALISM AND COMMUNITY COHESION
Milton Vickerman
THE PROBLEM OF POST-RACIALISM
Eve Hepburn and Ricard Zapata-Barrero
THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION IN MULTI-LEVEL STATES
Governance and Political Parties

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–24901–1 (hardback)
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order.
Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with
your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Also by Bridget Byrne

WHITE LIVES: The Interplay of ‘Race’, Class and Gender in Everyday Life (2006)
Making Citizens
Public Rituals and Personal Journeys to
Citizenship

Bridget Byrne
Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Manchester, UK
© Bridget Byrne 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-00320-1

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries

ISBN 978-1-349-43415-2 ISBN 978-1-137-00321-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137003218
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Transferred to Digital Printing in 2015

To my parents, Angela and Eugene Byrne, and to Sami
who missed out last time
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgements viii

1 Introduction 1
2 Bounded Citizenship 12
3 Taking the Oath 38
4 Europe Welcomes 72
5 Routes to Citizenship 108
6 Welcome to Britain? 138
7 Conclusion 170

Notes 177
Bibliography 185
Index 195

vii
Acknowledgements

The first germ of the idea for this book came from an invitation by Laura
Doan to see her receive British citizenship in Manchester in 2008. At the
ceremony, I was particularly interested in the representation given in
the ‘welcome speech’ of Manchester as a city built by migrants. What,
I wondered, would they have said about migrants and diversity in a
ceremony in Cumbria – Laura’s other home and one of the whitest areas
of Britain?
It is one of the delights of academic life that what starts as a merely
curious question can grow into an absorbing and major project. My first
step was to email all the registrar offices in the country with a request
to see the welcome speeches that were made at their ceremonies. The
response rate for this email approach was impressive and, as I was to
discover at other stages of the research, registrars are almost unfailingly
helpful in response to requests for access and help. So I give my first
thanks to Laura for bringing me to the ceremony and my next to the
many registrars who answered emails, invited me to ceremonies, offered
help in contacting interviewees and themselves gave up their time to talk
to me. Whilst the book questions the nature of claims made in ceremo-
nies about the welcome that British society in general gives to migrants,
my experience has been that, in the vast majority of cases, registrars
themselves are committed to making the ceremonies welcoming and
celebratory events, and they indeed are hospitable to new citizens and
researchers alike.
A fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation enabled me to travel
around Britain observing ceremonies in different towns and cities and
also to interview both registrars who conduct the ceremonies and new
citizens who had just participated in them. As I describe in Chapter 5,
many new citizens were, perhaps understandably, reluctant to take part
in the research. So I also want to thank those who gave me their time
and trust by taking part. I hope I have repaid that trust in my use of their
interviews. As someone who has ‘stayed put’, the experiences of those
who’ve moved are always fascinating. A British Academy Small Grant
enabled me to provide an international perspective and also brought
Carla De Tona, Bethan Harries, Dieuwertje Dyi Huijg, Katherine Jones
and Nadia Kidwai into the project – all of whom provided excellent
observations and interviews which form much of the base material

viii
 Acknowledgements ix

for Chapters 3 and 4 (although I’m sorry, Carla, that Italy fell off the
project – perhaps that’s a study in itself!) Thanks also to Zulfiqar and
Nighat Gilani for their hospitality in Toronto and Fidele Mutwarasibo
for facilitating and joining my observation in Dublin. Thanks, too, to
Nighat Kidwai for helping out in Cardiff.
Throughout this long project, I have been based at the University
of Manchester, where I have found stimulation and friendship – so
thanks in particular to Clare Alexander, Wendy Bottero, Laura Doan,
Brian Heaphy, Virinder Kalra, Paul Keleman, Niamh Moore, Tej Purewal,
Eithne Quinn, Sheila Rowbotham, Nick Thoburn and Darren Waldron. I
also want to thank several PhD students who over this time have been a
rich resource of ideas, concepts and introductions to new literatures – in
particular Gertrude Wafula, Shaida Raffat Nabi, Abril Saldana, Lorraine
Pannett, Bethan Harries, Dieuwertje Dyi Huijg and Gwyneth Lonergan.
Bethan Harries also read and commented on chapters, and Lorraine
Pannett turned from poacher to gamekeeper and became a most valued
advisor. (I sometimes opened her emails with the trepidation of a worried
student.) Lorraine read almost all of the book and was the most careful,
challenging and insightful reader I could have wished for. Thanks also
to Justin Byrne, Jonathon Darling, Khalid Nadvi and Eithne Quinn for
their comments on chapters and to Eithne for precious friendship and
laughs. The mistakes are obviously all my own.
Finally thanks to the extended Byrne and Nadvi families (and to other
friends) – for managing not to ask why I was still working on the book
and especially to Khalid, Sara and Sami.

Permissions

‘Borders’ Haiku by Antoine Casar, mondepasrond.net.

1
Introduction

Le monde n’est pas ronde.

In the artistic webzine Mondepasrond.net on migration, borders and

human rights, Antoine Cassar explains why, for him, the world is not
round:

According to which passport one holds, the world takes on a different

size and shape – governments have conveniently imposed upon
individuals a world in the form of a complex polyhedron of nation-
states.1

The starting point of this book is both an appreciation of the impor-

tance of passports and an interest in those few who manage to cross
borders, to navigate rules, regulations and testing, to acquire new citi-
zenship and, consequently, new passports. The central concern of the
book is the reception that these new national citizens get in their new
countries, and particularly where the state chooses to mark the making
of new citizens with official ceremonies. I will analyse this ceremo-
nial performance of citizenship in six countries across the (Western)
world – the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, the UK
and Ireland – examining the ways in which citizenship and the nation
are represented in the ceremonies. In particular, I’ll ask: How does the
state choose to represent itself and migrants in these ceremonies? Who
is upheld as the citizen to be welcomed or embraced by the state, and
what forms of citizenship are silenced or rejected in these represen-
tations? What kind of potential identities – national, local and more
global – are suggested by the ceremonies? And what identities are
suppressed or ignored?

1
2 Making Citizens

The book will also explore the experience of new citizens who have
taken part in the ceremonies across ten different locations in the UK,
asking why they chose to become British citizens, what their experi-
ence of migrating to the UK has been, and what they think of the citi-
zenship ceremonies. These accounts tell us the different ways in which
the world is, indeed, not round, and the impact of border crossing on
individuals’ lives. Their descriptions also, in juxtaposition with the
ceremonies themselves, raise questions about the nation’s representa-
tion both of itself (particularly in terms of the narration of nation as
welcoming spaces) and of its citizens and non-citizens. The research in
this book needs to be understood in the context of a rising discourse
which contests, or even proposes the end of, multiculturalism(s). These
policies, which recognised, accommodated and sometimes celebrated
cultural difference, were – particularly in Western Europe – the product
of post-colonial migration (Modood 2007; Meer 2010; Lentin and Titley
2011; Meer and Modood 2014).
Citizenship ceremonies were introduced in the UK ten years ago (2004)
as part of a government policy of renewed attention to citizenship arising
out of concerns about immigration, integration and the proposed ‘fail-
ures’ of multiculturalism. The ceremonies in the UK were not developed
in isolation: they took inspiration from those which former settler colo-
nies – the United States, Canada and Australia – had been holding for
many years, and which, particularly in the case of US, are frequently
represented in popular culture.2 The introduction of citizenship ceremo-
nies in the UK also influenced the establishment of similar rituals in
other countries in the European Union, including the Netherlands and
Ireland. This book will provide a comparison of the ceremonies in these
six countries, covering both those that are longer established in countries
of colonial settlement and the more recent introductions in Europe.
The ceremonies are of interest because they are a moment in which
the state creates a narrative of what a citizen is, as well as of how immi-
gration regimes intersect with citizenship and the nation. These public
events can shed light on how the citizen is imagined, and who – or what
forms of citizenship – are excluded from this imagining. The rituals
provide a rich source of narratives of nation and citizenship. Stories are
told through the buildings in which the ceremonies are held; in the
symbols, flags and portraits that are displayed, and in the rituals which
are created. They are also told in the oaths/pledges or affirmations which
are recited. Finally, they are told in the way the participants – those
passing from being citizens-to-be (who I will call ‘citizands’) to citizens
are addressed – as part of the national community or separated from it.
 Introduction 3

This book is the first in-depth comparative account of different citi-

zenship ceremonies across the world. It traces the ways in which these
public occasions function as rites of passage and how they share a
similar symbolic lexicon of initiation to the nation. The book is also
unique in that it is based on research derived from observation of the
ceremonies in six countries and interviews with those who organised
them. Additionally, in the case of the UK, I interviewed those who had
just participated in the events and become citizens.
Whilst there are many different forms of citizenship and ways of
understanding it, nation-state citizenship is critical in determining
where people can live, work and travel. I will argue that citizenship is
never neutral. In the context of Western countries, notions of member-
ship and rights have emerged out of a racialised, classed and gendered
history of colonialism and post-colonialism which has shaped both
nation and migration. The formation of the nation-state system and the
technological developments that enabled the state’s control of move-
ment over state borders emerged within the colonial context. The rights
attached to citizenship have not been made evenly available to women,
to sexual minorities, to the working class and to colonised and racial-
ised Others. In fact, citizenship – how it is understood, who is said to
possess it – has often emerged out of a process of differentiating between
citizens and those gendered, raced and classed others – the anti-citizens
(Barbero 2012). The construction of the anti-citizen – for example in
the figure of the illegal migrant, the terrorist, the uncivilised Other, the
deviant – can tell us much about the contours of citizenship. It can also
act as a warning to citizens about how they should behave.
Nation-state citizenship is a constantly shifting terrain with a seem-
ingly endless proliferation of modifications of Western nations’ rules
and regulations regarding immigration and citizenship. The continual
adjustment to immigration rules and regulations is not only the product
of increased levels of securitisation3 and suspicion about the migrant
(particularly against certain groups of migrants); it also indicates the
‘unnatural’ state of citizenship. Citizenship is in a permanent state of
reconstruction and redefinition – by the state, as well as by non-state
actors (Isin 2012a). Citizenship has to be adjusted in part because the
messy, interconnected lives of people do not always stay within the
narrow confines of state citizenship. People move across borders (or
borders move across people’s lives), and the numerous cases where the
rules prove to be illogical or contradictory – due to their inability to
govern the variety of people’s movements and affiliations – exposes the
ways in which citizenship as a state and social contract which is often
4 Making Citizens

inadequate for the task of governing social relations. National citizen-

ship is often constructed as inevitable and something that has ‘always
been there’. This is indeed suggested in the term ‘naturalisation’ – to
establish something as if natural. But at the same time, the language of
naturalisation highlights the idea that the person is not naturally of the
state – and perhaps more particularly of the nation. If you have to be
‘naturalised’ how can you be native? Naturalisation suggests impossi-
bility – that is, you may be naturalised, but of course no one can be made
natural – as it suggests artifice and unnaturalness.4 This raises the ques-
tion of whether the new citizen would ever really be seen as ‘equal to’
the (real) national. Will naturalised citizens ever properly belong, or will
they always be somehow ‘probationary’ to use the emerging language
in the UK, where the model is increasingly that of ‘earning’ citizenship?
The possibility, under certain conditions, of the revocation of naturalisa-
tion also points to its potential non-permanence and to a less-than-full-
citizenship.5 Naturalisation is potentially an ‘unhappy performative’,6
where the act of naturalisation fails to make the person a natural/native
citizen.
The idea that membership of the nation-state is somehow ‘natural’
also opens a route for the membership to be about biology and race, or
about a profound level of culture which cannot be imitated or learnt.
This again raises questions about the status of those not born to citizen-
ship of a particular nation. In addition, for citizenship to be considered
‘natural’ suggests that it is clear cut – that one either is or is not a citizen,
where belonging and identity are set up as a series of binary characteris-
tics. Yet belonging is always more complicated than this binary structure.
As will be discussed in the next chapter, a series of other characteristics
and exclusions (including those based on age, gender, sexuality, class,
race, dis/ability) affects citizenship claims.
This book focuses on the legal moment of making citizens, asking
how the ceremonial rituals which have been created around the act of
endowing citizenship construct the citizen and the nation. However, it
is important to acknowledge that this is only one route into the poli-
tics of citizenship, and it is a particularly narrow route in three specific
ways. Firstly, in the focus on formal membership, there is always a risk
of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002), in
which the nation-state is taken as the primary unit of analysis. Many
different forms of mobility are not shaped primarily by the social and
political force of the nation-state. In addition, there are many forms of
movement, attachment and belonging that cannot be readily concep-
tualised (or even made visible) if national identity and membership, or
 Introduction 5

crossing state-borders, are the focus of analysis. National identity and

belonging may be much less significant in people’s lives than other
forms of attachment and identification. Secondly, there is the additional
risk that we may be co-opted by the state’s focus on citizenship, migra-
tion status and the notions of illegal and legal migration. It is important
to remember that illegality is created through state legislation, rather
than it somehow being inherent to (or an inevitable consequence of)
human mobility (De Genova 2007).
Finally, the focus on citizenship as membership, which is the central
concern of this book, is not the only way that it can be – or should
be – thought of (Stephens and Squire 2012). For Engin Isin, it is possible
to think of ‘citizens without frontiers’, particularly if we focus on citi-
zenship as the acting (rather than moving) subject (Isin 2012a). These
‘citizenship acts’ are able to cross the borders of citizenship by subjects
acting as citizens, even where the state may not recognise them as such
(Isin and Nielsen 2008). This is a form of citizenship which rejects – or
in Isin’s terms ‘transverses’ – state borders and state definitions. Acts of
citizenship frequently involve the voicing of rights and claims which
go beyond the national frame (such as the anti-apartheid movement or
the activities of Greenpeace or WikiLeaks). They also involve contesting
both borders and normative frames. For Isin, ‘a fundamental feature of
a citizenship act is that it exercises either a right that does not exist or
a right that does exist but which is enacted by a political subject who
does not exist in the eyes of the law’ (Isin 2012a: 13). This approach to
citizenship acts is exciting because of the ways it can challenge defi-
nitions of what citizenship is and who can be citizens. It provides a
critical frame which recognises agency in those who are often seen as
lacking it (such as undocumented migrants) as well as a structure for
understanding actions which challenge the nation-state formation. This
approach also draws attention to the different levels on which citizen-
ship may be enacted – those above the level of the nation, such as claims
to regional (for example, European) citizenship, as well as at the sub-
national level, such as of the region, city or more local community.
However, it is also worth remembering that not all citizen acts may be
as progressive as those generally discussed in this literature. How can we
understand international far-right organising and activities within this
framework? Are actions that seek to close off citizenship to others also
citizen acts? For instance, Cynthia Weber (Weber 2012), in her examina-
tion of activism around the US-Mexican border, explores the practices of
the Minutemen, who are challenging the state to secure the border, and
taking the right upon themselves where they feel the state has failed (see
6 Making Citizens

also discussion in Isin 2012a: 47). At the same time, other activists, in
organisations such as ‘No More Deaths’ and ‘Humane Borders’, are high-
lighting and trying to prevent the many deaths which occur among those
trying to cross the border (Weber 2012). It would be worth exploring
further how these different approaches fit into the frame of citizen acts.
In addition, the idea of citizen acts itself still relies on normative notions
of citizenship. Isin defines citizen acts by the absence of state recogni-
tion that the actor is a citizen or that the right is a legal claim. So here
again we return to the question of citizenship as state membership or
belonging. Whilst the potentially transgressive quality of citizen acts
also helps illuminate the closures and exclusions of normative citizen-
ship, this book argues that the normative frame remains an important
concern, not least for the real effect that it has on everyday lives. As will
be discussed further in Chapters 5 and 6, interviews with new citizens in
the UK show that they engage in citizen acts which make claims to citi-
zenship predating state recognition or grants of formal rights. They also
draw on other forms of belonging: to cities or to other affiliations, such
as those forged through colonialism. These claims can be understood to
counter or transverse the borders of state membership.
This book is particularly concerned with the question of ‘new’ citizen-
ship: the state citizenship produced by the transnational movements and
settlements of people. It involves the granting of citizenship to people
who do not have it by virtue of where they were born or the status of
their parents. Importantly, this citizenship status appears to have an ‘in/
out’ quality to it. One cannot be ‘slightly’ or ‘almost’ a citizen – although
with the introduction of ideas of ‘probationary’ citizenship, and the
gradual increase of rights for those who are granted forms of permanent
residency, the ‘almost’ citizens begin to emerge (Soysal 1995). National
state citizenship is inherently dependent on the ability to identify those
who are not of-the-nation – the strangers or aliens. The citizen is known
at least partly in her/his differentiation from the non-citizen. In the
modern era, states have been developing technologies to differentiate
between them. Whilst initially, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, the
main focus was on controlling the mobility of citizens, increasingly
states have focused on their power to detect, exclude and expel non-
citizens as well as to enable surveillance of citizens who are considered
a threat to the state. The boundaries of citizenship are often framed
in national terms: ‘citizenship is meant to be universalistic and above
cultural difference, yet it exists only in the context of a nation-state,
which is based on cultural specificity – on the belief in being different
from other nations’ (Castles and Davidson 2000: 12).
 Introduction 7

As ‘new’ citizens are often citizens of two (or more) states, the granting
of citizenship also raises questions of dual citizenship and its relationship
to nationality and national identity. Internationally, there appear to be
two conflicting trends in response to migration, particularly by Western
states. On the one hand, there is increasing acceptance of dual citizen-
ship, with many countries now accepting (either legally or in practice)
that their citizens may also be citizens of other countries.7 At the same
time, in an era of securitisation and in the political context of the ‘War
on Terror’, certain categories of individuals with dual or multiple citi-
zenships are subject to particular levels of scrutiny and suspicion. They
can also be left vulnerable because of gaps in the protection that states
will offer them, or some states’ willingness to deport them (Stasiulis and
Ross 2006; Walters 2002). The context for these conflicting responses to
dual citizenship is a general retreat from discourses of multiculturalism
and a return to those of integration – which is often a euphemism for
assimilation – particularly fuelled by the figure of the dangerous ‘home-
grown’ terrorist (Meer 2010; Meer and Modood 2014). Citizenship is
wielded as one part of the armoury of the securitised state ‘enabling
specific groups and populations to be legitimately targeted and crimi-
nalised as non-citizens or failing citizens’ (Tyler 2010: 65). At the same
time, the figures that are presented of the ‘good’ and worthy citizen and
the abject intruder have often been developed on the model of older
patterns of colonial binary discourses of colonized and colonizer, Orient
and Occident, or North and South (Isin 2012c).
This book is concerned with the moment of ‘making’ new citizens – the
endowing of citizenship by the state on individuals who have migrated.
Thus, this approach to citizenship also has movement and mobility,
as well as immobility, at its heart. These new citizens are not born to
the citizenship which they are acquiring; they have moved towards it.
Obtaining new citizenship is often shaped by a desire to stay, as it gives
the right of residence. But it is also often accompanied by the desire to
move – to be able to move across national borders with more ease and
with the assurance that they can return. New citizens, how they come
to be citizens, what conditions they have to fulfil to acquire citizenship,
and how they are received by the state and society of their new nations
can tell us much about citizenship itself. As Ratna Kapur argues, ‘the
migrant subject is deeply implicated in the constitution of citizenship,
of who counts and who does not’ (Kapur 2007: 539).
In particular, this book explores the nature of citizenship ceremonies,
which have become a part of the citizenship regimes of an increasing
number of countries but have rarely been researched. Ceremonies seek
8 Making Citizens

to endow the moment of granting full citizenship to migrants with a

public – or semi-public – ritual. The creation of a ritual to ‘make’ citizens
also provides an opportunity to assert what citizenship and nationality
mean in particular places and at particular times. These invented tradi-
tions take place in the context of a range of often heated public debates
around immigration and the control of borders. These debates have
produced their own policy responses, including testing and other means
to assess the ‘integration potential’ of migrants before they are granted
citizenship. In the context of this growing securitisation and the retreat
from multiculturalism, this book interrogates citizenship ceremonies to
ask: Who is being held up as the welcomed citizen, and who is excluded
in these public rituals? What does it mean to ‘welcome’ a new citizen
to citizenship, and how is migration imagined in these events? These
questions are then set against the actual experiences of migration and
changing citizenship of those who become ‘made’ as citizens.

The book

Citizenship ceremonies have been practiced for at least a century in

the United States and Canada, and for 50 years in Australia. It is only
ten years since they were first introduced in the UK, with other coun-
tries in Europe, such as the Netherlands and Ireland, following suit. Yet
there has been very little scholarly attention to these invented tradi-
tions and how they construct citizenship and the state. This book is
the first major work in this area. The book seeks to provoke debates
around how citizenship and the desirable citizen are constructed and to
consider who is excluded in these representations of citizenship and the
nation. Chapter 2, ‘Bounded Citizenship’, traces some of the threads of
debate in the expanding field of citizenship studies. The chapter takes
a historical perspective which reminds us that citizenship is not natural
and inevitable but the product of a historically constructed relation-
ship between individuals and the state. State concerns about controlling
human mobility have arisen in particular historical contexts, as a form
of governmentality. The chapter argues that, in our understanding of
what citizenship does and might mean, we need to acknowledge the
history of exclusions from citizenship along lines of class, race, sexuality
and gender, which mean that different groups have achieved access to
citizenship rights in different ways and at different times. I argue for
the critical, and less often acknowledged, notion that the governmen-
tality of borders and citizens in Western nation-state citizenship devel-
oped out of a series of relationships between countries which need to
 Introduction 9

be understood within the colonial frame. This accounts for the ways in
which the control of mobility and borders (both external and internal
to the state) are intertwined with the racial state (Goldberg 1997).
Finally, the chapter explores some of the ways citizenship is currently
understood within the scholarly literature with a focus on ‘domopoli-
tics’ (Walters 2004) and the reconfiguration of the relationship between
home, nation and security.
Chapter 3, ‘Taking the Oath’, examines the way ceremonies are
constructed in the United States, Canada and Australia, three former
settler colonies, now nations which share a narrative of being ‘built by
immigrants’. The chapter examines citizenship ceremonies as rites of
passage rituals which follow a pattern: separating the participants off
from the rest of the public, treating them as a homogeneous group, and
then, after the oaths have transformed them into citizens, reintegrating
them back into society. The chapter argues that these ceremonies share
a similar lexicon of citizenship, in terms of symbols of the nation and
approaches to oath-taking. However, the ceremonies in the three coun-
tries also have significant differences in the ways they deal with past
injustices and exclusions and continuing discrimination – particularly
concerning the destruction of indigenous communities and racialised
exclusions from citizenship rights.
Chapter 4, ‘European Welcomes’, explores citizenship ceremonies in
three European countries (the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands) which
are relatively recent introductions to the citizenship regimes in these
countries. The ceremonies were modelled on those of the countries
discussed in Chapter 3. The chapter argues that they need to be seen as
part of a general trend within Europe of increased focus on controlling
immigration. This has been accompanied by debates about the ‘crisis’
of multiculturalism and regional policies concerned with ‘rebordering’
Europe. The chapter also considers the implications of citizenship testing
introduced in the Netherlands and the UK as part of this reshaping of citi-
zenship. I suggest that the tests function as ‘technologies of reassurance’
(Fortier 2008) by showing that it is not ‘too easy’ to obtain rights to stay
in both countries. The chapter also points out the absence of reference
to the European citizenship that is being granted, alongside the different
national citizenships. There appears to be no space to consider regional
membership in these accounts of national and sometimes local identity
and belonging. In this way, the national trumps the international. The
chapter explores how the narrative of Ireland as a diasporic nation of
emigrants dominates the ceremonies, with frequent reminders of those
who have left the country through its history. Particular attention is also
10 Making Citizens

given in this chapter to the accounts of national and local history which
are given in speeches in the UK ceremonies (and, to a lesser extent, the
Netherlands). I make the case that the avoidance of negative aspects of
history (such as histories of involvement in the slave trade, imperial
colonialism and racism) in favour of accounts of ancient history – set
in equally ancient landscapes – lead not only to a rather oddly imbal-
anced account of the UK, but also emphasise the division between the
host and newcomer. The chapter observes that some ceremonies suggest
that the transformation to full membership is not complete, and that
the new citizens still have to demonstrate their commitment to belong.
In any case, few ceremonies are able to give a very invigorated sense of
what active citizenship might mean.
Having considered the ceremonies as empirical evidence that can
illuminate the ways in which citizenship is being constructed at both
the level of the nation-state and in local contexts, Chapters 5 and 6
turn to the views of new citizens themselves. Based on interviews across
ten different sites with people who had just participated in a citizen-
ship ceremony in the UK, I find out about their journeys to citizenship,
including why they seek to become citizens of Britain and what they
think of the citizenship ceremonies. Chapter 5, ‘Routes to Citizenship’,
describes the way I located interviewees and argues that some of the
reluctance I encountered in this process is indicative of new citizens’
experience of officialdom in their process of coming to, and gaining
citizenship in, Britain. The chapter surveys the wide range of different
routes that the new citizens took into Britain and the need to under-
stand the differences between them. In this chapter, I also consider the
many different reasons that the participants gave for wanting to become
British citizens. I will argue that, for some at least, a sense of increased
anti-immigration discourse in the public sphere and increasing restric-
tions on access to citizenship have made the need to get citizenship feel
more urgent than it had seemed in the past. The chapter also explores
the different models of belonging and citizenship which emerged in
the interviews, which contest a singular focus on national citizenship.
Interviewees also stressed their sense of belonging and participation as
residents or city-dwellers and the importance of cultural links – through
European or postcolonial connections – which facilitated a sense of
belonging.
Chapter 6, ‘Welcome to Britain?’ explores the interviewees’ (gener-
ally positive) perceptions of the ceremonies, including how they felt
about the citizenship pledge and swearing allegiance to the Queen.
It also directly addresses the question of welcome, something that
 Introduction 11

the UK ceremonies claim has been a major characteristic of British

history and encounters with foreigners. In this chapter, I argue that the
claim of universal welcome stands at odds with experiences of racism,
hostility and what many interviewees saw as a culturally cool response
to newcomers or outsiders. The feeling of a lack of welcome is also
enhanced by anti-immigration debates, which have a prominent posi-
tion in public politics in the UK, and of which the interviewees were
very aware. Based on the experiences of the new citizens, the chapter
asks, what would be required for a welcome to feel more real? I maintain
that hospitality needs more than merely an absence of hostility, but also
a sense of warmth, care and recognition of individual worth.
Finally, the book’s conclusion questions the political hopes which
rest on an idea of global citizenship and the global citizen. It suggests
that the idea of the global citizen fails to address the racialised, classed
and gendered exclusions on which citizenship has been built. The imag-
ined idea of the global citizen often repeats rather than challenges these
exclusions. It posits that, in the context of retreats from multicultur-
alism at the level of public policy, and the shoring up of national sover-
eignty over border movements, it may be that local identities and forms
of belonging are likely to have the most purchase and be the focus for
challenging citizenship exclusion.
2
Bounded Citizenship

People cross borders.

It’s been that way ever since
Borders crossed people.
Antoine Cassar1

Introduction

This book is concerned with the making of new citizens – the ways in
which nation-states, in various international contexts, set out to cele-
brate the endowing of citizenship to those who have not received it
automatically by birth. However, in order to understand what lies behind
the moment of naturalisation, it is important to denaturalise citizenship.
That is, we need to understand how citizenship is neither a natural nor
a static concept but rather one which has developed historically in the
context of the creation of Western nation-states. The history of citizen-
ship has been shaped by economic, racial and gendered formations and
by the colonial context in which current understandings of state-mem-
bership emerged. By exploring the historical colonial context of modern
understandings of citizenship we can trace some of the boundaries of citi-
zenship, which, as a legal and social-cultural concept, are defined by the
borders that are drawn around it. These borders mark not only member-
ship but also claims to identity and rights, tracing out the answers to
the questions of citizenship: Who has the right to be a citizen? What
rights does that entail in the relationship with the state and between
citizens? Who is excluded from both membership and rights? And what
should the relationship be between the state and residents who are not
citizens? As Isin argues: ‘In a way, boundedness is the very condition of

12
 Bounded Citizenship 13

citizenship’ (Isin 2012a: 20). The citizen and the state are both bound
together and also define each other. The limits of citizenship are often
drawn through the figure of the ‘anti-citizen’ (Barbero 2012), those who
are situated outside the normative frame of the citizen and who may
reside in – but lie outside the embrace of – the state (Torpey 2000).
This book is concerned with the normative frame positioned around
the citizen and with what the processes and celebrations of naturalisa-
tion, including their symbolic nature, can tell us about state constructions
of the ‘good citizen’ as well as the ‘could-not-be citizen’. This approach
is grounded in an understanding of membership of the nation-state as a
historically created process with roots in colonial relations and one that
is shaped by race and gender as well as by notions of classed labour and
productivity in economic markets. The first section, ‘Second class citi-
zens?’ will argue against claims that citizenship is about universal and
‘blind’ recognition of individuals and rights. The next section, ‘Mobility
and the nation-state’, will explore how the development of the nation-
state involved different state responses to the transnational movement
of individuals and groups. In the third section, ‘Citizenship and coloni-
ality’, the relationship between the formation of the citizen and colonial
relations will be examined. The final section, ‘Securitised citizenship’,
asks whether we have come to the point where citizenship could under-
stood as ‘post-national’ or whether the claims for the deterritoralisation
of citizenship have to be revised in the light of the securitisation of both
citizenship and the nation. This chapter does not attempt to give an
overview of the vast and ever-expanding literature on citizenship – nor
can it give a thorough overview of the history of the development of
both the notion of rights and state membership. Rather, it poses a series
of questions which provoke and disrupt certain narratives on the place
and politics of the citizen.

Second class citizens?

One important limit to citizenship is shaped by its relationship to the

national. Despite liberal claims that citizenship is a universal concept –
culturally neutral and beyond cultural difference – it is often framed in
national terms. The nation is a creation, involving the production of a
sense of national belonging based on shared culture and identity. This
manufacture results in what Hannah Arendt describes as the conquest
of the state by the nation, whereby the potentially more neutral bureau-
cratic functions of the state are saturated by the culturally specific prac-
tices of national identity. As a result, we see the ‘transformation of the
14 Making Citizens

state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation’

(Arendt 1958: 275). Nationalism itself is often divided into ‘ethnic’
nationalism, where national identity is defined in terms of ethnicity
or race, and ‘civic’ nationalism, defined by common citizenship rather
than ethnicity. However, both frequently rest on the idea of a shared
national culture, and therefore both may be exclusionary (Berger 2007).
Thus, the state is involved in the construction of national culture and
values, which are defined through differentiation from other nations
and through the creation of national narratives and ‘invented tradi-
tions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Rituals and ceremony can play an
important role in this process. The narration of nation forms the basis
of understanding what it means to be a national: to hold citizenship of
the state. It is important to understand how these cultures of citizenship
emerge within historically specific contexts.
T. H. Marshall laid out the classic sociological approach to citizen-
ship, arguing that citizenship rights developed progressively from, first,
the acquisition of civil rights, which guaranteed freedom, then political
rights of legal justice and suffrage, and then social rights, which provided
welfare and economic security (Marshall 1950). However, this approach
is restricted by its failure to deal with inequalities other than those based
on class.2 Although Marshall’s understanding of citizenship is framed by
the idea of membership of a community, it fails to consider fully some
critical questions of membership – particularly who gets to be a citizen,
and what the terms are of membership and inclusion. These questions
are particularly key in relation to national communities and in consider-
ation of migration across national borders. By what criteria do residents
of a particular country gain citizenship rights and what determines
membership? In this chapter, I argue that, in the countries considered
in this book, the criteria for formal membership have emerged in – and
reflect – a context shaped by inequalities of race, gender, sexuality, class
and colonial relations. Furthermore, Marshall’s approach to citizenship is
too focused on stasis and is inadequate for dealing with the deterritorial-
ised rights and identities of a more mobile society (Castles and Davidson
2000; Urry 2000). Increased transnational movement raises questions
about the importance of citizenship. Many rights that are associated
with citizenship are being extended to resident immigrants without citi-
zenship, particularly under the influence of international human rights
discourse (Soysal 1995). Thus Seyla Benhabib argues that we are facing
a ‘disaggregation of citizenships’ where the formerly related dimensions
of citizenship (collective identity, privileges of political membership
and entitlement to social rights and benefits) are being ‘unbundled’, at
 Bounded Citizenship 15

least for those who have European membership (Benhabib 2008: 45).
However, before we explore the extent to which citizenship is moving
beyond the national scale, it is worth considering the historical context
in which it became so closely related to the state and to national member-
ship. Particular attention needs to be paid to the inequalities inherent
in national models of citizenship. Citizenship rights are not equally
conferred on all (membership is closed to some long-term residents
and some people born in the country). Furthermore, social inequalities
based on discrimination and exclusion shape how rights are understood
and exercised in different contexts. (Walby 1994: 379; Lister 2003: 1).
The progression outlined by Marshall (civil, followed by political, and
finally social citizenship) only represents the experience of white men in
England, not a more universalized category of citizen. Thus an analysis
of citizenship requires acknowledgement that rights do not arrive at one
moment for all people. Separate social groups gain aspects of citizenship
in different periods (and gain access to rights in different orders). This is
not merely a question of timing or temporality. Even when women, or
excluded groups such as African Americans, are considered to have full
citizenship rights, as Jeremy Waldron points out, ‘these subjects have
never come to bear those rights in the same way as their original bearers’
(Benhabib 2008: 112).
In addition, Marshall’s progression suggests that the attainment of
different rights is permanent – that rights once gained cannot be lost.
The retreat of the welfare state in Britain, as with other parts of Europe,
shows the process whereby social rights can be lost – for example, rights
to free higher education and other social security benefits. More starkly,
in the United States, the experience of former slaves and their offspring
shows how gains in rights are often followed by backlash and subse-
quent removal of rights. For example, Reconstruction, which followed
the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, gave African American men
economic and social freedoms and the right to vote for the first time
in 1867. However, these gains were reversed by the enactment of the
Jim Crow laws in the following decades. This same period saw the final
destruction of any notion of the citizenship rights of Native Americans.
Transformed from what the United States government deemed quasi-in-
dependent ‘Separate Nations’ to ‘Dependent Nations’, they were denied
both birthright citizenship and any right to naturalisation. They shared
exclusion from citizenship rights with other colonised groups across the
world. In the case of Native Americans, this was not redressed until the
Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 gave them formal citizenship, however
their access to rights remains weak (Glenn 2002: 25).
16 Making Citizens

Many texts on citizenship start with the distinction between citizen-

ship regimes which are constructed on a principle of jus sanguinis (right
to citizenship by descent) and jus soli (right to citizenship by virtue of
having been born in or residing in a territory). However, as Randell A.
Hansen points out, this is really a false dichotomy: ‘All liberal democ-
racies allow citizenship by descent and most have at least some provi-
sions for citizenship by residence’ (Hansen 2008: 3). In addition, Ayelet
Shachar argues that both involve birthright inheritance, which is funda-
mentally unequal in global terms (Shachar 2007: 371). There has been
considerable research on the gendered, sexualised and racialised nature
of citizenship, pointing out the ways which women, sexual minorities
and racialised groups have less secure claims to the rights that citizenship
supposedly endows3 (Barton 1993; Paul 1997; Donovan, Heaphy et al.
1999; Lister 2003; Lewis 2004; De Genova 2007; Lister 2007). For some
women (and some racialized or socially disempowered groups), before
striving to be recognized as citizens, they struggle to be recognized as
human beings of equal worth and dignity to others: what Arendt calls
‘the right to have rights’ (1958: 177). The majority of the world’s popula-
tion has very little opportunity to act as citizens in ‘civil society’, which,
in many states, is reserved for elites (Chatterjee 2005). This is not exclu-
sively a question of difference between the Global North and South.
The history of many Northern democratic states includes the exclusion
of racialised groups from civil society, political participation and social
protection. For example, in Australia, Aboriginals were not counted in
the census until 1967 – the same time that they also obtained equal
rights to vote (Tate 2009).
Citizenship, tied so closely to national identity, is often underpinned
by very normative notions of belonging and loyalty which are expected
of men and women in different ways and which can also be classed and
racialised (Anthias and Yuval-Davies 1989). As Isin argues, ‘The extraor-
dinary paradox of the nation-state is perhaps the fact that, although it
ideologically constitutes itself as a community of consent and choice
beyond family and kinship, it reproduces itself as yet another kind of
family through fraternization and birth’ (2012b: 456). The nation as
family is both heteronormative and deeply gendered – in the figure
of the brother suggested by the concept of fraternity, we see the male
subject of politics. The army is a central institution of the state (Foucault
2003). Participation in the military is often suggested as the ultimate
sign of loyalty for the citizen.4 Yet the gendered rules of participation
in the military, as well as the gendered construction of the military, are
clear (Nagel 1998; Enloe 2000). The state is also concerned with the
 Bounded Citizenship 17

production of economic value, and citizenship has often been dependent

on notions of economic independence which were gendered, classed
and racialised. In the context of US citizenship, Evelyn Nakano Glenn
argues that ‘white working men’s claim of independence (and therefore
of full rights of citizenship) was built on the subordination of people of
color and women’ (Glenn 2002: 29). The examples of both the military
and the idea of the family breadwinner demonstrate the way loyalty
is also constructed as both heteronormative (with only recent relative
loosening of the rules on homosexuality within the military) and based
on the assumption of the (male, heterosexual) able body. The notion
favoured by politicians of the ‘hard-working family’ encapsulates this.
Thus the question of the nation or state and soldiering demonstrate one
way in which the body of the citizen is important. The wrong bodies
(whether because of gender, sexuality, disability or ethnicity) can be
shut out from the rights and duties of citizenship. The ability to work,
to be politically active, and the right of mobility particularly (not only
the right to enter and leave countries) are all dependent on possessing
the right kind of body (Yuval-Davis 1997).
The complicated history of women’s access to citizenship member-
ship and rights, particularly in the case of married women’s rights,
demonstrates the continuing impact of second-class citizenship. This
is heightened where marriages occur across national boundaries and
where citizens of two different states have children. There certainly is
no globally universal model of what should happen when citizens of
different states marry. The citizenship of women has often proved to be
vulnerable as marriage to a non-citizen could entail automatic loss of citi-
zenship. Married women’s citizenship rights have often been dependent
on their husbands’. When they travel on their husbands’ passports with
no critical documents of their own – or require their husbands’ permis-
sion to travel internationally, this dependence can expose them to state-
lessness and be life-threatening. Despite attempts by the UN to stabilise
married women’s rights, the global situation remains very varied and
there is no effective enforcement mechanism for any provision of the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW)5 (Kerber 2005: 747–748). Even more complex is the
consideration of whether men and women have equal rights to pass on
citizenship in their country when they have a child with a citizen of
another country.
Historically, the citizenship of children has often been (and in many
cases still is) dependent on their father’s, not their mother’s citizenship
status, at least in cases where their parents are married and citizens of
18 Making Citizens

different countries. In many countries, it also depends on the marital

status of their parents, with different rights being given to children
born in or out of wedlock. Thus, the idea of ‘inheritance’ of citizenship
through birth and family is one mode through which the ‘ideal’ of the
heterosexual family as the model for the creation of the national and
the citizen is upheld (Berlant 1997: 19). This ideal is frequently racial-
ized. For example, an article on the ‘Immigration Law Portal’6 explains
the rules for people born outside the United States (when one or both
parents is a US citizen). The rules change depending on when the person
was born (with four different sets of regulations operating between 1935
and the present). Regulations are different for those whose mother is the
only US citizen than for those whose father is the only US citizen, and
for those born in and out of wedlock. The regulations reflect US mili-
tary presence in wars overseas and the need to respond to the birth of
children to American soldiers. Kerber argues that these practices reflect
gendered norms but also arise out of the racial state, with its concern
for children fathered by white slave owners ‘following the condition
of the mother’. So, with a similar logic, ‘birthright citizenship for chil-
dren born overseas to unmarried couples is transmitted only through
the mother’ (Kerber 2005: 738–739).7
The complexity of citizenship inheritance indicates the need to under-
stand citizenship as politically constructed and shaped by gendered,
racialised and classed practices. Citizenship in Western liberal states
remains structured by inequality. One way to understand this is by
looking at how citizenship regimes have emerged from the racial and
the imperial state (Goldberg 1993). The racialisation of citizenship rights
can be seen in the contemporary period with startling frankness in the
case of American Indians who are allowed free movement across the
Canadian-US border because the Jay Treaty of 1794. According to the
website of the Canadian embassy in the United States, individuals can
claim eligibility for American Indian status by providing proof that they
have ‘at least 50% American Indian blood’ by certification from an offi-
cial from an ancestral tribe – although another page on the website refers
to the need to have 51 per cent American Indian blood.8 This associa-
tion of ‘blood’ to rights is a very literal interpretation of ius sanguinis and
is reminiscent of the laws in US states like Virginia from the 1920s to
1960s which applied what was known as the ‘one drop rule’ (Domínguez
1986; Sweet 2005). The next section will further trace the ways racial-
ised and gendered citizenship has historically arisen, focussing on the
development of controls of mobility. Although the history of citizen-
ship can be traced through ancient Greek and Roman traditions and the
 Bounded Citizenship 19

formation of city politics, this tradition will not be discussed. Instead, I

will argue that contemporary citizenship must be understood as arising
out of Western nation-state formation and colonialism.

Mobility and the nation-state

That nations are imagined communities, narrated as if they have ancient

origins with fixed traditions passed down through generations in a
fantasy of continuity, is a well-established contention (Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1983; Bhabha 1990; Anderson 1991; Ranger 1996). Acts of imagi-
nation occur not just at moments of crisis, or in a nation’s ‘high’ formal
ceremonies, but are also repeated daily at the level of what Michael Billig
calls ‘banal’ nationalism – ‘habits of nationalism which create an idea
of “our” nation and produce citizens as nationals’ (Billig 1995: 6). It is
also worth remembering that this tying together of the nation-state and
the citizen is not inevitable or natural, despite the connotations of the
term ‘naturalisation’. The development of the concept of a citizenship
tied to a state – and a state based on nationality – arose out of a series of
historical contexts and conjunctures. Thus the national citizen is not an
ahistorical concept, nor as discussed above, is it neutral or universal.
Benedict Anderson (1991) has argued that the development of the idea
of the nation was dependent on the technological development of the
printing press. With the development of a ‘national’ literature and news,
it was possible to create a sense of the ‘we’ in the imagined commu-
nity – people with whom you had a sense of connection and belonging
even though you would never meet. In a less well-cited article, Anderson
(1994) also argues that the national was born of mobility and, in partic-
ular, exile.9 As people moved away from familiar homes to be educated,
to labour in industry, and to colonise or be remade as colonial subjects,
then the imagined ‘home’ of the national narration attained meaning.
The nation was recognised and created from looking back at it from
a distance. The development of the technological means for spreading
these narratives was critical to this process of formalising membership,
as were the nation-state’s gradual control of birth registration and of
movement across its borders.
For Foucault, the relationship of race to the state is tied into the develop-
ment of regulatory power in the form of biopolitics. The state constructs
race and difference so as to justify its surveillance and management of
the population in defence of the national race which is, by definition,
threatened by external, Othered races (Foucault 2003). This notion of
race and racial superiority could readily be used to justify colonialism
20 Making Citizens

and genocide. The national citizen is raced and gendered as well as

hetero-normative, imagined as a member of an intimate conventional
heterosexual family (Berlant 1997; Fortier 2008). A central concern of the
state is regulating the birth rate and the general health of the population
(Foucault 2003: 243). The national citizen is also required to have what
are deemed to be a healthy body and rational mind, thereby excluding
those with mental and physical disabilities. As citizenship is often criti-
cally concerned with labouring bodies producing for the state, differ-
ences of dis/ability, gender and sexuality are particularly important. To
explore this further, this section will contend that Western nation-state
citizenship developed out of a series of relationships between countries –
importantly, within the colonial frame, which was deeply gendered as
well as classed (McClintock 1995).
John Torpey traces the development of documentation to control
movement, tracking the means by which states ‘have successfully
usurped from rival claimants such as churches and private enterprises
the “monopoly of the legitimate means of movement”’ (Torpey 2000:
1). The history of state control of mobility demonstrates that the
motivation and means for regulation developed unevenly within and
across state borders. Identity documenting processes were crucial, as
was deciding who should and should not be citizens – and therefore
also a member of the nation. There is a shift in focus from disciplinary
power to technologies of biopolitical power which aim to control, order,
enumerate and survey the population (Foucault 2003). For Torpey, ‘the
notion of national communities must be codified in documents rather
than merely “imagined”’ (2000: 6). The history of the construction of
citizenship and attempts to control movement shows how nation-state
citizenship required the creation of clear lines between the citizen and
the non-citizen: lines which were also mapped onto the ‘us’ and ‘them’
of the nation.
Yet this history also reveals that this process could not adequately
account for the complexities of social and economic life or for some of
the counterforces and possible routes of resistance to the framing of the
nation-state. Some people spend all their lives close to where they are
born, meaning that their social, economic and political lives may revolve
around such a small geographical circuit that ‘the nation’ is rendered
meaningless (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). The politics, econo-
mies and cultures of the local, the city or the region (which may also
cross national boundaries) may have much more impact on individual
lives and identities than those at national level. Nation-states require a
territorial boundedness, yet people cannot be readily contained within
 Bounded Citizenship 21

the borders of the nation-state. They move to work and trade; they live
across the borders and develop human attachments which compli-
cate what ‘a national’ is. The messy and rich lives of individuals often
struggle to be contained within citizenship.10 Indeed Liisa Malkki argues
that, as a result of this failure to be contained neatly within the nation,
the border crosser can be seen as uprooted, disturbed and therefore
dangerous because of a loss of ‘moral bearings’ (1992: 33). Borders them-
selves can sometimes move or collapse, and people living in the liminal
border spaces experience a sudden loss of citizenship (Kerber 2005: 729).
This is particularly true in times of conflict and when empires break up.
In these situations, ethnic, religious or racialised differences frequently
shape the redrawing of borders.11
The history of the nation-state’s relationship with mobility is further
complicated by the different kinds of mobility it attempts to control –
or promote. For example, in an economic depression, the nation-state
may encourage mobility out of the nation space, whereas labour short-
ages frequently lead to recruitment inwards. Moreover, movement across
national borders was not always the primary focus of state action.
As Torpey points out, ‘The Magna Carta of 1215 had guaranteed to
merchants from other lands the right to come into and leave England at
will’ (Torpey 2000: 69). Here we see the relationship between class and
mobility (Anderson 2013). The phenomenon of class or wealth enabling
the crossing of national borders continues in the contemporary period,
particularly in situations where a sufficiently large investment can buy
citizenship12 (Ong 1999: 1). Similarly, the ‘smart border’ between the
United States and Canada facilitates the movement of pre-cleared busi-
ness travellers (Sparke 2006). In preindustrial England, mercantilist poli-
cies sought to control the movement of (some) subjects within a country
and prompted particular anxieties about keeping peasants tied to the
land and inhibiting the movement of ‘indigents’. This was achieved
through the 1662 Act of Settlement and Removal, which produced a
form of parish serfdom which prevented peasants from moving freely
from one parish to another (Walters 2002). William Walters argues that
in this act (even where it may not have been easy to enforce) we see the
hostility to foreign poor coming into parishes. In this context, nation-
ality did not define foreignness or ‘outsiderness’; parish or county did
(Walters 2002: 270).
However, eighteenth-century Europe saw the gradual movement away
from laws which inhibited internal mobility and towards imposing
control of entry by foreign – as in non-national – aliens. The Aliens
Act of 1793 sought to prevent dangerous French revolutionaries from
22 Making Citizens

entering England, whilst in 1795, the British partially repealed the Act
of Settlement and Removal of 1662, which had restricted the move-
ment of English subjects within the country (Torpey 2000: 66). These
shifts were also related to changes in welfare provision, through the
Poor Laws, which tied the poor to their parish and prevented their
movements around the country. By the 1830s, the necessary bureau-
cratic foundations were established that allowed wider-scale attempts
to record and control the entry of foreigners (Torpey 2000). Strict immi-
gration controls were first instituted in the Aliens Act of 1905, which
was particularly designed to restrict the entry of Jewish refugees from
repression and persecution in Eastern Europe. David Glover argues that
this was ‘the first recognisably modern law that sought permanently to
restrict immigration into Britain according to systematic bureaucratic
criteria that were initially administered and interpreted by a new kind
of public functionary: the immigration officer’ (2012: 1). The legisla-
tion was targeted at poorer immigrants (with steerage passengers the
focus of attention) and, as Glover contends, the legislation and cultural
debates that surrounded it meant that ‘the word “alien” lost its old
meanings derived from common law and became a national-racist
epithet’ (2012: 10).
As states developed the means of controlling entry and exit, as well as
the technologies for identity documentation, the reciprocal and exclu-
sive nature of state identity produced statelessness for those who were
undesired. Arendt argues that the French declaration of the ‘Rights of
Man’ was combined with a declaration of national sovereignty (Arendt
1958: 272). However, as I will contend below, the establishment of the
nation-states within Europe needs to be critically understood as the
action of states with imperial – as much as national – ambitions and
scope. The developing European focus on rights of equality, citizen-
ship and the rule of law did not preclude colonial rule, in which these
rights were denied to many. Discourses of difference and the ‘white
man’s burden’ justified colonial subjugation and the idea that rational
citizens should be biologically determined within a racial hierarchy. Of
course, strikingly similar arguments were made to exclude women (both
white and non-white) from citizenship (McClintock 1995). Nonetheless,
Partha Chatterjee argues that we can only understand the development
of the modern nation-state in the context of imperialism: ‘It was in the
course of the worldwide spread of the European empires that all forms
of techniques of modern governance were developed, transported and
adapted – not just in one direction’ (2005: 495). Through the development
of what Chatterjee calls ‘the rule of colonial difference’, justification for
 Bounded Citizenship 23

deviation from norms of modern governance was declared for subjects

under colonial rule at the very same time as the universal nature of
rights was declared. In a similar way, women, the disabled and some of
the working classes could also be excluded from these rights.13
The dominance of the nation-state as a worldwide reciprocal system
became clear in the aftermath of the First World War. In the shake-up of
nations, there were waves of migrants who found that no country was
willing to take them in. They were reduced to refugeedom:

Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once
they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been
deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the
earth. (Arendt 1958: 267)

Without the recognition or protection of a state, you have, Arendt

argues, no rights, no voice. This is what Giorgio Agamben (1998) calls
‘bare life’. For Agamben, as for Arendt, refugeedom exposes the way the
Rights of Man were appropriated by the nation, and exclusion from
the nation therefore means exclusion from rights. Refugees disturb the
nation-state system ‘because by breaking the continuity between man
and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of
modern sovereignty in crisis’ (Agamben 1998: 77).
The implication of the primacy of the nation-state in the protec-
tion of human rights means that, for individuals or groups who are
excluded from the nation, there is no protection of rights, so, outside
of any community which will claim and protect them, they are forced
into the ‘abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human’
(Arendt 1958: 297). The German Jews were the classic case of this: the
1936 ‘Law of the Retraction of Naturalisation and Derecognition of
German Citizenship’ was part of the movement towards genocide in
Germany (Torpey 2000: 132). The first step to claiming that Jews had no
right to live was to declare that they were not German – and therefore
that they did not have the right to protection by the state. Cultural
assimilation provided no real protection, becoming merely an obstacle
to be overcome (Gilroy 2005: 146). Jews in Germany, and eventually in
other European countries, were not alone in this experience of ‘dena-
tionalization’ as, at various points, other groups and individuals have
been excluded from nations. During the Second World War, US citizens
of Japanese origin found themselves placed in camps. In the early 1950s,
the singer Paul Robeson was declared ‘un-American’ for his political
beliefs. His passport was seized, and he was forbidden to leave the United
24 Making Citizens

States (Perucci 2009). In the 1970s, Africa saw a series of coerced mass
migrations because of the expulsion of ethnic groups, including Asians
from East Africa who were brought there by colonialism and then saw
their claims of citizenship questioned and contested by the British state
(Joseph 1999: 6). Arendt warns us of the tendency of the nation-state
system to ignore statelessness or to refuse to recognise the statelessness
of individuals who are repatriated to countries which will not protect
them and which are hostile to their rights. Many Western deportation
regimes force the return of people to states which are unwilling to recog-
nise and respect their rights.14 In addition, many poor and vulnerable
people, particularly women, find that claiming protection from another
state in the form of asylum is frequently impossible: Those who cannot
leave a hostile state are forced to stay and are, in effect, stateless in their
own countries (Kerber 2005).
The stranger (as well as the citizen) is constructed through technolo-
gies of recognition (including systems of identification), reception (such
as medical, language or knowledge testing), surveillance or expulsion
(including laws around reporting to police and deportation) (Ahmed
2000). For Iker Barbero (2012: 754), these processes create an ‘anti-
citizen’ who is not only outside of, but also threatening to, citizenship.
At the same time, citizenship and migration legislation produce ‘ille-
gality’. Those deemed illegal or dangerous are, as we shall see below,
increasingly confined to zones of abject ‘unliveability’ (Butler 1993;
Pannett 2011) where there is a denial of rights, silencing and, at times,
death. At moments of moral panic about, for example, illegal immigra-
tion or the idea of bogus asylum seekers – there is heightened focus
on those in zones of abjection, in ways which continue to deny them
agency or voice. In both instances, those deemed illegal or with uncer-
tain status (such as asylum seekers) are denied full civil or economic
rights (Pannett 2011: 38). Furthermore, as Derrida points out, asylum
seekers, as foreigners, are compelled to represent themselves and claims
for rights in a legal language which is foreign to them and is ‘the first
act of violence’ (Derrida 2000: 15). Acts of expulsion and deportation
laws constitute an important distinction between the citizen and non-
citizen, since only the citizen has truly permanent rights of settlement
(Anderson, Gibney et al. 2011). Yet William Walters points out that
there is not a clear history of when this link between citizenship and
the right to settle in a state’s territory emerged (Walters 2002: 256). As
we shall see, this is even more complicated when considering colonial
subjects and their rights to settle in the ‘mother’ country. Furthermore,
as governments seek to deport even their own citizens, particularly in
 Bounded Citizenship 25

situations where individuals hold dual citizenship,15 it becomes apparent

that not all citizens can feel equally assured of their ‘non-deportability’
(De Genova 2010). The ways a citizen is defined, as opposed to a non-
citizen can also lead to exclusion and insecurity for those who have
formal citizenship but feel that they cannot claim allegiance to or iden-
tify with representations of ideal citizen. So, for example, where ‘the
Muslim’ connotes danger and suspicion, Muslims’ claims to citizenship
in Western countries come under pressure: by way of calls for greater
performance of citizenship identity and loyalty. For instance, when,
after an act of terrorism by ‘Islamic extremists’, Muslim citizens and non-
citizens alike are encouraged to speak out in opposition to these acts – to
prove their loyalty – whilst still perhaps maintaining the idea that they
are connected to, and even responsible for, all acts by Muslims.
This section has explored the relationship between citizenship and
mobility. It has argued that, through the process of controlling some
forms of mobility and allowing others, in a form of biopolitics which is
racialised and gendered, the state creates both the citizen and the anti-
citizen. The tight association of citizen-nation-territory has profound
implications for those rejected by states and reduced to statelessness, or
forced to flee to other states. The next section will return to the question
of state and citizenship formation in the context of colonial power and
the racial state, drawing on a framework of governmentality.

Citizenship and coloniality

The control of borders – who can be admitted or expelled – is related to

the emergence of governmental power. For Foucault, governmentality
is distinguished from sovereign power by its concern with the manage-
ment of the population in order to direct the economy and maximise the
productive force or well being of the population. As sovereign power is
limited to the exercise of authority over the population, so governmen-
tality is related to a range of technologies, apparatuses and knowledge
(including biopower) to produce a citizenry of ‘docile bodies’ best suited
to the government policies (Foucault 1977). Expulsion or deportation
can be seen as the exercise of sovereign power, particularly when it is
directed at political opponents or dissidents. However, William Walters
argues that, through the nineteenth century, the targets of deportation
were increasingly those who were defined as socially or economically
undesirable, rather than mere political enemies (2002: 279). Deportation
and immigration control increasingly targeted populations that were
seen to threaten the welfare of the population because they were deemed
26 Making Citizens

to have deficient social characteristics (signalled by poverty, disease or

race) or because of their threat to a national labour market (particularly
in times of economic downturn). They were threatening because of who
they were, rather than because of any direct challenge to power.
However, I suggest that it is important to place any analysis of the
governmentality of borders and the control of citizens within a postco-
lonial frame. This implies consideration of how such governmentality
was developed by European colonial powers concerned with extending
their economic and political control over geographically disparate coun-
tries and continued by settler societies. For Walter Mignolo, the citizen-
ship born in eighteenth-century Europe was the racialised creation of an
‘ethno-class’ of European, Christian and white bourgeoisie who sought
to replace a ‘community of faith’ – controlled by church and monarchy –
with a ‘community of birth’ controlled by the nation-state. This built on
earlier colonial ideas of a racial concept of humanity as developed in
Europe to justify the colonisation of the Americas (Mignolo 2013). Thus,
this history of coloniality and racialization is central to understanding
citizenship. For Foucault, the emergence of biopolitics (which he suggests
is a development of the seventeenth century), arises where governance
is directed at defending ‘society against all the biological threats posed
by the other race, the sub-race, the counter-race that governance itself
brings into existence’ (Foucault 2003: 62–71). This state racism lies at
the heart of biologics, where the state is the protector of the purity of the
superior race (Foucault 2003: 81).
The dual developments of the nation-state and ideas about popu-
lation governance through border control were shaped by and took
place in the context of colonial relations. White settler colonies in the
Americas, Australia and New Zealand were based on a citizenship model
from which original ‘native’ populations were excluded. These states
were shaped by openness to (the right kind of) immigration, which
was needed for labour, but their histories also demonstrate the ways in
which citizenship was deeply racialised. The United States, classically
portrayed as a nation of immigrants, had a long history of openness
to immigration from Europe (apart from some attempts to inhibit the
settlement of radicals from France and Ireland) but suspicion of non-
European migration. Moreover, the discourse of the ‘nation of immi-
grants’ fails to account for both the forced migration of slaves and the
experience of forced migration and displacement of Native Americans.
As Malcolm X argued, ‘We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock ... we were not
brought here to be citizens’.16 The freedoms and rights endowed to citi-
zens within the United States were denied to slaves, Native Americans,
 Bounded Citizenship 27

and others deemed ‘too foreign’ and unable to be absorbed into the
nation. In the Naturalisation Act of 1790, naturalisation was limited to
‘free white persons’ (Glenn 2002: 24). An associate justice in Virginia
described the situation of slaves just before the Civil War in America:
‘This race has been by all nations of Europe regarded as subjects of
capture or purchase; as subjects of commerce or traffic’ (Kerber 2005:
733). These limits on the freedom of slaves included the absolute lack of
the freedom of movement, a central feature of citizenship. Once slaves
were freed in the United States after the Civil War they ‘moved around
as if to prove that they were no longer stateless’ (Kerber 2005: 733).
The 1868 Fourteenth Amendment conferred partial citizenship
rights on former slaves. It also gave all citizens the right to move freely
(without taxation) from state to state within the nation. But American
citizenship was racialised and excluded both blacks and other aliens
considered too racially different, notably the Chinese. Former slaves had
fewer rights, and they were subjected to segregation and exclusion from
political rights. The1868 Burlingame Treaty between the United States
and the Chinese imperial government permitted Chinese nationals to
immigrate freely into the country but removed any rights to naturali-
sation. This was followed in 1880 with a new treaty which gave the
United States the right to limit the entry of the Chinese to the country.
From 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the bringing in of Chinese
workers as contract labourers was banned. (Torpey 2000: 97). Citizenship
was frequently tied to land ownership and, in eleven states, Chinese
migrants were banned from owning land. American women marrying
Chinese men would lose their US citizenship (Glenn 2002: 26).
The United States continued to apply a racialised lens to the issue of
immigration and its attempts to manage the population. In 1921 the
first ‘national origins’ quota was introduced which followed the prin-
ciple of preserving the racial state as it was in 1910. Thus immigration
was restricted on a monthly basis to a small percentage of each nation-
ality seen in the 1910 census (this was then pushed back to the 1890
census which was more ‘white’ Nordic, than the more Eastern European
profile offered in the later census) (Torpey 2000: 119). Kerber argues
that ‘Immigration restriction had in it an element of the restoration
of some notion of equilibrium, as though the balance among exotic
others admitted into the American population had to be reset’ (Kerber
2005: 733). This pattern of racialisation was shared in other white
settler societies. A series of policies aimed at preserving ‘White Australia’
was implemented from the 1850s to the 1970s. As Torpey points out,
this state management of the racialised population depended on both
28 Making Citizens

technologies of the census and national identity documentation: ‘docu-

ments such as passports and identification cards that help determine
‘who is in’ and ‘who is out’ of the nation here took centre stage and thus
became an enduring and omnipresent part of our world’ (Torpey 2000:
121).
However, Torpey and others often fail to examine fully how the
modern development of the nation-state with a territorially bounded,
and importantly a racialised perception of citizenship, grew out of
European colonialism. Empire and colonial subjecthood relate in
complex ways to questions of citizenship. Under the rule of colonial
difference (Chatterjee 2005), it was possible to be a subject of the empire
without many crucial citizenship rights – particularly rights to partici-
pate in the political process and rights to travel to and reside in the
‘mother’ country. Radhika Viyas Mongia insists it was in the colonial and
postcolonial responses to ‘race migration’ that ‘precipitated the emer-
gence of nationality as a staunch territorial attachment’ (Mongia 1999:
528). She argues that, in the case of the British Empire, it was concern
about the ‘free’ migration of racialised colonial subjects to Britain or
white settler colonies that:

generates a state monopoly over migration practices and, via the

passport, gives us the specifically modern imbrications of the state,
the nation and race, an imbrication that produces race as a ‘national
attribute’, codified in the state document of the passport. (Mongia
1999: 528–529)

Mongia examines the political and policy debates within Canada and
with the Viceroy in India, between 1906 and 1915, which discussed
attempts to block the free migration of Indians to Canada in a way which
could not be seen as racist or, more importantly,17 violating the idea
that all British subjects had freedom of movement across the Empire.
Through these debates, Mongia tracks the emergence of the category
of national, both in the sense of national (as opposed to colonial)
interests and also national culture – where other British subjects could
be regarded as too culturally different (as well as unable to cope with
different national climate, an idea which has biological underpinnings).
The eventual policy solution to this perceived problem of Indian migra-
tion to Canada was a bureaucratic fix which declared that new arrivals
to Canada had to come directly from their original countries (this effec-
tively banned Indians as there were no direct ships sailing from India to
Canada). Mongia argues that it was:
 Bounded Citizenship 29

through a recourse to the ‘national’ that the principle of the ‘complete

freedom for all British subjects to transfer themselves from one part
of His Majesty’s Dominions to the other’ was abandoned and the
category of ‘British subject’ was rendered available for division and
differentiation. (Mongia 1999: 553)

For Mongia, the passport ‘generates nationality as the intersection

between the nation and the state’ in a way which also conceals how the
national identity is also a racial one (Mongia 1999: 553).18
At the dawning of the postcolonial period, Robin Cohen suggests that
British citizenship was given to residents of the UK through a ‘legislative
sleight of hand’ in the 1948 British Nationality Act which established
the status of ‘Citizen of the UK and colonies’ (Cohen 1994: 7).19 This
new category bolstered ‘the myth of a racially exclusive British iden-
tity’ (Cohen 1994: 14) by distinguishing mostly white UK residents from
the older colonial category of ‘British subject’, who also had rights to
enter the UK and also from ‘British subjects without citizenship’, who
were mostly from India and Pakistan and were now subject to immi-
gration controls. Further legislation in 1962 and 1971 were used to
prevent postcolonial immigration to Britain and preserve the idea of
white Britishness. The 1971 Immigration Act introduced the concept of
‘patriality’ which constructed ‘a legal boundary between the colonizers
and the colonized’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993: 45). This Act gave
right of abode in Britain only to citizens of the UK and colonies and
commonwealth citizens who had a parent or grandparent who had been
born in the UK – thus restructuring right of entry and abode on essen-
tially racialised grounds (Cohen 1994: 18). The 1981 Immigration Act
for the first time restricted ius soli as a principle for membership of the
UK as people born in Britain of non-British parents no longer automati-
cally acquired British citizenship. For Harry Goulbourne, the introduc-
tion of descent and blood asserted an ‘essentially racial definition’ of
Britishness (Goulbourne 1993: 181; see also Tyler 2010).
In a similar way in the United States, following the Spanish-American
war of 1898, the category of ‘noncitizen national’ was created to recog-
nise the status of people who ‘lived under the United States flag without
the full range of constitutional protections that the flag normally carries’
(Kerber 2005: 734). Thus colonial relations are defined in such a way that
people living in some territories were fully citizens while others (espe-
cially racialised others) living in colonies were not and could-not-be citi-
zens, they were ‘designed’ to be ‘failed citizens’ (Tyler 2010). Nation and
state are entwined in such a way that those who are excluded define the
30 Making Citizens

citizen. So, for example, white British residents residing in the UK were
given financial incentives in the twentieth century to emigrate to self-
governing parts of the empire. At times colonial citizens were drawn into
Britain to work, but found that, despite being British subjects, they were
not always welcome, or made to feel ‘at home’ in the ‘mother country’
(Paul 1997). In order to understand these processes of exclusion, this
section has outlined how it is essential to draw out their colonial and
postcolonial histories. The border is a key site where distinction is made
between migrants – figured as outsiders – and citizens. The following
section will examine how borders can be taken as a particularly critical
location for the enactment of citizenship as a differentiating practice
and also the implications of the idea of nation as a home which needs
to be protected.

Securitised citizens

If the uprooted or mobile are deemed to be dangerous to the territori-

alised state (as suggested above), the place where this mobility is first
apprehended is at the border. I will argue in further chapters that an
important element of many citizenship ceremonies is the notion of
‘welcoming’ new citizens and of claims that particular nations or commu-
nities have always shown a welcome to newcomers (Darling 2013). Yet,
at the national border there is a less ‘homely’ welcome – in the ‘buffer
zone’ (Isin and Rygiel 2007: 191) in which people can be processed and
where the immigrant official or border guard demands that the traveller
accounts for their identity (Derrida 2000: 29). Here travellers are scru-
tinised as a possible threat to the state. This scrutiny at the border, as
well as at the point of issuing visas and so forth, has become normalised
to the extent that ‘we now expect interrogation rather than welcome’
(Salter 2006: 171). The culture of scepticism has become routine border
practice and for some, such as asylum seekers, continued far beyond the
border (Pannett 2011).
Mary Douglas’ work has alerted us to the importance of borders and
boundaries in creating both anxiety and identity. For Douglas, borders
are particularly important in the social maintenance of purity (Douglas
1996). In this context, certain kinds of border crossings can cause fear
and anxiety. It is not hard, when considering the discourse around
‘uncontrolled’ immigration, to find metaphors of danger and pollution.
It is common for immigrants to be referred to as potentially ‘flooding’20
a country, leaving the citizens at threat of being ‘swamped’. Undesired
immigrants are often perceived to be ‘dirty’, failing to follow systems of
 Bounded Citizenship 31

hygiene and rubbish collection.21 Borders can be threatened or weak-

ened by the supposed flood of immigrants. They can also become ‘leaky’.
Governmentality at the border aims to make it stronger by policing
the movement of people. However, borders must not be impenetrable.
There is a filtering required which facilitates the passage of some, whilst
it impedes others. Thus the border is a moment of producing citizen-
ship and identifying the ‘good’ versus the ‘bad’ migrant. The state
utilizes a range of technologies to ‘manage’ immigration, to identify
‘good’ migrants and to prevent potential ‘bad’ migrants from entering
(see (Anderson 2013; Darling 2013) for a discussion of the good citizen
defined in contrast to the failed citizen). Generally, the ‘good’ migrant is
economically productive, is not perceived as presenting a burden on the
state and welfare system and is not seen as ‘too different’ from the imag-
ination of nation and its citizenry which has been created. Alternatively,
the good migrant can be read as adding to ‘multicultural’ richness in a
way which is perceived as non-threatening (Schinkel and van Houdt
2010). This discourse of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrant maps onto other
polarised narratives, such as the good Muslim/bad Muslim described by
Mahmood Mamdani (2004). The famous declaration of George Bush
that ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ exemplifies
this binary. This is both a biopower, directed at the internal population
and a Zoēpolitics, primarily directed at those outside the state. Willem
Schinkel argues that normative discourses of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizen
or migrant are also combined with processes to identify the citizen from
the non-citizen – the valid member from the enemy/alien who can be
cast out to ‘bare life’ (Schinkel 2010: 156).
The association of certain forms of mobility with danger has become
heightened as a result of increased focus on terrorism and its suggested
links to immigration. Mark Salter, drawing on Agamben, argues that
‘[T]he border is a permanent state of exception’ – the place where the rule
of law is suspended by the sovereign’ (Salter 2008: 365). For Salter, the
border is a space where the contract between the sovereign and citizen
or sovereign and traveller are reconsidered and redrawn in the decision
to allow entry or expel. (Salter 2008: 373). At the border, the citizen
is made a stranger until documentation makes him/her sufficiently
knowable and recognizable as a citizen – or alien. It is in the everyday
bureaucratic acts of allowing, or refusing entry, issuing passports, visas
and decisions on refugee status that the population is governed and
the act of mobility is something that has to be justified and accounted
for. It is worth stressing that sovereignty at the border is engaged in a
racialising process (Butler 2004: 68). Acts of filtering are often shaped
32 Making Citizens

by perceptions of who is dangerous and safe based on ethnic or racial

models. Borders are not fortress walls which block all movement – rather
they are designed to be membranes which categorise and filter the
desirable from the undesirable traveller (Sparke 2006). Whilst regional
agreements have made some borders appear invisible (for example the
Schengen Agreement within Europe), others have been much more
carefully policed.22 Wendy Brown points to the ‘fundamental tensions
between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and
reinscription’ in nation-state borders (Brown 2010: 7–8). She tracks this
tension in particular in the ‘frenzied building’ of new physical bounda-
ries and walls across the world. However, border work is not done only
at the spatially limited external international border. States, through
a process of ‘rebordering’ (Andreas 2002), have developed an increas-
ingly sophisticated and multi-faceted apparatus of surveillance within
and also outside of nation borders to police legal and illegal mobili-
ties. These include identity and/or passport checking at point-of-contact
with medical services, the education system and by travel companies
(Walters 2004).23 Since the UK 1981 Nationality Act which took away
automatic citizenship for those born in Britain, Imogen Tyler argues that
‘maternity wards across Britain have become “border zones” through
which “aliens” enter Britain’ (Tyler 2010: 69). Illegality can be conferred
on babies with their first breaths. For powerful nations, border practices
can be extended to the territory of other countries. For instance, the
United States has border controls set up in Ireland for ‘pre-screening’ of
travellers to the United States, with similar arrangements at Calais for
entering the UK. The dominance of the United States means that it can
also change the border practices of other states, through for instance
insisting on specific documentation for re-entry, which has led Canada
to adjust its own practices (Muller 2010).24
Alongside the increased securitisation of internal and external
borders, Isin argues that the ‘neurotic citizen’ has developed – a citizen
which governs itself through managing responses to risks and anxieties
(Isin 2004). Anxiety has been constructed as the norm for citizens and
governance has become about managing or tranquilising those anxie-
ties – the management of unease. As Brian Massumi puts it, ‘insecurity
is the new normal’ (Massumi 2005: 31). The focus of the anxiety of the
neurotic citizen is, as will be discussed further below, the homeland,
the nation as home threatened from outsiders and potential enemies
within. Massumi considers the colour-coded terror alert system which
the United States Department for Homeland Security introduced in
2002. The colours, following a traffic-light code suggest the levels of
 Bounded Citizenship 33

risk. These range from low to severe with no colour for safe: ‘Safe, it
would seem, has fallen off the spectrum of perception’ (Massumi 2005:
32). This system was designed to enable the government to calibrate
the levels of nervousness of the population and to combat fear fatigue.
Whatever the colour, more or less constant vigilance is asked of the
citizen. Thus the neurotic citizen’s unease is managed through a range
of governmental technologies which both create a sense of crisis and
threat but also seek to relieve the fears that have been produced, rather
than action which resolves the problem. Wendy Brown sees a similar
‘Wizard of Oz’ quality in the new nation-state building projects, in
that they ‘stage both sovereign jurisdiction and an aura of sovereign
power’ even while they may not achieve the protection they promise
(Brown 2010: 25–26). Discomfort can also be transferred to others – by
demonstrating that asylum seekers, for example, are not treated in a
way which would suggest the state was ‘soft’ or giving comfort (Fortier
2010; Darling 2011). The home/nation and border are two critical sites
of these productions of a sense of risk and the governance of risks (thus
the concept of ‘homeland security’). The home is constructed as the
ultimate space of security and the domain for managing anxiety. But
(the wrong kind of) homes can also be seen as a threat to the security of
the nation, of fostering the enemy within who lacks the proper cultural
attributes of ‘home’. Matter out of place is dirty and polluting and this
threat is transferred to the wrong kind of people in nation. Hence the
need for governments to show that they can defend the nation against
‘too much’ immigration. This is what Andrew Baldwin calls a ‘future
conditional’ threat25 – something that may emerge if mass migration is
allowed (Baldwin 2012).26
The Australian government has been engaged in a range of activities
which seek to show that they are ‘managing’ the threat posed by asylum
seekers. In December 2013, this included the publishing of a ‘code of
conduct’ which all asylum seekers would be required to sign. The short
code largely insists that the asylum seekers abide by the law and follow
instructions given to them by the police and other government offi-
cials. But it sets out three specific conditions which reveal the partic-
ular ways in which asylum seekers are perceived as a threat to intimate
home spaces. The first admonishes the asylum seeker: ‘You must not
make sexual contact with another person without that person’s consent,
regardless of their age; you must never make sexual contact with someone
under the age of consent’ The second tells them ‘You must not harass,
intimidate or bully any other person or group of people or engage in any
antisocial or disruptive activities that are inconsiderate, disrespectful
34 Making Citizens

or threaten the peaceful enjoyment of other members of the commu-

nity’. Whilst the third insists: ‘You must not refuse to comply with
any health undertaking provided by the Department of Immigration
and Border Protection or direction issued by the Chief Medical Officer
(Immigration) to undertake treatment for a health condition for public
health purposes’.27
William Walters calls this ‘domopolitics’ where the relationship
between home, nation and security are reconfigured in a way which
‘rationalizes a series of security measures in the name of a particular
conception of home’ (Walters 2004: 241). This domopolitics requires
systems of classification and management – a form of governmentality
which identifies some as privileged travellers or desired (good) migrants
and others as dangerous, bogus, illegal and potentially polluting (Darling
2013). Amy Kaplan (Kaplan 2003), in an article which explores the
emergence of the concept of ‘homeland security’ in the United States
asks: ‘Does the word homeland itself do some of the cultural work of
securing national borders? Might it also produce a kind of radical inse-
curity?’ She argues that the concept of ‘home’ is structurally reliant on
its opposition to the idea of ‘foreign’. But one might also argue that
the concept of home also relies on the notion of its abject – that which
is repudiated in order to define and construct the homely norm. The
process of securitization and governance through insecurity enables
the erasure of certain rights in defence of the home. Rather than be
allowed to enter homely spaces, asylum seekers and others deemed
to be a threat to the safety of the home (particularly insurgents, ‘non-
legal’ combatants) are consigned to abject zones where their rights are
suspended and they remain unseen and unheard – and rendered ‘inex-
istent’ (Isin and Rygiel 2007: 189) and non-political (Darling 2013).
These include both off-shore detention facilities such as Guantanamo
Bay and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea (used by the Australian
government) and also unofficial transit camps where undocumented
migrants gather waiting to attempt border crossings (Isin and Rygiel
2007: 193). At the same time, efforts are made to ensure the continued
flow of capital, material goods and ‘cosmopolitan’ travellers (Stasiulis
and Ross 2006). Homes are designed to be places of comfort and secu-
rity – they are places into which you may invite outsiders, but you
retain the right to exclude or expel them. Of course who is deemed to
be the desired traveller is at least partly defined by who they are not –
the boundaries of citizenship and privileged traveller are defined alike
by the repudiated abject in the form of those represented as bogus
asylum seeker, illegal immigrant or terrorist (Tyler 2006: 186). For
 Bounded Citizenship 35

Tyler, this process of abjection is not only defining of the citizen, but
also comforting:

For the creation and exclusion of this imaginary bad object brings
‘us’ closer together. The mobilization of the asylum seeker as ‘our’
national hate figure bestows ‘us’ with a collective identity and in
doing grants ‘us’ the pleasures of secure identification: we are British,
we have a way of life, and we must protect it. (Tyler 2006: 192)

It’s also worth noting (and often overlooked in discussions of domo-

politics), that the concept of home generally implies a set of gendered,
heteronormative relations. As feminist theorists have long been aware,
claims for who should be in and who should control the space of home
and the role of the family often have an exclusionary and oppressive
force. Threats to this ‘intimate public sphere’ (Berlant 1997: 1) can
provoke anxiety. While domopolitics focuses on the state as home, it is
concerned with the preservation and reproduction of only certain kinds
of home. Irene Gedalof, in her examination of the UK government’s
2001 white paper ‘Secure Borders, Safe Havens’ is concerned with how
certain kinds of homes and family relations are regarded as suspicious
and threatening to the national space. Even the structuring of the paper,
where marriages and family visits are included in the same chapter as
‘war criminals’, provokes anxiety. The discussion of arranged marriages
is intermingled with that of ‘bogus’ marriage, suggesting they are equally
suspect (Gedalof 2007).
In addition to the construction of these internal and external borders,
there has been a proliferation of adjustments to Western nations’ rules
and regulations regarding immigration and citizenship. This is part of
what Brian Turner has called the ‘enclave society’ where literal as well as
metaphorical walls surround social groups of very different scales – from
the gated community or elderly residential home to the nation (Turner
2007).28 Turner notes that ‘while there may be an increasing global flow
of goods and services, there is an emerging parallel ‘immobility’ regime
exercising surveillance and control over migrants, refugees and other
aliens (Turner 2007: 289).29 This ‘immobility regime’ requires continual
adjustment of state legislation concerning immigration and citizenship.
However, it is worth remembering that, under conditions of expedited
removal and extraordinary rendition, some categories of ‘aliens’ can
be moved remarkably quickly by the state (Sparke 2006). Aiwha Ong
(1999: 9) points out that immobility in terms of ‘being stuck’ may well
be the experience of many poorer citizens of Western States with limited
36 Making Citizens

capacities to move and prosper. One might consider incarceration, with

its classed and raced profile as the most extreme version of this immo-
bility. The technology of exclusion and the ‘immobility regime’ works
also to exclude migrants from particular rights resulting in an ‘immigra-
tionalization’ of social welfare and citizenship (Lewis 2004: 29).

Conclusion

This chapter has pointed out that citizenship membership, as has

been developed within the legal framework of nation-states, is neither
inevitable nor neutral. Rather, this form of citizenship emerges out of
a specific European colonial history, which is racialised, gendered and
classed. It is marked by governmentality, which is concerned with
controlling the populations within the nation-state and empire and
with managing regimes of both mobility and immobility across the
borders of the nation/empire. Coloniality, according to Walter Mignolo,
has overridden notions of Humanity with that of the citizen, who can
only exist in the context of the exclusion of others (Mignolo 2013).
The citizen has been shaped in part by who s/he is not. The chapter
has explored the gendered, sexualised and racialised contours of citi-
zenship and membership rules. It has also shown how the state has a
relationship to mobility which has arisen out of economic and political
concerns, as well as colonial processes. Finally I have traced how, despite
increased mobility and deterritorialisation, renewed attention has been
paid in the last few decades to both nation-state and internal borders
and the movements of individuals across them. This has included the
drawing in of new agents in the filtering and surveillance required in
bordering activities (such as private landlords or healthcare providers).
Justification for this state activity has relied on the formation of domo-
politics, which produces the nation as a home under threat. This also
involves the creation of a neurotic citizen who responds to a sense of
risk and threat from the ‘anti-citizen’ and who is then reassured through
techniques of frontier control, surveillance and expulsion.
This approach to citizenship membership will be taken forward in
the rest of the book. It poses specific questions for our understanding
of the moment of the celebration for new citizens acquiring citizenship.
In particular it asks how the citizenship ceremonies, and other proc-
esses involved in acquiring citizenship as an immigrant (such as citizen-
ship testing for example) function as a form of domopolitics? To what
extent are these practices shaped in such a way that provides reassur-
ance for the neurotic citizen? What account do the ceremonies give of
 Bounded Citizenship 37

the nature of the nation-state for which they are awarding membership?
What does membership come to mean in these ceremonies? And how is
the idea of the good citizen – and the anti-citizen – constructed through
the ceremonies? The next chapter will examine the ceremonies for new
citizens in the United States, Canada and Australia. It will explore how
these ceremonies can be understood as a form of rite of passage into
citizenship as well as tracing how the idea of the nation accounted for
in the ceremonies relies on particular accounts of national history in all
three contexts which silence the experience of states as formed through
histories of domination and exclusion.
3
Taking the Oath

Say it like you mean it!

Canadian citizenship judge

Introduction

In the impressive, highly decorative and heavily gilded art deco

Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, the host of the naturalisa-
tion ceremony welcomes the people who have come to receive their
American citizenship: ‘America becomes a better place because of you.
Everybody, thank you for becoming citizens’. This is greeted by clapping
and whoops from the audience.1 In the less elaborate surroundings of
the Brooklyn, New York courthouse, which lack the razzmatazz of the
California ceremony, the presiding judge declares, ‘When I look at this
gathering, I see the beautiful smiles of America’.
The idea of a country built on a history of immigration is, as we shall
see, a repeated theme which runs through the ceremonies observed in
the United States, Canada and Australia, three former settler colonies
of the British Empire. However, this does not mean that the position of
the immigrant is always a valued one, free of hostility and suspicion. All
three countries also have ongoing political debates about what types of
immigrants should be allowed to enter the country, how immigrants’
cultural differences – and potentially divided loyalties – may or may not
pose a threat to the country, and how to address undocumented migra-
tion. Emphasis on immigrant contribution in the United States also
denies the contributions and deprivations of those who were brought
to the United States as slaves and those who inhabited the land before
the ‘settlers’. In a similar way, both Canada and Australia have histories

38
 Taking the Oath 39

of immigration policies which exercised racialised exclusions and suspi-

cion of migrants. Like the United States, they have built myths of the
‘nation of immigrants’ in ways that can silence the histories and deny
the citizenship rights of indigenous communities.
This chapter will explore the different approaches taken to these issues
by examining citizenship ceremonies in each of these three countries.
The previous chapter argued for the need to understand citizenship in
the historical context of the emergence of the nation-state out of Western
imperialism. This chapter, which examines the ceremonies from three
postcolonial settler nations which are often seen as classic immigration
nations’, will explore the ways in which these histories are represented in
the ceremonies. It will also examine how citizenship and the process of
immigration and naturalisation are constructed in the ceremonies. The
United States, Australia and Canada have a long history of conducting
ceremonies to celebrate the creation of new citizens and as a public
arena for the taking of an oath or pledge of loyalty. They have provided
influential models for the more recent development of such events in
Europe – three of which (the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands) will be
explored in the next chapter. Yet, very little scholarly attention has been
paid to citizenship ceremonies in general, and no previous studies have
carried out an international comparative study in these countries. Based
on observations of ceremonies, and interviews conducted with officials
involved in organising and presenting at them, the chapter will consider
how the ceremonies function as ‘rites of passage’, initiating participants
as citizens of a nation. It will also examine how these events reveal and/
or obscure the ways in which processes of naturalisation figure in citizen-
ship regimes. I suggest that the ceremonies and the ways they position
new citizens and construct national membership can shed light on how
citizenship in general is being understood as well as how immigrants to
the nation are regarded. In many ways these ceremonies may be seen as
rather trivial occasions in the general scheme of considering immigra-
tion, refugeedom, citizenship and rights. Nonetheless these occasions,
created by states to celebrate the moment of endowing national citizen-
ship, can shed light on the how membership and citizenship is under-
stood. They can also tell us about the narration of nation.
The analysis in this chapter is based on observations three research
assistants and I made in the United States, Canada and Australia.
Having conducted extensive fieldwork in the UK, which is explored
in the following chapters, I was interested to know how the UK cere-
monies differed from, or were similar to, those in other parts of the
world. I was particularly interested in those countries which I knew
40 Making Citizens

had influenced the design of the UK ceremonies, as well as exploring

ceremonies in other parts of Europe (which will be discussed in
Chapter 4). I was able to get funding2 for a small project in which
researchers, already located in the countries concerned, observed a
citizenship ceremony. The researchers took detailed notes on what
they saw (having been given instructions about how to and what I
was particularly interested in). They conducted interviews with offi-
cials responsible for conducting or organising the ceremonies. They
also took photos, largely of the buildings in which the ceremonies
were held, which gave added detail to their descriptions. The obser-
vation in Oakland California (near San Francisco) was conducted by
Bethan Harries. Nadia Kidwai undertook the observation in Winnipeg,
Canada and also interviewed a citizenship judge, while Katherine
Jones interviewed an official and observed a ceremony in Yarra City
(near Melbourne). In addition, I was able to attend two centres for
the ceremonies in New York. At Federal Plaza in Manhattan, which
houses a field office of the United States Citizenship and Immigration
Service (USCIS), I observed two ceremonies on a single day and had the
opportunity to speak to most of the officials involved. I also attended
a ceremony in Brooklyn’s law court and met with officials and a citi-
zenship judge in Mississuaga, near Toronto.
Inevitably, these observations can only tell us about the conduct of
those ceremonies in those places on that particular day. Nonetheless,
there is sufficient uniformity in the way the ceremonies were conducted,
as also confirmed by the officials, that we can take them as generally
representative. In fact, in many ways, this limited survey (including the
countries considered in the following chapter) demonstrates that, even
internationally, citizenship ceremonies tend to follow a fairly uniform
pattern. They generally take place in similar kinds of public buildings
displaying familiar national symbols – flags and heads of state – with
comparable officials and dignitaries presiding over them. In terms of
the format of the event, all of the ceremonies focus centrally on the
taking of an oath or pledge of allegiance and the distribution of certifi-
cates of citizenship. And all finish with the playing and singing of the
national anthem. Whilst these elements will be discussed in more detail
below, they form an internationally recognised lexicon of and often
what is most interesting are the incidental remarks and practices which
are wrapped around the more expected elements. The events do have
varying atmospheres – which can range from fairly formal and official,
to relaxed and even entertaining. They also produced a range of narra-
tions of nation. These differences, while seemingly trivial, nonetheless
 Taking the Oath 41

suggest varying approaches to national culture and attitudes towards

immigration and citizenship, as well as national identity.
This chapter will explore how, whilst there are many similarities in the
ceremonies in the three countries, there are also significant variations.
These differences centre on the possibility of representing some of the
more contentious aspects of national history, particularly with regard
to those who occupied the land before colonial invasion and the long
histories of exclusion from citizenship of racialised groups. Although all
of the ceremonies claim a welcome and openness to newcomers, they
deal differently with questions of diversity and the ongoing relation-
ships that immigrants may have to their countries of origin. Finally, the
oaths themselves will be examined, raising questions about what they
symbolise and if they signal the ultimate transformation from foreigner
to fellow citizen. It is through this analysis of both ‘silences’ and expres-
sions about the value of certain immigrants that we can see national
specificities about who is a good citizen, to be welcomed into the family
of the nation, and who should be repulsed.

Nations of immigrants

The national narratives that are presented in the citizenship ceremonies

in the United States, Canada and Australia all rely at least partially on
the notion of a nation of immigrants. In many cases, the new citizens
are presented as the archetypal citizen in the immigrant nation. They
are regarded as those who, through what is constructed as their choice
to become a citizen of a particular country, have affirmed the status
of a nation in which the immigrant dream persists. As the host of the
Manhattan ceremony puts it: ‘Perhaps your greatest responsibility is to
remind native-born citizens what being an American is about’. In a video
which is shown at the beginning of the ceremonies in America, the US
immigration services director starts a presentation on Ellis Island, stating:

The United States is a nation of immigrants. We have always been

a nation of immigrants, we’re the only country in the world that
opens its arms as wide as we do to immigrants. I think the new blood,
the new culture, the new experiences which come to this nation are
what make us different and are what make America the country it is
today.

Of course this narrative of ‘arms open wide’ to immigrants belies a

much more complicated history that overlooks the presence of Native
42 Making Citizens

Americans who lived in America before the colonialists and immigrants.3

Also silenced is the history of the forced immigration of slaves.4 Finally, a
long history of racialised immigration policies contradicts the expansive
suggestion of ‘arms open wide’. In the United States, for example, the
Exclusions Act of 1882 prohibited the naturalisation of Chinese immi-
grants and controlled their entry into the country to such an extent that
they sometimes spent years living on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay
(the equivalent to Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay) (Jaggers, Gabbard
et al. 2014: 5). In 1917, the ‘Asiatic-Barred Zone’, which prohibited migra-
tion from China, India, the Middle East and the Philippines, was estab-
lished. In addition, there have been quotas in immigration since 1921,
as discussed in Chapter 2 (Jaggers, Gabbard et al. 2014: 5). It was only in
the 1940s that racial restrictions on naturalisation ended, and finally, in
1952, an act was passed which removed race or national origin as a crite-
rion for American citizenship (Bloemraad 2006: 22). The United States
was also very late in signing up to United Nations provisions on refu-
gees (which originated in 1951, but the United States did not conform
to it until The Refugee Act of 1980) (Jaggers, Gabbard et al. 2014: 8–9).
Furthermore, the country continued stringent efforts to control migra-
tion (particularly the undocumented kind), and the ongoing debates
about the ‘threat’ of immigration to the security and the economy of the
United States undermine the notion of ‘arms open wide’. As discussed
in the previous chapter, the state of domopolitics is such that immigra-
tion and outsiders are continually represented as a threat to the security
of the nation. The debates are often conducted in racialised terms with
particular national or ethnic groups deemed to offer specific threats.
Popular cultural movements, such as the Minutemen, who patrol the
southern borders of the United States, also belie this image of unquali-
fied hospitality.
Whilst the narrative of a nation of immigrants may provide a rather
partial view of American history and nation building, it nonetheless
constitutes an important myth. In some ways, as suggested by the
quotations used in the introduction to this chapter, this myth serves
to privilege the position of naturalised citizens. In a seeming reversal
of some of the hostility to immigration, there is a suggestion that natu-
ralised citizens are somehow more ideal citizens than those born in the
United States. However, this idealisation exists alongside hostility to
immigrants through the creation of boundaries of legality and illegality.
Border and immigration control technology is used to determine that
certain migrants are illegal – their position as ‘bad’ migrants is further
underlined with contrasts to the ‘good’ migrants who are legal (De
 Taking the Oath 43

Genova 2002). Furthermore, the discourse of immigrants as ideal citizen

still marks them out as different from those born in the country. The
distinction made between citizens by birth and naturalisation within
the ceremony accords with the findings of Sofya Aptekar, who studied
speeches at US naturalisation ceremonies in two periods: from 1950
to 1970 and from 2003 to 2008. She found a striking shift in the later
period towards extolling the virtue of immigrant citizens in contrast to
their potentially less committed US-born counterparts:

A strong thread that ran through many ceremony remarks is the idea
that native-born Americans take many things for granted and that
immigrant citizens’ job is to remind the native-born what America
stands for. (Aptekar 2012: 946)

In the United States, the idea that new citizens are special worked with
a narrative which positioned migrants as having a closer relationship to
the ‘American Dream’. The idea of the American Dream is referred to at
several points in the ceremonies. In the videos shown, the director of
the USCIS explains how the 100 million Americans who can trace their
ancestry back to Ellis Island are connected by ‘the dream’, concluding,
‘In America, anything is possible’. The welcome video recorded by
President Obama also claims, ‘Always remember that in America, no
dream is impossible. ... You can help write the next great chapter in our
great American story’.
Similarly, in their speeches, the judges in Manhattan and Brooklyn
use their own or their families’ histories of immigration to illustrate
The Dream. The judge in Manhattan explained that she and her family
migrated from Lithuania to Israel and then on to the United States:

I became more comfortable. I learnt English from the TV. The school
was good, and I got into an Ivy League college. Seventeen years in a
justice department: You could say I realised the American Dream.

The Brooklyn judge produced her own family’s immigration story as a

final flourish to her speech before striding out of the courtroom with her
legal gown ballooning behind her:

All my grandparents migrated to this country. I lived with my grand-

mother who migrated from Russia. She came steerage in a boat and
landed at Ellis Island as a 14 year old. She worked in a sweatshop
making dresses. Would she have imagined her granddaughter would
44 Making Citizens

be a federal judge? Have big dreams for you and your children and I
wish you all the best.

These personal accounts show the power of the narrative of the American
Dream and how its telling makes the dream open to all through immi-
gration, or even somehow more possible for those who emigrate, or their
near ancestors who have the fresh energy and commitment to make the
dream a reality. As the judge from Brooklyn said after the oath and pledge
had been taken: ‘[As a citizen], you stand here before the law equally,
even if a person’s great-great-great-grandfather came here’ (emphasis in
the original). In part, this narrative of the American Dream – or what
might be termed in other countries the ‘immigrant’s dream’– is tied to
families and multi-generational fulfilment; the dream may come true
for the new citizens’ children, or their children’s children.
The Canadian ceremony offered a similar notion of a promise granted
to immigrants over generations and of the impact of those immigrants
on nation building. The clerk of the ceremony in Winnipeg introduced
herself as a sixth generation immigrant, asking the new citizens to
imagine what life would be like in six generations’ time. She said that
their families would now ‘determine the future of Canada’. Whilst one
might not agree with the biologically determinist position presented by
Gary R. Johnson (1987) in his analysis of the use of kin terms in patriotic
speeches, it is interesting to consider how references to family, ancestors
and future generations function in these speeches. For Johnson, these
familial references are used to elicit altruistic responses. They may also
serve as an attempt to reassure new citizens that the beneficial results
of migration will come, or continue, through generations of their fami-
lies, despite whatever difficulties they personally face. In Canada, there
was clear evidence of what Johnson called the ‘symbolic’ or ‘fictive’
use of kin terms – where the term ‘is applied to those who are neither
biologically defined kin, or to an entity like the country itself’ (Johnson
1987: 171). In this way, the judge in the Winnipeg ceremony proposed
that citizenship is a ‘covenant between individual and country; a bond
between us and those who came before us and those who come after
us’, and finished her speech with the line, ‘We are honoured to welcome
you to our “Canadian Family.”’ As discussed in Chapter 2, the associa-
tion of the nation with family and home can also lead to a domopolitics
of protecting the nation from others who are seen to be always outside
the family and threatening to the home (Walters 2004). On a slightly
different note, Canadian participants were told of the Canadian Charter
of Rights and Freedoms and of the ‘Canadian Way’, which included
 Taking the Oath 45

volunteerism and the ‘willingness to reach out to others and to take

responsibility for our friends and neighbours’.
A similar idea, of Australian values as a ‘fair go for all, regardless of
colour, creed or age’, was declared in a ceremony there. The Australian
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission had proposed in
2006 that the ‘spirit of the fair go’ was one of the central values which
new citizens should understand.5 However, the idea remains within the
boundaries of citizenship, rather than traversing them. Australia has a
long history of immigration control which is designed to allow in only
those who are considered desirable. Migration decisions remain exempt
from the Disability Discrimination Act, so disability is still a factor in
the assessment for entry into Australia. Historically, immigration policy
was highly racialised, under what became known as the ‘White Australia
policy’, but now immigrants are selected through a points system, based
on their skills and other desirable attributes. At the same time, Australia
has an increasingly hostile attitude to asylum seekers and, according to
the Australian Human Rights Commission, ‘maintains one of the most
restrictive immigration detention systems in the world’ (Australian
Human Rights Commission 2013: 2).
Accounts of immigrants’ potential in the ceremonies are related to
the injunctions to be active citizens and, in particular, to vote. All the
ceremonies observed gave out information on how to register to vote,
with the Yarra City (Australia) and Oakland (California, United States)
ceremonies also having officials to help the new citizens complete the
registration forms. The new citizen welcome packs in the United States
included copies of the Constitution. The Brooklyn and Manhattan cere-
monies took place in the last few days before the deadline to register
to vote for the 2012 US presidential election, and participants were
reminded to register. At the Brooklyn ceremony, they were told,

People are dying on the streets in other places to have their views
heard – you must vote in every election, take the time to vote. Make
your voices heard in this country. (emphasis in the original)

In Brooklyn, not only were new citizens urged to register and exercise the
right to vote in the upcoming election, they were also given information
about how to pursue their rights. In an introductory session, they were
taken through what was going to happen in the ceremony, how to say
the oath and how to apply for a passport. They were told about human
rights law and given a newsletter from the New York City Commission
on Human Rights which was specifically directed at new citizens. An
46 Making Citizens

official talked them through an example of a job applicant who was

disadvantaged by racism. She stressed the need to speak up quickly and
told them how to pursue justice if they had experienced discrimination.
They also learned about resources available to them, such as government
loans, and how to contact emergency services. Here, the links between
citizenship and other rights were made explicit.
At times, the greater commitment of immigrant citizens than native-
born citizens to nation building was suggested in the ceremonies through
the construction of a particular kind of agency – choosing a country
to live in. This narrative has the virtue of reassuring those birthright
citizens that their country is the ‘best’, a place where people choose
to be. Susan Biblier Coutin, in her study of citizenship ceremonies in
Los Angeles in 1996–1997, found that there was considerable emphasis
placed on the idea of choosing to migrate to the United States. However,
she argues that:

for migrants’ decisions to naturalize to be seen as voluntary (and

therefore legitimate), one has to presume a sort of free market of citi-
zenship, in which migrants select the nation whose social system best
permits them to develop their personal talents. Such presumptions
ignore the international relationships and inequities that propel
migration, downplay the incommensurability of migrants’ histories,
and legitimize immigration systems that constitute some migrants as
illegal and therefore exploitable. (Bibler Coutin 2003: 509)

However, it is interesting that in the ceremonies observed in 2010 and

2012, there was much less reference to the choices or decision-making
processes behind migration than Bibler Coutin had found. A more
dominant theme was that of a difficult (and therefore heroic) journey.
For example, the judge in Manhattan said, ‘As an immigration judge, I
can appreciate that it has been a long and frustrating road’. Similarly, in
the video clip played after the oath-taking in Oakland and Manhattan,
President Obama repeated the narrative: ‘You have travelled a long path
to get here’. In the Canadian ceremony, the judge congratulated the new
citizens, saying, their ‘long journey is over. [Your] ... perseverance and
faith is being rewarded today’. These statements carry connotations of
reaching the Promised Land, which, whilst they may reference some of
the less welcoming experiences migrants face in navigating visa systems,
also feed the idea of the American Dream. This section explored the
importance of constructions of the immigrant dream in citizen cere-
monies in the United States, Canada and Australia. It also traced the
 Taking the Oath 47

construction of the nation as a family, to suggest a form of domopolitics

(Walters 2004). The next section will argue that, when the dominant
rendering of the nation is of one built on the efforts of immigrants, it
silences two important histories: pre-colonial settlement and slavery. It
will also ask what kinds of claims to citizenship this undermines.

Impossible immigrants, impossible citizens

United States
Part of the problem of a narrative in which a nation is built by immi-
grants is that it sits awkwardly with the knowledge that in all of these
‘immigration nations’, there were already indigenous people whose
rights to land and nationhood were ignored and who have historically
been excluded from citizenship. In the case of the United States, there is
also the question of how to fit in the large community of people whose
ancestors were not immigrants following a dream, or people compelled
to leave their homes to escape oppression, for whom the United States
provided a refuge. How can narratives of the American Dream accom-
modate the stories of those forcibly brought to America as slaves?
African American history is tied to the denial of the rights of citizenship,
including being deprived of many rights after the abolition of slavery –
‘Jim Crow’ laws, segregation of public spaces and of access to public
services such as education and health care, and the de facto disenfran-
chisement of black voters – that have continuing economic, social and
cultural effects (Alexander 2010).
The first US naturalisation law was passed by Congress in 1790, based
on the idea that those living in the US were citizens rather than subjects
(Bloemraad 2006: 21). However, citizens had to be ‘free white persons’.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) mandated jus soli
for all those born in United States Territory. This Reconstruction amend-
ment sought to address the ambiguous legal situation of former slaves
and to ensure their citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment stated:
‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State
wherein they reside’. It was understood that this would apply not only
to former slaves and their offspring, but to other racialised minorities,
‘even’, as an exchange in the Senate put it, to ‘the children of Chinese
and Gypsies born in this country’ (quoted in Lee 2010: 5). However, it
did not ensure equal rights for all, especially with the continuation of
segregation and institutionalised discrimination. In addition, confusion
48 Making Citizens

over the implications for Native Americans remained; the amendment

makes reference to ‘Indians not taxed’ who are excluded from citizen-
ship (Lee 2010: 7–8). The constitutional amendment did not ensure
that all American citizens were treated equally, and racial segregation
persisted until the civil rights movement challenged it. Racial restric-
tions on naturalisation were only removed in 1952 (Bloemraad 2006:
22). As discussed in Chapter 2, citizenship has a gendered history, with
women often slow to receive full rights. The idea of ‘a nation built by
immigrants’ is highly gendered, tending to focus on labouring and
propertied men. It was not until the 1920s that (white) women got full
suffrage in the United States. Until 1922, a woman automatically lost
her US citizenship if she married someone who was not a US citizen.
Given the ways in which immigration and citizenship rights in the
United States are bound up with a history of exclusions and discrimina-
tion, it is notable that, whilst there were references made to civil and
political rights in some of the ceremonies, and considerable encourage-
ment of registering to vote, no mention was made of any US history
which might disrupt the ‘nation of immigrants’ narrative. The next
section will show that, although both Australia and Canada share a
narration of a nation centred on immigration with the United States,
their ceremonies were slightly different, in that there was some direct
reference to those who lived in the two countries before colonial settle-
ment and who have been excluded from full citizenship.

Reconciling the past in Canada and Australia

The arrival of the British in Australia followed a probable 50,000 years
of Aboriginal habitation, and the history of the effects of settler colo-
nies on Aboriginals remains contentious. Whilst the first immigrants
to Australia were brought there forcibly as convicts, in the main, the
promotion of voluntary immigration was the focus of nation building
there, including offering financial inducements to migrants. The popular
slogan of the first minister of immigration (post-1948) was ‘populate or
perish’ (Klapdor, Coombs et al. 2009: 5). However, this was based on a
racialised schema, known as the ‘White Australia’ policy, which preferred
immigrants from the United Kingdom, tolerated other European migra-
tion, and specifically excluded non-European migrants. The Nationality
and Citizenship Act (1948) established citizenship for all who were born
in Australia, regardless of colour. But, David Mercer argues:

in practice – and not withstanding the lofty sentiments expressed

in the 1948 Act – this piece of legislation was an ‘empty vessel’ and
 Taking the Oath 49

Australia’s Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders still remain largely

‘citizens without rights’. (Mercer 2003: 422)

Aborigines were not counted in the census until 1967 and only acquired
the same level of voting rights and responsibilities as other citizens in
1983 (Mercer 2003: 425). According to John William Tate, Aboriginals
‘were so marginal to our sense of “nation” that they were barely included
as members (citizens) of the state’ (2009: 101). In some states, there were
also severe restrictions of Aborigines’ mobility, including not having enti-
tlement to Australian passports. In Western Australia, as recently as the
mid-1970s, ‘it was illegal for Aborigines to cross the State border or for
anyone to assist them in this way’ (Mercer 2003: 431). Domopolitics – the
idea of the nation-as-family and nation-as-protection-of-family – has a
very particular history in Australia, where an estimated 100,000 Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander children (known as the Stolen Generation) were
forcibly removed from their families and raised in homes or adopted by
white families, a practice that continued until the 1960s. This has become
a prominent issue in the struggle for social and civil rights of Aboriginals
and Torres Strait Islanders. In 1997, a report titled ‘Bringing Them Home’
called for an official apology from the government. The prime minister at
the time, John Howard, refused. However, in 2008, Kevin Rudd made an
official apology on behalf of the government. Given this ongoing recon-
ciliation, the idea of Australia as simply a nation of immigrants requires
re-examination. There is evidence of some level of recognition of this
within Australian citizenship ceremonies.
The Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code, published in 2011,
recommends that ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders should
be invited to the ceremonies, alongside representatives of all three levels
of government (federal, state or territory and local) and other commu-
nity leaders’ (Government of Australia 2011: 5). It suggests displaying
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags alongside the Australian
national flag and the Commonwealth coat of arms. In sum, the code
‘encourages incorporating Indigenous elements into citizenship cere-
monies. This enhances awareness and understanding by new citizens
as well as the wider community of Indigenous culture and heritage and
the status of Indigenous people as the first Australians’ (Government of
Australia 2011: 29). Here we see that the politics of reconciliation has
produced an attempt to engage with the claims of the ‘first’ Australians –
something that is missing in the United States.
The ceremony in Yarra City took place on ‘Australia Day’– a public
holiday established in 1994 – and Colin Hunter Jr, an indigenous
50 Making Citizens

Australian, led the welcome. Said to originate from former convicts’

tradition of celebrating their emancipation, the impetus to establish
Australia Day as a public holiday arose during the bicentenary of what
many Australians think of as the country’s discovery. Citizenship cere-
monies are often held on the holiday, with the new citizens’ pledge of
allegiance followed by an affirmation (which is said by all citizens). The
celebration of Australia Day has been contentious and, in his speech,
Hunter Jr, pointed out that, for many indigenous Australians, it would
be better known as ‘invasion day’.6 He also paid his respects to the
Wurundjeri people and their elders, who he said were the ‘traditional
owners of the land’ and he brought gum leaves to the ceremony as a
symbol of welcome. The recognition of Australia’s contentious history
was not confined to the Aboriginal representative. It was mentioned
by both the MP who was present and the Mayor of Yarra – who specifi-
cally acknowledged that the county’s history included the genocide of
Aborigines as well as the transportation of convicts. Although these
were simply symbolic gestures, they represent a significantly different
acknowledgement of a history of conflict and repression than the US
ceremonies, which entirely avoided such controversial issues.
The ceremonies in Canada also sought to recognise the tension
arising from claiming a country for immigrants and abusing the rights
of those already occupying land, but they did so in a way which might
be regarded as favouring the colonial conquerors’ account of history.
Included in the welcome pack for new citizens of Canada that is given
at the naturalisation ceremony is a message from the minister of citizen-
ship, immigration and multiculturalism, who writes that ‘Hundreds of
years ago, French and British pioneers partnered with the First Nations
and laid the foundations of Canada’. The choice of the word ‘partnering’
might well be seen as a problematic simplification of a relationship that
brought foreign diseases, war, seizing of land, a massive reduction in
population size and an imposition of what Europeans considered a
‘superior’ culture. Indians were not ‘persons’ in federal law until 1951,
and they did not obtain political rights until 1960 (Altamirano-Jiménez
2004: 351). Conflicts remain over the place of Indian treaty rights in the
constitution (Henderson 2002). At the same time, as in the Australian
ceremony, there was recognition of the inhabitants of Canada before
the immigrants. In the ceremony, the minister of culture, heritage and
tourism paid tribute to the indigenous First Nations peoples of Manitoba,
who inhabited the land originally, before European settlement and the
formal creation of Canada. The minister explained that ‘Manitoba is the
Cree word for “Where the spirit resides”’ and named Louis Riel, a Métis
 Taking the Oath 51

historical figure, as the ‘father of the province’. These gestures, whilst

undoubtedly brief, serve to break up the narrative of a nation built solely
on the labour and enterprise of immigrants exercising free choice. Thus,
I would argue that there are significant differences in the ways in which
Canada and Australia – compared to the United States – deal with their
nations’ history of citizenship, oppression and inequality. In Australia
and Canada, there is symbolic recognition of previous injustices towards
first settlers (although no account is made of either racism or racial
controls on immigration). In the US ceremonies, it seems to be impos-
sible to interrupt the celebratory account of immigration and citizen-
ship, even with symbolic gestures to indigenous inhabitants or forced
migration, in the case of slavery. The differences in approach may partly
be a reflection of Canada and Australia having gained independence
more recently and therefore being able to confine more of this conten-
tious history to their colonial pasts, whereas, for the United States, the
history of slavery in particular is more closely bound up with the nation
as it is now, so it cannot be consigned to a colonial past.7 The US narra-
tion of nation as built by immigrants pursuing the American Dream
forecloses the possibilities for the recognition of Native American or
slave histories. Indeed, the different ways in which these contentious
aspects of national history are dealt with alerts us to the importance of
the symbolic register of citizenship ceremonies. The following sections
will explore the ceremonies as rites of passage in order to illuminate
how the ceremonies serve to symbolise the transition from foreigner to
citizen as a form of initiation.

Citizenship ceremonies as rites of passage

Citizenship or naturalisation ceremonies can be understood as rela-

tively modern ‘inventions of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) in
a particular mode: that of a rites de passage. Arnold van Gennep first
suggested the idea of social ceremonies as rites of passage in 1908,
noting ‘rites which accompany every change of place, state, social posi-
tion and age’ (quoted in Turner 1987: 4). Van Gennep envisages these
rites as rituals associated with transition – akin to moving through a
threshold – as individuals move from one life-stage to another (such as
birth, entering adulthood, marriage and death) (van Gennep 1960).
Analysing the citizenship ceremonies as rites of passage enables explo-
ration of their similarities and differences. This approach also highlights
the symbolic register in which the ceremonies are constructed. Van
Gennep argues that these events have three stages: one which marks the
52 Making Citizens

separation of those undertaking the rite of passage from others, the next
a stage of liminality where participants are affectively cordoned off from
the rest of society, and finally, the transition into a new status and incor-
poration back into the wider society. Victor Turner considered further
the nature of the liminal stage, maintaining that ‘during the ... liminal
period, the state of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) is ambiguous; he
passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the
past or coming state’ (Turner 1987: 5). This ambiguity, or what Turner
suggests can also be seen as ‘invisibility’, is highlighted by the way that
there is often no word to describe the liminal condition.8 The transition
from non-citizen to citizen also has no word for those in the liminal
stage and this presents a problem for those organising the ceremonies
and those making welcome speeches: how to refer to the participants.
There is frequently a tension in the way they are addressed: an oscilla-
tion between regarding them as ‘you’ – separated from other citizens –
and hailing them as ‘us’, part of the citizenry. And, as shall be seen,
there is also sometimes hesitation about when their transition should
be considered complete (see also Byrne 2012). To ease this linguistic
problem and to enable the precise analysis of the ceremonies, I will refer
to the citizens-to-be as ‘citizands’ (analogous to ‘graduand’) while they
are participating in the ceremony and are not-yet-made-citizens.
The ceremonies which were observed in the United States, Canada
and Australia did involve the physical separation of the citizands (as did
all but one of those studied internationally). Whilst this undoubtedly
occurs in part for logistical convenience, it also serves the purpose of
placing the citizands in a liminal space, together with other citizands
and away from the general public and their friends and families. For
example, in California,9 outside the theatre in Oakland, there was a
festive feeling among the friends and family accompanying the citi-
zands: taking pictures, holding flowers which they are going to give
them afterwards. The arrivals were greeted by friendly uniformed
theatre staff who ushered them to their places. In the theatre, citizands
(who numbered more than a thousand) were directed to the stalls of
the theatre on the ground floor, while their guests went upstairs to take
seats in the balcony. Whilst some guests leaned over the front of the
balcony, they could only wave down below to their friend or relation
who was waiting to become a citizen. The ceremony in Brooklyn took
place in a courtroom. Having passed through quite stringent security
measures, including going through airport-style scanning equipment
and handing in all mobile phones or recording devices, the 200 or so
citizands were invited to sit in the courtroom, while their friends and
 Taking the Oath 53

family went to a waiting room on a higher floor to watch the proceed-

ings on large screens. In Manhattan, having also passed through the
airport-like security of the USCIS building in Federal Plaza (including
the removal and scanning of shoes), the approximately 150 citizands
were all seated at the front of a large room, while their guests sat at
the back in an area separated by a wide aisle. Films were played on a
large screen and the American flag was displayed. In the United States,
a sense of leaving a status behind is underlined during registration as
the citizands hand in their permanent residency cards. In Canada, the
cards are also taken away and replaced with a citizenship card (There is
no requirement to carry either card around in everyday life, in contrast
to the US permanent residency card, or ‘Green Card’, as it is more
commonly known.
In Winnipeg, Canada,10 the ceremony takes place in the elaborately
decorated ‘Chandelier Room’ or Speakers’ Reception Room, of the
Manitoba legislature building, itself an imposing and highly ornate
Neoclassical building, completed as the Manitoba Parliament in 1920.
The 31 citizands were seated in the centre of the large, grand Chandelier
Room, which is lined with pictures of the Queen and other royalty; their
guests sat on either side of them. Flags of Manitoba and Canada are
displayed. In Australia,11 the ceremony takes place in Richmond Town
Hall, another impressive Neoclassical building, built in the 1890s, in
the city of Yarra. The 60 citizands were seated facing the guests at a
45-degree angle in a room decorated with a large Australian flag and
pictures of the Queen and the Commonwealth coat of arms. Thus, the
separation of the citizands from their guests in all of the cases that were
observed, places them in the context of a formal setting of official, often
colonial, buildings (apart from the theatre in Oakland). They were also
surrounded by the symbols of state and nation, a gesture towards what
Michael Billig calls the ‘hot nationalism’ of the ‘saluted flag’, which
signals a suspension of the everyday (1995). In all countries, the citi-
zands were given small handheld flags and encouraged to wave them.
The Australian Citizenship Code specifies appropriate symbols for the
ceremonies, including the Commonwealth Coat of Arms and portrait of
the Queen (which it is stressed should be placed in a ‘prominent posi-
tion’), the Australian national flag (with detailed instructions about the
different ways it can be hung or displayed), and the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander flags (Australia 2011: 25–26). As was discussed above, the
inclusion of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags (which ‘may’
be displayed and therefore are not obligatory) is a partial recognition of
those who occupied Australia before the immigrants.
54 Making Citizens

Alongside the common separation of the citizands from their friends

and family and other guests, in all ceremonies observed, differences
among the citizands as a group were levelled, as Turner suggests. He
comments on the ways those taking part in rites of passage, particularly
in initiation ceremonies, are not only separated from the group, but also
divested of their positions within the social hierarchy:

equality usually characterizes the relationship of neophyte to

neophyte, where rites are collective ... the liminal group is a commu-
nity or comity of comrades and not a structure of hierarchically arrayed
positions. ... [N]eophytes are withdrawn from their structural positions
and consequently from the values, norms, sentiments, and techniques
associated with those positions. They are also divested of their previous
habits of thought, feeling, and action. (Turner 1987: 14)

Those who apply for citizenship in any country form a highly diverse
group in terms of country of origin, income, employment, education
and ability to speak the host language. They have also followed very
different routes to gain citizenship. (See Chapter 5 for further discussion
of this in the context of the UK.) They come with different attitudes
about the ceremony, and about the idea and experience of acquiring citi-
zenship of the country to which they have moved. This in part is made
visible by the differences in their dress. Some appear to have made great
efforts – wearing clothes which you might expect at a party or wedding
(including both Western and ‘traditional/ethnic’ dress – although the
latter was in the minority). Others dressed very casually in jeans and
sweatshirts, while many seemed ready simply to return to their office
jobs after the ceremony. Different attitudes about the ceremony and
citizenship itself were also suggested by the presence – or absence – of
guests. As the Australian official organising the ceremonies explained in
an interview, ‘Some people ... just come and get their certificate, and it’s
no big deal, and they don’t bring any guests. And then you get other
people going, you know, “I’ve got family and friends and”, you know. I
had one lady and her daughter bringing 20 guests’. However, during the
ceremony, differences among the citizands are both recognised and then
de-emphasised, as they are treated as a single group rather than many
diverse individuals.
In all of the ceremonies we observed, there was a moment of recogni-
tion and celebration of diversity when a list of all of the countries from
which the citizands came was read. The Canadian judge12 explained:
‘I tend to do that because I think it’s interesting to hear where people
 Taking the Oath 55

originally come from, and that diversity as a result of it’. There was a
tension in the ceremonies between representations of multiplicity
and unity. The following section will examine an example of this in
the United States, where there was recognition of national differences
among the citizands in the group and erasure of those distinctions as
they prepared to become American. This might be regarded as a ritual
of the removal of national difference. However, I suggest that the ritual
is ambiguous and indicates contradictions inherent in having both an
American identity of equality and sameness as well as hyphenated iden-
tities. The dynamics and tensions between unity and difference were
similar in the ceremonies in Canada and Australia.

Stand up and cheer for your country

The naturalisation ceremonies observed in the United States emphasised
cultural and national difference, whilst at the same time suggesting that
the ceremonies function as a ritual involving moving from one status
(the prior nationality) to another (American). They also presented the
citizands as equals within the liminal space (although there was one
exception, as we shall see below). The ceremonies in both California and
Manhattan followed a similar format which involved both identifying
the citizands’ nationalities and then appearing to distance the partici-
pants from them. As the master of ceremonies, an official from USCIS in
Manhattan, stated:

There are 140 people here today. You have many things in common,
but you are also a very diverse group from 37 different countries. Today
you will all stand as one and become citizens. (emphasis added)

The Oakland ceremony presented what might be seen as ‘the wonder of

diversity’ with a high energy, show business feeling. The MC littered his
announcements with jokes and interacted with the audience. To gasps
and cheers, he told the audience that there were 1,399 people there
representing 9513 countries, ‘but in just a few minutes, just one’. He
explained that, although it was a legal ceremony, he wanted everyone
to feel able to clap and cheer as much as they wanted to. In the manner
of a ‘warm-up’ act before a television broadcast, he got everyone to prac-
tice being loud and cheering. He said, ‘Maybe we need something to
cheer for. A lot of people from a small country are here’, and went on to
ask everyone to clap for ‘Our friends from El Salvador’, which they did.
‘How about Mexico?’ he asked, and his question was answered by very
loud cheers, whistling and clapping. The celebration of diversity also
56 Making Citizens

featured a jokey routine where he amazed the audience by each new

language he could speak (or at least say ‘Welcome’ in). After speaking
in Spanish, Mandarin, French (‘One of America’s first allies is here’.),
Russian (for ‘our newest friends’), Hindi and Filipino, he joked,

‘OK, I suppose I should stop now’, which was met with more cheering
and clapping. ‘Besides’, he continued, ‘I see some faces up front
looking like, “Oh no, he’s not going to do this for 88 more countries
is he?”’ That comment elicited more laughter from the audience.

This polished performance demonstrated an embrace of difference,

but care was taken to return to unity:

MC: Oh, shoot. I want to do one more. Can I?

AUDIENCE: Yes!
MC: Let’s hear it for the San Francisco Giants!

As this followed an important victory for the local baseball team, the
theatre erupted in the loudest cheer of the day. Here the local is refer-
enced as a common bond which trumps differences of national origin.
This particular performance of difference and language proficiency
was unique to the Oakland ceremony, but the ceremony then followed
the format also used in Manhattan, in which each citizand’s country of
origin was called out. In all cases, the citizands cheered or clapped and
stood up on hearing their country’s name and then remained standing
until all the countries had been named. Difference is recognised and then
symbolically abandoned in the act of standing ‘as one’. Interestingly,
at one of the ceremonies in Manhattan, there were two male soldiers
who were receiving citizenship, wearing their dress uniforms and seated
at the front, one on each side of the central aisle. They were singled
out by the MC, who said, ‘We are honoured that in our audience we
have two special guests serving in the United States military’. The audi-
ence clapped. The soldiers were asked to stand and give their names
and history of service.14 So whilst the general focus was on unifying
the citizands, a distinction was made to give a special place to those
engaged in what is often constructed as the ultimate act of citizenship:
defending the nation militarily (see Yuval-Davis 1997). Once everyone
was standing, they all said the oath of allegiance, the requirement for
becoming American citizens together (the oath will be discussed further
below). In the Brooklyn ceremony, the ritual of renouncing difference
and former solidarities was even starker as, after the oaths had been
 Taking the Oath 57

made, the judge explained that she would call out each country and
asked people to stand and clap for the countries. She then went through
each of the 62 countries of origin, saying, ‘Will the new citizen formerly
from ... please stand up?’ The repetition of the words ‘formerly from’
served to underline the idea that a nationality has been left behind.
When all of the citizands were finally standing up, the judge concluded:
‘Isn’t that the most beautiful thing?’
However, in all the ceremonies in the United States, there was a tension
between the symbolism of what the citizands were doing – marking a
departure from a particular identity for the sake of a unifying ‘American’
identity – and the ways it was done. The performance of this ritual, in
terms of the citizands’ participation, as well as remarks made by the
judges or official hosts, worked against the idea of the withdrawal of
different cultural identities and produced a the possibility of American
hyphenated identities which could include the new citizens’ former affil-
iations. In this model, loyalty, affection and the retention of a notion
of cultural difference are preserved. This tension between renouncing
former countries of origin and retaining loyalty can be seen in the enthu-
siastic cheering for each country – and particularly those where many of
the citizands came from, such as Mexico, El Salvador and the Philippines.
There was also a sense that all countries were to be celebrated. Given the
political climate and the enduring representation of Iran as part of the
‘Axis of Evil’, it was perhaps rare in the United States in 2012 to hear an
enthusiastic cheer in response to the naming of Iran. Continued loyalty
to or affiliation with their countries of origin was also indicated by some
citizands arriving wearing sweatshirts with the name of their homelands
on them. In the Brooklyn ceremony, after the judge had gone through all
the countries that people were ‘formerly of’, she appeared to contradict
the suggestion that the ceremony had involved relinquishing an identity
or a national loyalty when she encouraged the citizands to:

Be proud of your own country – you don’t have to give up anything of

it. Don’t give up the things in your heart, don’t give up your language.
Teach your children your language, don’t give up your customs. Carry
them with you and keep your connections to the country – explain and
share your customs with others – what the specific food is. This world
is in a bad place and you can’t expect leaders to get it better. Explain to
others what’s special about your home country and build bridges.

This exhortation to retain cultural heritage also serves as a rejoinder to

the kind of binaries suggested by George W. Bush in the aftermath of
58 Making Citizens

9/11, when he suggested that ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the
terrorists’ (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo 2008).15 Leo R. Chavez,
writing about Latino immigrants (but perceived threat of Muslims would
also apply), argues that current discourses about the cultural threat of
immigrants need to be put in the wider context of a long history of fears
about the Other within American society (Chavez 2008). The citizen-
ship judge appeared to be referencing this climate of fear, but then allo-
cated to the new citizens an important specific role and responsibility to
overcome it. The neurotic citizen (Isin 2004), as discussed in Chapter 2,
needs to be reassured by the acceptable migrant, who can become a
good citizen.
The Brooklyn judge’s statement of diversity as something positive that
immigrants and citizands in particular have to offer was also echoed
in other ceremonies. At the Yarra ceremony, the mayor spoke of how
Australia had been ‘enriched’ in the last 20 years by 3.5 million people
from many countries. She added that the citizands ‘must not forget their
country of birth. ... Australia is the richer for the different cultural contri-
butions. There is strength in diversity’. While this could be regarded
as a fairly bland statement about multiculturalism, it should also be
understood in the context of the histories of exclusion of cultures that
were deemed to be ‘too different’ to the host culture as well as ongoing
debates in each country which question a positive understanding of
multiculturalism, immigrant cultures and ties to home countries.
The timeframe given by the Australian mayor is interesting. By
limiting the focus to the last 20 years, she sidesteps a highly racial-
ised history of immigration control in Australia – the ‘white Australia’
policy – which sought to maintain an essentially British or, at the very
least, European culture in Australia. Whilst immigration was opened
up to non-European migrants after 1956, British and Irish advantage
in progression to immigration was maintained until 1973, and distinct
voting rights for British permanent residents were maintained until
1985 (Fozdar and Spittles 2009: 498). Legislation to remove discrimi-
nation in immigration policies was adopted in the 1970s (Klapdor,
Coombs et al. 2009; Tate 2009). The date suggested by the mayor
starts with the embrace of multiculturalism under Prime Minister Paul
Keating in the 1990s. However, this more positive attitude towards
cultural difference in Australia has not gone unchallenged. John
Howard, who took aim against what he called ‘zealous multicultur-
alism’, led the initial backlash. Pauline Hanson’s anti-multicultural
and anti-indigenous ‘One Nation’ political party followed in the mid-
late 1990s.16 Debates about immigration in Australia were dominated
 Taking the Oath 59

by discussion of asylum seekers arriving from overseas by boat. Since

9/11, focus on the Muslim community’s supposed lack of integration
increased. For the first time, citizenship policy was directed towards
making the acquisition of citizenship more difficult for everyone,
for example with the introduction of the citizenship test (Klapdor,
Coombs et al. 2009). Whilst no speaker at the Australian ceremony
expressed any hostility to immigration, or naturalisation, State
Member of Parliament Richard Wynne turned to the language of inte-
gration rather than multiculturalism when he spoke of how the state
had ‘successfully integrated successive waves of migrants’ and stressed
that new citizens should accept the principles of Australian society.
Here again, it appears that there is the production and reassurance of
the neurotic citizen. This section has considered some of the rituals
in the ceremonies which reflected models of what it would take to
become a citizen. It has argued that the ceremonies can be seen as rites
of passage – an initiation – in which differences between citizands are
both recognised and suppressed in order to create a sense of unity in
gaining a new status. There is a tension in the ceremonies between
recognising and potentially celebrating cultural difference and the
sense of acquiring a new identity. Next, I turn to one key moment
that crystallizes this tension: taking the oath.

Taking the oath

A key part of all countries’ naturalisation ceremony is the oath or pledge:

of allegiance (in the United States), of citizenship (in Canada) and of
commitment (in Australia). The judge in Manhattan pointed out that
she needed to see each citizand saying it, a requirement that has proven
controversial in Canada, but interestingly not in the other countries that
we observed. In December 2011, Jason Kenney, Canadian citizenship
and immigration minister, declared that Muslim women must remove
niqabs (covering of the face) throughout the citizenship ceremony.
According to the National Post, his concern was that the citizenship
judges could not see whether the women were really reciting the oath.17
The current policy is that anyone wearing a niqab must remove it for
identification purposes and during the oath. However, the niqab can be
worn through the rest of the ceremony.18 It is not clear how many (if
any) women have actually come to Canadian citizenship ceremonies
wearing the niqab. The question of concern about the sincerity of oath-
taking goes beyond the question of whether someone has actually said
the words, and will be returned to below.
60 Making Citizens

The oath of allegiance in the United States is a good example of an

invented tradition which has the appearance of a longstanding, anti-
quated tradition (particularly suggested by the use of archaic language)
but, as will be discussed below, the pledge is, in fact, a relatively modern
invention and one which continues to be subject to changes and modi-
fications. The current oath of allegiance that citizands in the United
States have to take follows:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce

and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince or state
or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject
or citizen, that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws
of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and
domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that
I will bear arms19 on behalf of the United States when required to by
law, and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reserva-
tion or purpose of evasion, so help me God.20

The commitment to renounce allegiance to former countries again

stands in strong contrast to the encouragement in the ceremonies to
maintain cultural ties and affiliations to countries of origin (and indeed
in contrast to the cheers of support for ‘former’ countries) as discussed in
the previous section. Another particularly striking aspect of this declara-
tion is the complicated structure and old-fashioned language. This would
appear to suggest that the oath has a similarly old heritage. However,
whilst an oath of allegiance has always been a requirement in naturali-
sation, the form it took was not made uniform at a national level until
1906. This reform also set out the requirement for a public ceremony,
rather than a court appearance (Aptekar 2012). The oath’s wording has
undergone repeated modifications. The US Citizenship and Immigration
website gives a history of the oath of allegiance which explains its origins
and modifications. The account begins with this statement:

Throughout our nation’s history, foreign-born men and women have

come to the United States, taken the Oath of Allegiance to become
naturalized citizens, and contributed greatly to their new communi-
ties and country. The Oath of Allegiance has led to American citizen-
ship for more than 220 years.21

Here again, as in the ceremonies themselves, an account of the nation is

given which obscures the history before the nation existed – representing
 Taking the Oath 61

it as a form of terra nullis. Despite this curtailed version, it remains true

that, in the United States, the question of how to make ‘new’ citizens is
a critical one and lies at the heart of nation building. Whilst the United
States was part of the British Empire, and in common with Australia and
Canada, a two-tiered system of naturalisation developed. The colonies
could naturalise citizens locally, but England controlled the status of British
subjecthood which applied throughout the empire (Bloemraad 2006: 20).
However, in 1773 London banned colonial naturalisation. The American
Declaration of Independence three years later criticised King George III
for preventing the colony from naturalising new settlers and thereby
preventing the ongoing population of the state. The first US naturalisa-
tion law was passed by Congress in 1790, establishing the idea of citizens
rather than subjects, but restricted naturalisation to ‘free white persons’
of ‘good moral character’. Taking an oath to support the Constitution was
required. Perhaps surprisingly, only in 1929 was a standard text developed
for the oath of allegiance (after a commission pointed out there was no
uniformity in the oaths made at local court level). Even this text has not
remained static, with the last major alteration (the commitment to bear
arms) introduced in 1952. The actual text of the oath is not enshrined in
law in the United States, and the USCIS recently considered changing the
oath to simplify the language. This prompted sufficient opposition, from
politicians and the public, to block any changes.22 The oath begins with
the requirement to ‘absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all alle-
giance or fidelity to any foreign prince, state or sovereignty’. This suggests
hostility to dual citizenship. However, in practice, and in law, dual citizen-
ship is not illegal in the United States, and the government recognises that
naturalized US citizens may remain citizens in their country of birth.23
The code covering the American oath of allegiance allows for the reli-
gious elements (‘so help me God’ and the word ‘oath’) to be omitted
(and the oath replaced with ‘solemnly affirm’). However, this option
was not exercised in any of the ceremonies we observed, and it is not
clear how easy it would be for citizands to choose to avoid religious
declaration. The same applies for the commitment to ‘bear arms’, which
may be omitted if it can be shown that participation in the military is
contrary to a person’s beliefs. In the US ceremony, the oath of allegiance
is followed by the pledge of allegiance to the flag, where the audience
can also join in, saying:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to

the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
62 Making Citizens

This pledge is commonly heard in American society. For example,

many schools require the teachers to lead a daily pledge of allegiance
to the flag (although the children can choose whether or not to say it),
and it is said at other public gatherings and sports events. The prac-
tice of saying the pledge, and particularly the inclusion of the phrase
‘under God’ has been questioned before and is currently under legal
challenge from parents and the humanist society in Massachusetts,
which has objected to the suggestion that ‘good parents are God
believers’.24
Both the Canadian and the Australian oaths of citizenship and
pledges of commitment have much more straightforward language than
that of the United States. Perhaps, given their more recent history of
independence, there is a desire to show the pledges as modern rather
than antiquated. Until 1949, the citizenship granted in Australia was
that of British subject,25 although the federal government had control
of all migration from 1921 on (Klapdor, Coombs et al. 2009: 4). The
Nationality and Citizenship Act (1949) established citizenship for all
who were born in Australia, regardless of colour (although as discussed
above, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders’ access to rights associated
with citizenship was highly constrained, if not impossible).
The Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1949 also introduced the concept
of citizenship ceremonies. In 1993, during a period of the government’s
promotion of multiculturalism, a preamble was inserted into the Australia
Act stating that ‘Australian citizenship is a common bond, involving
reciprocal rights and obligations, uniting all Australians, whilst respecting
their diversity’. At the same time, a new oath, drafted by the poet Les
Murray, was adopted (Betts and Birrell 2007: 46). Officially known as a
‘pledge of commitment as a citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia’, it
dropped the reference to the ‘Queen of Australia’ and stated instead:

From this time forward, under God, I pledge my loyalty to Australia

and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and
liberties I respect and whose laws I will uphold and obey.

The Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code allows for the words

‘under God’ to be omitted and in the ceremony in Yarra City, this
option was taken by about half the citizands. The two versions of the
oath were said separately. The religious element is particularly inter-
esting, given that the Governments Code for Citizenship Ceremonies
states that
 Taking the Oath 63

Citizenship ceremonies are non-commercial, apolitical, bipartisan

and secular. They must not be used as forums for political, partisan
or religious expression or for the distribution of material which could
be perceived to be of a commercial, political or religious nature.
(Australia 2011: 6)

Nonetheless, directly after it states this, the code explains how indi-
viduals can bring in their own holy books, and religious organisations
may also supply them, although they must not be made to appear to
be a requirement of the ceremony. In 1999, Australia introduced an
‘Australian Citizenship Day’, which included the proposal that commu-
nities should hold:

a short ceremony where anyone can affirm their loyalty and commit-
ment to Australia and its people by reciting an affirmation that is
based on the pledge made by new citizens. It is a wonderful way for
members of the community to express their national pride and spirit
and to celebrate the values that we share as Australians.26

The affirmation is intended to function much like the American pledge

to the flag and is for both citizens and non-citizen residents (who omit
the first four words):

As an Australian citizen,
I affirm my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic
beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect and whose laws I
uphold and obey.27

In the ceremony that was observed in Yarra, all participants made the
affirmation after the pledge taken by the citizands. The concept of an
affirmation is also common in Australian society; for example, in many
schools, children say one every day which does not necessarily follow
the text above but repeats concepts of loyalty to Australia.28
The Canadian oath of citizenship is said first in French and then in
English and includes an affirmation of allegiance to the Queen:

I affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and
Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and
fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.
64 Making Citizens

The Canadian Citizenship Act (1946) was the first law passed in
any Commonwealth country to create citizenship separate from
that of British subject. (Klapdor, Coombs et al. 2009: 6). The status
of Canadian citizen was given legal and political meaning, although
Canadians remained British subjects (Macklin and Crépeau 2010: 10).
This law also instituted citizenship ceremonies, the first of which was
held on 3 January 1947 at the Supreme Court in Ottawa (Chapnick
2011: 22). The continued pledge of loyalty to the Queen has provoked
some debate and opposition. For example, in October 2012, the death
of Charles Roach was widely reported. He was a civil-rights lawyer who
had refused to take the oath of Canadian citizenship because of his
opposition to the monarchy and had campaigned for the oath to be
changed. But, as CBCNews put it, he ‘died with his decades-long dream
of becoming a Canadian unfulfilled’.29 Some campaigners in Canada
have cited the example of Australia, which dropped the reference to
the Queen.
Whilst all three countries have developed practices of pledging alle-
giance to the nation in the everyday (in contrast to the European exam-
ples discussed in the following chapter), there are significant differences
in the ways their oaths are taken. I suggest that the Australian and
Canadian ceremonies, and particularly the oaths, strike a different tone
to the US ceremony, where the oath is stylised to sound both grand and
antiquated, with ornate language which stands out in the context of
the ceremony, and belies its relatively recent composition. The oath,
and particularly the requirement to swear to relinquish allegiance and
loyalty to former states, also sits awkwardly with other moments of
celebration of diversity in the ceremony. It directly contradicts de facto
acceptance of dual citizenship in the United States. Although in times
of securitisation and suspicion of certain categories of dual citizenship
and ideas of the enemy within (as discussed in Chapter 2), this oath
may take on increased significance. In contrast to the United States,
both Australian and Canadian oaths – and particularly the Australian –
appear more streamlined and modern in their wording. Perhaps again,
given their relatively more recent independence, there is an embrace
of the modern (which also allowed for acknowledgement of historical
wrongs as discussed in the previous section), whilst the United States’
oath suggests a more formal, historic register. The following section
will consider whether the oaths should be regarded as performative – as
creating the transition to ‘citizen’ that they suggest and argue that the
ceremonies illustrate the anxieties which appear to be provoked by the
intentions behind, and efficacy of, the oath.
 Taking the Oath 65

Does saying it make you a citizen?

In the moment they take the oaths, citizands become citizens. The
oaths are performative in the sense first outlined by J. L. Austin, in
that they involve not merely saying something, but actually doing
something. The words call into being an act (Austin 1997: 235), as in
‘I pronounce you man and wife’ or ‘I sentence you to imprisonment’.
According to the USCIS website, ‘Taking the oath will complete the
process of becoming a US citizen’.30 Or, in the words of the more
jocular host of the Oakland ceremony, ‘This is the bit that makes you
a citizen. Paying your fee didn’t make you a citizen, although, don’t
get me wrong, we’re glad you paid the fee. I really needed the money’.
As the Winnipeg judge put it in an interview, ‘if you don’t show up,
you don’t become a citizen’. The Australian code of citizenship also
makes this clear:

The presiding officer should ensure that each candidate makes the
pledge by reciting the pledge out loud. If a candidate fails to make the
pledge during a public citizenship ceremony they should be advised
that they are not a citizen and should again be given the opportunity
to make the pledge. Candidates who do not make the pledge do not
become Australian citizens and must not be presented with a certifi-
cate. (Australia 2011: 21)31

As Austin pointed out, however, performative utterances can be unsuc-

cessful or, in his terms, ‘unhappy’. (Austin 1997: 237). They may be infe-
licitous if the necessary circumstances to give them effect do not occur.
But they also depend on the right intentions of the speaker:

A good many of these verbal procedures are designed for use by people
who hold certain beliefs or have certain feelings or intentions. And
if you use one of these formulae when you do not have the requisite
thoughts or feelings or intentions then there is an abuse of the proce-
dure, there is insincerity. (Austin 1997: 238–239)

In the case of the oaths or pledges of allegiance and commitment

(as well as in the context of ‘welcomes’ or ‘celebrations’ which will
be discussed in Chapter 4), it is clear that there may be such insin-
cerities. Whilst in the ceremonies there were no explicit means by
which the sincerity of the citizands was tested, there were nonethe-
less friendly suggestions that it might be a concern. For example, the
judge in Brooklyn stopped the citizands from pledging the oath and
66 Making Citizens

then started it again, urging them on: ‘Say it louder!’ In Mississauga,

Canada, the judge called out, ‘Say it like you mean it!’ In the United
States, it is clear that the citizands already know the correct deportment
to use when swearing the oath of allegiance (and singing the national
anthem) as they make the familiar gesture of placing their right hands
over their hearts. Alongside the more explicit expression of concern
that the oath should be said with conviction or sincerity, the ceremo-
nies also produced other performances of enthusiasm and patriotism
towards the United States and becoming a citizen. For instance, the
judge in Brooklyn began with the question ‘Is everyone excited?’ At
each ceremony, the citizands were given small stars-and-stripes flags
which they were encouraged to wave at various times by ceremony offi-
cials, who were themselves waving along energetically, in a manner akin
to teachers at a school assembly. In both the Manhattan and Oakland
ceremonies, a video showed a message from President Obama congratu-
lating them on becoming American citizens. The video ended with Lee
Greenwood singing ‘God Bless America’, a song written by Irving Berlin
in 1918 which is commonly played at national and sporting events.32
The video accompanying the song shows iconic pictures of American
landscapes, buildings and monuments, as well as the subtitles to the
song. The citizands are encouraged to sing along and wave their mini
flags. As the host in Manhattan said, ‘This is your day. Be proud and
sing it loud. You’re US citizens, and we’re seeking the next “American
Idol”’. In conversations and interviews, the officials emphasised their
perception that the ceremonies and the swearing of the oath are mean-
ingful to the citizands by pointing out how frequently citizands cry
during the ceremony. It is as if the outward expression of emotion is
taken as reassurance that the inward intention is sincere.
This emotional display is not only performed by the citizands (and
their guests), but also by officials who take part in the ceremonies and
often explain how much they enjoy organising and witnessing them.
In Canada, the judge and other officials organising the ceremony in
Mississauga repeatedly said that the ceremonies were ‘joyous’ occa-
sions where many people cry. The judge said he saw the ceremony as
providing ‘closure of finally being integrated into Canada. ... It is a really
big deal’. The Brooklyn judge told the audience:

This is the best part of my job, and I say it from my heart. ... I’m the
lucky person who gets to stand here and say, ‘Welcome’. We are so
glad you decided to become American.
 Taking the Oath 67

As one of the officials at the Manhattan ceremony pointed out, much of

the judge’s work involves deportations (the very opposite of a welcome),
whereas on these occasions, people are pleased to see her. The citizands
are urged, ‘However you choose to celebrate this day, please celebrate
it’. In the Canadian ceremony at Winnipeg, the Manitoba Provincial
Minister for Culture, Heritage and Tourism, Flor Marcelino, who was
herself a naturalised citizen (she was originally from the Philippines)
gave a welcome. As well as reading a speech on the importance of multi-
culturalism in the province, she appeared to speak spontaneously about
her experience of migration to Canada. She was clearly emotionally
involved as she began crying, saying, ‘I consider it to be a privilege and
an honour to be a Canadian citizen. The Canadian citizenship ceremony
is very dear to me. I am grateful to be a Canadian citizen’. In Australia,
the official who organised the ceremonies explained in an interview:

Every time I do one I still get nervous before a ceremony, after five
years, because it’s such an important thing for many people. And
some people have travelled a long, hard road to get their citizen-
ship. ... And I also sometimes still get a lump in my throat when I
think about the families coming up and getting their certificates and
stuff like that as well. ... Yeah, yeah, so I never get tired of the citizen-
ship [ceremonies].

As this section has shown, there is an expectation of deep emotion

when taking and hearing the pledges. For many of the citizands, it will
indeed be an emotional moment.33 However, the ceremonies also reveal
a level of concern that the ‘correct’ emotions are being felt, as well as
potential doubt as to how this might be discovered. Linked to the ques-
tion of whether the intentions behind the oath-taking are genuine is the
question of doubts about the transformative potential – does saying the
make someone a ‘real citizen’. The following section will explore further
the suggestion that the journey towards citizenship is incomplete even
after the pledge taking and ceremony.

True citizens?
Alongside the encouragement to retain ties and cultural identity with
their ‘former’ countries (despite the oath they have taken), the United
States ceremonies do maintain the symbolism of an initiation ceremony
whereby the new citizens emerge from the ceremony transformed in
their status. Indeed, this is symbolised in the way that, after the pledge
68 Making Citizens

has been taken in unison, the new citizens go up individually to shake

hands with the presiding person (judge or other official), to receive their
certificates, and to have pictures taken.34 This act marks the exit from
the liminal position back into society as a citizen. In Oakland, the trans-
formation is promised from the outset. As the host apologised for delays
in entering the theatre and starting the ceremony, he joked, ‘Today is
the last time you’re going to stand in an immigration line. From now
on, you’re in a citizenship line’. In Manhattan, once the citizands had
all made their oath of allegiance together and pledged loyalty to the
flag, the host confirmed their status: ‘My fellow Americans. Remember,
you are no longer a permanent resident. You are all national citizens’.
Once the ceremony is completed, there is an acknowledgement that this
change may take some adjusting to. For example, the host in Oakland
gave advice ‘to those who may be worried about leaving the building
and walking around the street without a Green Card’. He assured them
that they should not worry because

when you leave here today, for the first time, you will be legally enti-
tled to say, ‘Excuse me, officer. I’m a citizen of the United States’. The
audience clapped, and he concluded, ‘You don’t have to carry proof
of US citizenship.

There is however, a potential hesitation in this. It is possible that new

citizens may indeed still find themselves challenged to prove their
identity/citizenship by public officials and others, in ways they might
have been on the way to the ceremony. Legal citizenship does not, for
example preclude being stopped for the offence that has become collo-
quially known as DWB (driving while black).
By coincidence, the second of the two Manhattan ceremonies on the
day I was observing was filmed by a camera crew for NBC for broadcast
after the upcoming election. After the ceremony, the film crew conducted
very short interviews with some of the new citizens. It appeared that, for
those who agreed to be interviewed, the transformation felt complete.
The first person they spoke to was a middle-aged man who was wearing
a Stars and Stripes tie. The interviewer asked, ‘Where are you from?’ to
which the man replied, ‘From the United States of America now’. Each
person interviewed was asked at the end of the interview to say ‘I’m a
US citizen’ and to wave their flag, which they all did very enthusiasti-
cally, apart from one of the soldiers in the ceremony who said the line
but did not wave the flag, perhaps feeling it was a little undignified for
his uniform.
 Taking the Oath 69

Victor Turner, writing about the liminal stage of initiation rituals,

largely focused on those, such as transitions from boys to men and girls
to women in rural Africa, which all members of a society are expected
to go through. Indeed, he discusses cases where, for example, men who
have not undergone circumcision rituals will be shunned from participa-
tion in other rituals. Citizenship ceremonies play a slightly different role
in society; most citizens of a country have never had to go through one,
which leaves residual doubts as to when citizands truly become citizens:
How truly performative are the ceremonies? Or, alternatively, what kind
of citizen do they produce? In the Manhattan ceremony, these kinds of
doubts were suggested. The judge made a fairly long speech which was,
as she said, about love, although she hastily explained, ‘not romantic
love. I might get into trouble for that, and it’s too early in the morning.
But love of your country’. She went on to acknowledge that this love
presents a ‘complicated issue’, because:

the country you came from, you may love more than before. It is the
place you go for vacation and to relax. The US is the place where your
daily struggles occur, and you may not necessarily be feeling much
love. So how do you come to love the United States?

In this account, we get the merest hint of hostility and unequal condi-
tions that immigrants might face, with the reference to ‘daily struggles’.
This had been spelt out more clearly by the pre-ceremony information
that was given out in Brooklyn about what to do if faced with discrimi-
nation. The judge in Manhattan went on to explore her own history of
emigration as a child from Israel to the United States and shared that she
did not find it an easy experience: ‘I wasn’t feeling love. I was annoyed
at my parents’. She described how, in her twenties, American history,
the Civil War, and the civil rights movement fascinated her. She ended
her speech by saying:

I learned to love the US by getting to know it on a different level. I

hope that if you don’t feel it then you begin to feel the love – good
luck to all of you and God bless America.

This speech has a double effect. On the one hand, it recognises the ties
to and affection for their home countries that the new citizens may still
have. On the other hand, it potentially suggests that they are not yet
fully citizens until they can ‘feel love’ for the US. Tension remains about
when the new citizens can feel secure in their belonging and when
70 Making Citizens

they will be considered to be properly American. As will be described

in Chapter 4, some UK ceremonies suggest similar reservations, where
there is a feeling that the citizenship ceremony is only the start of the
new citizens’ transformation, rather than a celebration of the end of a
process.

Conclusion

This chapter has taken the citizenship ceremonies as rites of passage

which are designed to initiate new citizens. The ceremonies in different
countries are in many ways remarkably similar. It would seem that
rituals of citizenship have a common lexicon of symbols and practices
that countries draw on. These rituals are generally in accord with other
rites of passage, particularly in the ways they orchestrate the separation
of initiates from the rest of the public, the creation of an idea of unity
among diverse initiates, and the final return to the public once the trans-
formation into citizenship is complete. They all require a form of verbal
commitment of loyalty to the country, or the head of state. These are
generally commitments which citizens-by-birth do not have to make,
although in all the countries examined in this chapter, there are rituals
of loyalty to country which are practiced routinely by all citizens (such
as listening to the national anthem and pledges of allegiance).
The chapter asked what framing the speeches and other practices give
to the standard ceremonial elements? What can this tell us about the
way the nation is being narrated and how new citizens are regarded?
What is not said is as important as what is said. This is particularly signif-
icant when thinking of how the nation and its history are told in regard
to citizenship. All three countries have settler colonial pasts which
involved genocides of indigenous people as well as a renunciation of
their rights to land and civil and political rights. They also have an open
to immigration, but highly racialised caveats.. These histories are often
silenced in the production of a narrative of an immigrant nation. Stories
of nations built on the contribution of immigrants are potentially a
powerful way to give new citizens a place in their new country. Such
accounts enhance the idea that the immigrants have shown resilience
and can now bring that strength to the country. As was seen in many
of the speeches we observed, these narratives are often coupled with the
notion that the cultural diversity that immigrants bring is also positive.
However, this narrative can inhibit the recognition of past exclusions
based on race and national origin as well as contemporary hostility and
discrimination faced by many migrants. Claims of openness also fail to
 Taking the Oath 71

account for the ways in which states identify some migrants as illegal
and seek their deportation. In all three countries, arms are only ever
held open wide for certain categories of migrants.
In this chapter, I have tracked how the response to this dilemma plays
out differently in the United States, Canada and Australia. In all three
countries, we see reference to the difficulties immigrants may face in
migrating. This is largely referred to euphemistically as ‘long hard roads’,
‘daily struggles’ or ‘immigration lines’. None of the ceremonies them-
selves tackle questions of the racism that the new citizens may encounter,
or may have faced since their arrival (although the Brooklyn court did
give out information on racism and employment before the ceremony
began). However, there are significant differences among three cases in
the representation of history. Australia and Canada make symbolic refer-
ence to the fact that European ‘discovery’ of the New World had an
impact on indigenous peoples (this was given significantly more promi-
nence in the Australian ceremony). By contrast, in the United States,
the dominance of the narrative of the American Dream and the national
myth of a nation built by immigrants appears to drown out any consid-
eration of pre-colonial settlement and its destruction, or, equally, the
extent to which the nation was built on slave labour.
Taking the oath/pledge is central to all three countries’ ceremonies.
The verbal commitment is positioned as performative – it is this act
which ‘makes’ the citizen – which is of course not to say that this act is,
in itself, sufficient to make a citizen. Even when the oath is said in the
conditions which give it power to be performative – the credentials of
all the citizands have been checked and passed administratively – there
is space to question the sincerity of some citizands taking the oath. This
doubt is not expressed explicitly but does seep into the practices of the
ceremony – with exhortations to ‘Say it louder!’, to celebrate it properly,
and even to ‘feel the love’. It is clear that an expression of emotional
connection is expected as well as the legal requirement for the words to
be said. These concerns and doubts may lead to questioning the trans-
formative power of the ceremonies. Can ceremonies alone truly make
citizens? Do citizens by naturalisation have to do and feel something
more to make them really citizens? What does it take? These questions
will be explored in the following chapter, which focuses on citizenship
ceremonies in three European countries.
4
Europe Welcomes

Introduction

In his speech at the citizenship ceremony in Dublin in October 2012, the

Irish minister for justice, equality and defence, Alan Shatter, explained
how The Irish Times, in association with the Royal Irish Academy and
the National Museum, had opened a public vote to choose 10 of the
100 objects that would be used to symbolise the history of Ireland. One
of the objects that could be voted for was a certificate of naturalisa-
tion. The minister encouraged the citizens to vote for the certificate to
symbolise ‘new Ireland’ – a country, he explained, where 12% of the
population come from abroad. The certificate of naturalisation did not
make it to the final list (see http://www.100objects.ie/the-objects/), but
the choice of objects taken to represent the history of Ireland can tell us
much about the way nation is narrated (Bhabha 1990). As the journalist
Fintan O’Toole, who originally suggested the idea of a history of Ireland
in 100 objects, put it, ‘Because Irish people have spread all around the
world, they [the objects] belong to the world as well’.1 The final list of
objects which were chosen to represent the history of Ireland included
an emigrant’s cardboard suitcase and tin teapot. This particular narra-
tion of nation was also reflected in the speech of the retired judge who
oversaw the taking of the oaths and pledges of naturalisation at the
ceremony which I observed. He explained to the citizands that ‘We are a
nation of emigrants, and we understand it [the migrant experience]’. It
is likely that the Irish museum project was inspired by the BBC collabo-
ration with the British Museum in 2010 which produced a ‘History of
the World in 100 Objects’.2 What is striking is the difference in the scope
of the two museum projects and the contrasting ways in which Britain
and Ireland insert themselves into global relations. In Ireland, histories

72
 Europe Welcomes 73

of colonial occupation as well as participation in empire have led to

migration and the creation of an Irish diaspora, who are understood to
be both Irish but also beyond Ireland as a global diaspora. In the UK,
a history of imperial rule creates an imagined Britain which is at the
centre of global relations – a place to which all the world comes. An echo
of this can be seen in the speech made in the Kingston-on-Thames citi-
zenship ceremony in the UK, which uses the building of the Guildhall
in Kingston in 1935 as a metaphor for the enrichment of British society
through its position as a place to which goods are brought and to which
people come:

The builders used some local materials. The stone is from Portland,
the bricks come from Oxshott not far from here and the tiles are
from Cranleigh near Guildford. But the timbers are from many places
around the world, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas. This
building could not exist without materials that come from the local
area and from other countries. And that’s what makes our commu-
nity and our country flourish.

The narrative of Ireland as (until very recently) a nation largely of

‘outgoers’ (rather than ‘incomers’) creates a notion of Ireland as a
homogeneous society and silences a longer history of immigration
into Ireland (including not only Scots and English migrants, but also
Huguenots, Italians, Chinese, Germans and Jews3) (Lentin 2007). It also
serves to make the arrival of the current migrants into Ireland a break
with history, rather than a continuation (and enlargement) of an older
process of migration and emigration. The speech from Kingston, lacks
any reflection on the important and continuing relationship between
Britain and the places mentioned – that of colonial conquest, settlement
and colonial and post-colonial migration. Many of the areas mentioned
were, at the time of the construction, still part of the British Empire, and
thus were inhabited by British subjects. These histories are important,
not least because migration to Britain is still shaped by colonial relations
and Britain’s global post-colonial position. However in this narration of
global links, the links between citizenship and empire are left unexam-
ined. As we shall see, this absence was a common feature of the speeches
at citizenship ceremonies observed in Europe.
This chapter will explore the ceremonies of three European coun-
tries which, at least partly inspired by the ceremonies in the countries
discussed in the previous chapter, have recently chosen to mark the
naturalisation of new citizens with formal ceremonies of their own. The
74 Making Citizens

chapter explores the nature of compulsory citizenship ceremonies in

three countries at the western edge of Northern Europe (Ireland, the
UK and the Netherlands) that have long histories of people moving
beyond their borders: as settlers, migrant labour, and colonialists. The
Netherlands and the UK in particular have long histories of settlement
of non-nationals within their borders. In all three countries, citizenship
ceremonies are a recent introduction, starting in 2004 in the UK, 2005
in the Netherlands (attendance was made compulsory in 2006), and in
2011 in Ireland. It can be argued that they mark a ‘citizenship turn’ in all
three countries where citizenship in general and naturalisation in partic-
ular have had a renewed focus in public debates. The introduction of the
ceremonies has been part of a general realignment of citizenship regimes
which can be characterised as part of wider public discourses in Europe
over the last 10 to 20 years, which have included questioning multicul-
turalism and a return to more integrationist policies, with a particular
focus on immigration and citizenship. In all cases, the ceremonies also
mark the granting of European citizenship (for those who do not already
have it). Despite all the academic (and sometimes popular) discussion
of the end of national sovereignty and the decline of the national, it
is interesting to see how Europeanness as a potentially ‘postnational’
(Brown 2010) form of citizenship is largely ignored in the ceremonies.
In contrast, being a citizen of the nation-state is of central importance.
The absence of discussion of the European aspect to belonging and citi-
zenship is particularly significant because, as will be explored further
in Chapter 5, for the citizands, European citizenship and the rights to
travel and employment that it gives them are often highly important. At
the same time, questions of local city identities are also stressed in the
ceremonies in Britain and the Netherlands.
In this chapter, I maintain that the development of ceremonies in indi-
vidual countries in Europe needs to be understood within the context of
wider citizenship trends in Europe and the rebordering of Europe. The
chapter will examine the introduction of citizenship testing in the UK
and the Netherlands, arguing that these tests are one indication of the
shifting citizenship regimes in Europe, which are concerned with both
controlling immigration and naturalisation and demonstrating to the
public that their policies are ‘tough enough’. The chapter will explore the
introduction of citizenship ceremonies in the UK, the Netherlands and
Ireland and discuss the ways in which they represent histories of immi-
gration and reception of migrants. It will also examine how the ceremo-
nies represent the nature of the citizenship which is being endowed. The
material in this chapter is based on observation of single ceremonies in
 Europe Welcomes 75

the Netherlands (conducted by Dieuwertje Dyi Huijg) and Ireland, as

well as interviews with officials involved in organising the ceremonies.
The research in the UK was more substantial, with the examination of
more than 47 welcome speeches4 from citizenship ceremonies across
the UK and the observation at 10 actual ceremonies in the UK and inter-
views with several registrars. The speeches were obtained by emailing
158 county and civil level register offices in Scotland, England and Wales
(and Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland) in 2008 and 2009 with a
request for the text of the local welcome given at the ceremony. The
ceremony observations were conducted in 2010–2011 and these visits
were combined with interviews with new citizens who had taken part in
the ceremony. (These will be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6.)

European borders and citizenship

2013 was declared ‘European Year of Citizens’ by the European

Commission to focus attention on those ‘at the heart of the European
project – the citizens’ (European Commission 2012: 1). The Commission
launched online surveys and ‘citizens’ dialogues’ in cities across Europe.
The document which launched the Year of the Citizens made it clear that
a restrictive model of citizenship was envisaged: ‘If you are a national of
an EU country, you are an EU citizen’ (European Commission 2012: 3).
As a critical report from the European Economic and Social Committee
argued, this left third-country nationals (those from countries outside
the EU) who were residing legally in the EU, ‘“invisible” in European
debates of citizenship and in participation in politics and democratic
life’ (Castaños 2013: 4.6). This reflects one of the tensions in the regional
block of Europe in which freedom of movement is an important char-
acteristic of the European Union, but which is not guaranteed for non-
European residents, creating a significant difference in rights between EU
citizens and other residents. European citizenship is tightly interwoven
with national citizenship, with only those countries that are within the
EU having the power to grant European citizenship. In this way, Union
citizenship is derivative of national citizenship, with the EU itself playing
no formal role in the attribution of citizenship. As the ‘Declaration on
the Nationality of a Member State’ sets out, ‘The question of whether an
individual possesses the citizenship of a member state shall be settled
solely by reference to the national law of the member state’ (quoted
in Vink and de Groot 2010: 729). Nonetheless, norms and principles
within European law can play a potential role in shaping nation-state
law, as countries have a responsibility not to violate community law,
76 Making Citizens

many aspects of which can impinge on citizenship rights. For example,

EU citizens cannot be deported from EU countries, even where they do
not hold citizenship of that country (Anderson, Gibney et al. 2011).
Yet whilst one could argue that membership of regional grouping such
as the European Union has, in some instances, made membership of
nations less significant, within Europe, there also has been a politicisa-
tion of immigration and a revaluing of national identity in a way which
Dora Kostakopoulo suggests potentially heralds a re-ethnicisation of
nationality (2010).
In many very significant ways, for its citizens, the EU represents a
borderless zone. A central right associated with citizenship in Europe
is the free moment of goods and people across national borders of the
member states, and associated freedoms to live, work, access benefits and
vote in some elections. However, national borders still remain highly
significant for third-country members, because many of them need visas
to enter and move around Europe. Thus, as was suggested in Chapter 2,
borders have shifted both to the external edges of Europe and within
national borders in ways which serve to filter and regulate population
movements. Through rebordering (Andreas 2002), a range of actors have
been drawn in to the control of the movement of goods, and most signif-
icantly people, across borders. For example, airlines face ‘carrier liability’
which requires them to transport only those who meet legal conditions
for entry into a country or region. In addition, populations are assessed
at other points within the state to identify those who are deemed to be
‘illegal’. This assessment occurs at moments of accessing public services
as well in those in the private sector (for example where landlords are
required to check the legal status of migrants). As some internal borders
between countries have been dissolved (particularly among those coun-
tries that signed the Schengen Agreement), the external borders, over-
seen by Frontex, a European organisation which was established in 2004,
become increasingly significant.5
At the same time as advanced technologies of surveillance and move-
ment tracking enforce processes of rebordering, physical barriers are
constructed at critical points in the exterior of what has been dubbed
‘Fortress Europe’. For example, the enclave cities of Ceuta and Melilla in
northwest Africa both have a land border between Spain and Morocco
and are surrounded by a double layer of three meter high steel walls (a
height which has to be continually increased), with a large stretch of
no-man’s land in between the walls (Barbero 2012). On the other side
of these barriers and borders, transit camps are set up as other countries
get drawn into policing European borders, and migrants experience a
 Europe Welcomes 77

loss of rights (Isin and Rygiel 2007). Wendy Brown sees these walls as
postnational barriers, which only appear as national, as the fortification
of Europe against immigration from the East is left ‘to the easternmost
nation recently added to the EU’ (2010: 32). As these external barriers
become higher and more impenetrable, potential migrants use more
dangerous routes to try to enter Europe.6 In the Moroccan desert, or in
the seas outside the Italian island of Lampedusa or the Spanish Canary
Islands, hundreds of such migrants die every year. The International
Organisation for Migration (IOM) had records of at least 2,360 migrants
who died attempting to cross borders in 2013. Although not all of these
deaths occurred at Europe’s borders, the IOM estimates that 2013 may
be the ‘costliest year on record in terms of lives lost, for migrants seeking
to cross international borders clandestinely’ and Europe remains a major
destination for migration.7 The deaths represent both the desire of many
to enter Europe, and the limits of European humanitarian sentiments, as
the migrants are refused entry and their fatalities are ignored.
When the barriers and surveillance fail to stop the entry of undoc-
umented migrants into Europe, the deportation regime developed
within Europe attempts to identify and remove them (De Genova
2010; Anderson, Gibney et al. 2011). The deportation regime requires
an internal rebordering and a diffusion of responsibility for enforcing
legality in migration. For example, efforts are underway in the UK to
force medical providers and private landlords to check whether their
patients or tenants have the legal right to be in the country.8 For Iker
Barbero, the normalisation of ‘wartime’ levels of security, the violent,
forced removal of individuals, and the acceptance of the deaths of
those attempting to migrate creates an ‘anti-citizen’: those who are too
different and too much of a threat to be integrated into Europe (Barbero
2012). This construction reworks orientalism, which often pits European
civilisation against Islamic barbarism, with a focus on the need to defend
European national identities (often against what are seen as the harmful
effects of multiculturalism (Lentin and Titley 2011). It is important to
note that the anti-citizen is almost always a racialized or ethno-religious
construction. The racialised effects of surveillance of the anti-citizens
also produce scrutiny of and sometimes hostility to those legal citizens
who are racialised as ‘other’ – who ‘look like’ the potential anti-citizen.
In all of the countries considered in this chapter, political debates
around immigration have been particularly intense over the last
10–20 years. These have been interwoven with debates which suggest
‘crises’ in multiculturalism and citizenship (Modood 2007; Meer 2010;
Lentin and Titley 2011; Meer and Modood 2014). For Ralph Grillo, this
78 Making Citizens

is the third phase in the governance of diversity in Europe (2007). He

argues that, until the 1960s, policies were shaped by national and racial
stereotypes which argued for the need to abolish difference through
assimilation. From the 1960s to the 1990s, a multicultural framework
was generally accepted, with a recognition of that minorities had the
right to maintain cultural difference. Since the 1990s, however, we have
seen what Grillo terms a ‘European-wide moral panic about “difference”’
in both populist movements and wider public debates’ (2007: 980). This
panic centres on concern that there might be ‘too much’ difference for
national unity and leads to a reassertion of the need to preserve a narrow,
majority-defined, national culture. European political leaders such as
Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron have all made decla-
rations that multiculturalism has failed (Lentin and Titley 2011). In the
period since 9/11, there has been a particular focus on religious differ-
ence and fear of Muslims. Multicultural tolerance and even celebration
of difference has been blamed for fostering too much separation and
for being weak in the face of cultural forces hostile to Christianity and
Western culture. An example of this rhetoric can be seen in a speech the
British prime minister, David Cameron, gave in 2011 when celebrating
the 400th anniversary of the King James’ version of the Bible. A central
focus of the speech was this idea: ‘We are a Christian country. And
we should not be afraid to say so’.9 This suggested that core values of
Britishness were under threat from both a hostile (non-Christian) other
and what he called the ‘passive tolerance’ of multiculturalism.
As the rhetoric around immigration and multiculturalism has shifted,
it is also possible to track shifts in the citizenship regimes in Europe,
although the diversity of the different rules and regulations which
govern migration, citizenship and processes of naturalisation mean
that there will be exceptions to any general trend. Maarten P. Vink and
Gerad-René de Groot identify several broad trends in citizenship poli-
cies in Europe (2010). One is a general move towards eliminating gender
inequalities in the acquisition of citizenship. Thus, in general, women
in Europe are more likely now than in the past to have equal rights with
men in passing on citizenship to their children, and women’s citizen-
ship status is less likely to be dependent on their husbands’. Another
trend identified by Vink and de Groot is the convergence of countries
with ius soli and ius sanguinis traditions. Countries like Germany which
had an exclusively ius sanguinis model – meaning that citizenship was
solely inherited through the parents – have begun to offer the possi-
bility of naturalisation to second and third generation immigrants by
virtue of their having been born there. On the other hand, the UK and
 Europe Welcomes 79

Ireland, which traditionally had a system that included ius soli – the
right to citizenship through birth in a country – now limit citizenship
to those born in the country, depending on their parents’ citizenship
status or length of residency (since 1983 in the UK and since 2005
in Ireland). The change in law away from ius soli in Ireland was the
result of a referendum in 2004 with an overwhelming 79.8% of voters
supporting changing the law. The campaign for the referendum centred
on what was framed as ‘abuse’ of the right of ius soli by non-European
immigrants who were accused of making use of a provision which had
been largely aimed at giving those in Northern Ireland the right to Irish
citizenship (Brandi 2004; Lentin 2007; Handoll 2012). Thus, ius soli is
now limited to those who have at least one parent who is (or is entitled
to be) an Irish citizen. The referendum preserved ius sanginis by leaving
untouched the citizenship rights of the children of those who gain Irish
citizenship through having one Irish grandparent, without needing to
have ever lived in Ireland (Lentin 2007).
The Netherlands is currently an exception to the third trend which
Vink and de Groot propose, in that there is an increasing acceptance
of multiple citizenship in Western European countries.10 In contrast to
this general trend, the Dutch government has legislated to restrict dual
citizenship. The country has experienced intense political debate about
immigration in general in the last 25 years, and about dual citizenship in
particular. Dual citizenship has become a pressure point in discussions
about immigrant integration and belonging, with the renunciation of
former citizenship seen as a marker of integration into Dutch society.
These debates suggest an increasingly narrow approach to citizenship,
national identity and cultural belonging. In 1991, the citizenship law in
the Netherlands was reformed, introducing full acceptance of dual citi-
zenship for immigrants – who no longer had to renounce their citizen-
ship after naturalisation. However, long-term emigrants were still at risk
of losing their Dutch citizenship if they lived outside the Netherlands
for more than 10 years. In 2000, this situation was reversed, as long-
term emigrants were allowed to maintain dual citizenship whilst the
renunciation requirement for those who naturalise was reintroduced,
with some exceptions (Blatter, Erdmann et al. 2009).
Vink and de Groot identify a dominant trend within Europe of a
shift towards higher barriers for naturalisation. These obstacles include
the required number of years of legal settlement before immigrants are
eligible to apply for naturalisation, and the requirement to prove (often
through tests) that integration has already been achieved (Goodman
2010; Vink and de Groot 2010).11 Both the UK and the Netherlands have
80 Making Citizens

introduced citizenship testing. Ireland currently does not have either

a language or knowledge test for naturalisation, making it a minority
in the European Union – a position shared only by Belgium, Cyprus,
Italy and Sweden (Goodman 2010: 14). It is likely that Ireland will
follow down the road of language and integration testing, as it has been
proposed by government (Handoll 2012: 22). The testing regimes estab-
lished in the Netherlands and the UK are discussed in the following
section, which argues that tests practically restrict access to citizenship
but also rhetorically reassure the public that attaining citizenship is not
becoming too easy.

Citizenship testing in the Netherlands and the UK

The tests introduced in Europe for applicants for naturalisation or perma-

nent residency are not merely imitations of the longer-established tests
in the United States and Canada: they are distinct in the way they have
been developed within the specific context of challenging multicultur-
alism and hostility to some forms of immigration. As Christian Joppke
argues, ‘the coercive and punitive tone in some of Europe’s new citizen-
ship tests and loyalty requirements is still noteworthy and, to repeat, a
distinctly European innovation’ (Joppke 2013: 3). The Netherlands not
only stands out in Europe as the only country to continue to try to reduce
dual citizenship, but it has also had a particularly intense public debate
about migration and multiculturalism. There has been a clear shift in
government policy from one of tolerance of difference and multicul-
turalism to demands for integration and assimilation (Jacobs and Rea
2007). In some ways, the Netherlands can be seen as a trendsetter in
this area, and the policy and legislative changes have been followed,
for example by Belgium. The Dutch approach to assimilation also puts
considerable emphasis on the adoption of social norms and cultural
perspectives about what constitutes the ‘good life’. Migrants are required
to ‘feel’ Dutch before they become citizens (Joppke 2013: 12). The extent
of the hostility to migration in the Netherlands is suggested in the film
which is shown to those applying for long-term visas to come to the
Netherlands. The film, Naar Netherland (Going to the Netherlands), was
introduced in 2005 as part of a ‘pre-immigration preparation package’. It
presents an image of the Netherlands which is a far cry from the way one
might expect a nation to represent itself. Semin Suvarierol sums up the
portrayal of the Netherlands in the film as ‘cold, wet, small, overcrowded
and expensive’ (2012: 215). Potential immigrants to the Netherlands are
warned of poor housing in overcrowded estates and the hostility of the
 Europe Welcomes 81

native Dutch. It is suggested that non-European migrants will have to

change their attitudes towards homosexuality and gender norms and
will be at risk of prosecution for violence towards women. There is a
focus on honour killings, domestic violence and female genital mutila-
tion. Thus, both the Dutch and the foreigners are represented in stere-
otyped and homogenising ways which fit into a narrative of the ‘clash
of cultures’ (Suvarierol 2012).
The demands placed on non-Western migrants to the Netherlands12
to prove their willingness and capacity to integrate began in the late
1990s, when the Wet Inburgering nieuwkomers (WIN) scheme was intro-
duced. Under WIN, migrants from non-Western countries were obliged
to take 600 hours of language and ‘social orientation’ courses, paid for
by central government and municipalities. The requirements have, over
time, become more demanding, and there has been a withdrawal of state
funding for the lessons. From 2007 onwards, the obligation to participate
was shifted to a requirement to pass the tests. Those who cannot pass
within three-and-a-half years (or five years for asylum seekers) cannot
obtain permanent residency and have limited entitlement to state bene-
fits. There was a suggestion that even those immigrants who had already
obtained Dutch citizenship should have to pass the test. Although this
was ruled unconstitutional, it reflects the potential vulnerability of natu-
ralised citizenship compared to citizenship by birth (Jacobs and Rea
2007). The Dutch citizenship test’s stringency suggests that it functions
as much as a control on migration as it does for education and prepara-
tion for active citizenship. Christian Joppke argues:

The Dutch citizenship test stands out as a harsh and high-demanding

extreme.13 [ ... ] the test is an arduous four hours long [ ... ] no test
materials or preparations are provided by the state [ ... ] and one can
try only three times, after which one is terminally out. So daunting is
the Dutch citizenship hurdle to take that after introduction of the test
in 2003 the number of applicants fell to two-thirds of the previous
level, while the passing rate of those who still dared dropped to 70%.
(2013: 12)

Similarly, the introduction of the new citizenship regime in the UK,

including the citizenship tests and citizenship ceremony, could be
seen as the product of ongoing political debates about the nature of
Britishness and citizenship.14 Politicians from both the left and right of
the political spectrum in Britain have engaged in debates around the
meanings of nationhood, often in the context of an argument about a
82 Making Citizens

supposed citizenship crisis. The concern frequently voiced is that the

British do not know what citizenship (or Britishness) means. This argu-
ment was particularly present, for instance, in response to civil distur-
bances in Oldham and Bradford in 2001 and in the declared War on
Terror. Since the 7/7 bombings in London, there has been an increased
focus on ‘homegrown’ terrorists. The new Labour government proposed
various solutions to this crisis, including the introduction of citizen-
ship studies in schools in 2002, the biannual ‘citizenship survey’, begun
in 2001, and attention given to the endowing of citizenship to new
British subjects. The focus on new citizens needs to be understood as
part of a contradictory move within British legislative policy. On the
one hand, the government was arguing that immigration should be seen
as potentially positive (where it is good for the economy), yet this is
accompanied by an increasing demonisation of ‘unmanaged’ immigra-
tion, and in particular of asylum seekers who were increasingly classed
as a kind of anti-citizen (Flynn 2005). In the context of the War on
Terror, the government also claimed the right to renege on some of the
basic terms of the relationship between citizen and state (for instance,
in the control orders in which the state restricts individuals’ mobility
and subjects them to extra scrutiny without recourse to a trial). These
policy debates are often centred on what has been termed ‘the crisis of
multiculturalism’. Derek McGhee argues that, in the UK, there has been
a ‘systematic dismantling of the multiculturalism as the organising rhet-
oric of public policies’ (McGhee 2005a: 1.4). However, it is important to
note that what is at issue here is generally the way in which policies are
framed and defended: whilst the rhetoric may shift, only weak forms
of multiculturalism or small accommodations have ever been imple-
mented in Britain (Grillo 2007; Phillips 2007; Pitcher 2009).
Citizenship testing was introduced in the UK in 2005 with a test based
on the book Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship,
which was written by Bernard Crick, an advisor to the Labour govern-
ment who was also involved in reforming the teaching of citizenship
education in schools. Passing the test was initially required for those
applying for citizenship, and then got pushed further forward in the
process, so that applicants for permanent residency are also required to
pass the test. Initially it was possible for those whose English was not
good enough to take the test to opt to take an ESOL (English for Speakers
of Other Languages) course. This option has now been withdrawn and
since October 2013, everyone is required to demonstrate a good grasp of
English (by passing a language qualification as well as a knowledge test)
before being eligible for permanent residency. The introduction of the
 Europe Welcomes 83

test in the UK attracted considerable media attention. Andrew O’Hagan,

writing in the London Review of Books, called the study guide for the
test ‘the funniest book currently available in the English language’,
largely because of the way it produced a fictional account of an always-
welcoming Britain and a ‘rendition of family contentment in which
everyone hangs out of the windows of their square houses to smile their
clean smiles and wave hello to the dustmen’ (O’Hagan 2006). The guide
for the test, and therefore the test itself, has been repeatedly rewritten
since it was introduced. The third edition of Life in the United Kingdom,
published in 2013, was intended to place more emphasis on British
history and achievements and reflected an increased focus on integra-
tion and participation, thus reflecting the shift to ideas of ‘earned’ citi-
zenship. As Mark Harper MP, minister for immigration explained:

We’ve stripped out mundane information about water meters, how

to find train timetables, and using the internet. The new test rightly
focuses on values and principles at the heart of being British. Instead
of telling people how to claim benefits it encourages participation in
British life. (Brooks 2013: 23)

This shift in emphasis has also involved the removal of practical infor-
mation, such as how to get medical assistance through the NHS, details
of educational qualifications and how to report crime (Brooks 2013).
While the content of the tests may be debated, it is clear that in both
the Netherlands and the UK, citizenship or naturalisation tests serve as
a technology of reassurance (Fortier 2008: 101). They not only restrict
access to citizenship but are also a public statement that citizenship is
not ‘too easy’ and that a high bar is placed on inclusion. Another poten-
tial technology of reassurance is the introduction of citizenship ceremo-
nies. In many cases, it appears that the ceremonies were designed to
highlight not only the importance of citizenship but to provide reassur-
ance that the creation of new citizens is accompanied not just by ritual
but also reminders to new citizens of their duties and responsibility as
citizens. The next section will explore the relatively recent introduction
of these ceremonies in Europe by first examining how they avoid repre-
sentations of European citizenship.

European ceremonies?

Debates about the nature of national identity and the role of immigra-
tion and naturalisation have prompted several European countries to
84 Making Citizens

introduce citizenship ceremonies.15 The model for citizenship ceremo-

nies has come from the ‘immigration nations’, especially the United
States, Canada and Australia, which were considered in the previous
chapter. Chapter 3 discussed how Australia was influenced by the UK
experience in the introduction of citizenship tests. In its turn, the UK
government white paper, Secure Borders, Safe Haven, explained the moti-
vation behind the creation of ceremonies in Britain and the ways in
which they were influenced by other countries’ experiences:

It is symptomatic of the low-key and bureaucratic approach which the

UK has adopted to the acquisition of British citizenship that, unlike
the position in many other countries, there are no arrangements for
any kind of public act to mark becoming a British citizen. The use of
citizenship ceremonies is well established in Australia, Canada and
the United States and is becoming increasingly common in European
countries. There is evidence to suggest that these ceremonies can
have an important impact on promoting the value of naturalisation
and that immigrant groups welcome them. (Home Office 2002: 34)

Thus, ceremonies have been seen as a way of marking the acquisition of

citizenship more formally, with central prominence given to the taking
of an oath or pledge of allegiance. Given that the ceremonies in Canada,
the United States and Australia were the inspiration, it is therefore not
surprising that the citizenship ceremonies observed in Europe followed
a similar structure. The European ceremonies share many features with
those observed in Chapter 3, in ways which suggest that they function
as rites of passage and initiation. The ceremonies we observed in Europe
were also a mix of formal ritual and celebration and they produced
narratives of the meanings of nation and of its relationship to immigra-
tion and citizenship.
In terms of the ceremonies as rites of passage, in both the UK and
Ireland, a similar stage of liminality was produced, where citizands were
separated from their accompanying friends and relatives. The ceremony
in Ireland was of similar proportions to that of Oakland, California,
with 700 citizands. The citizands showed that they had the appropriate
documents and are then directed to the stalls of the auditorium of the
newly built Convention Centre in Dublin. Their friends and relatives
(including many young children) sat above them in the balcony area.
In the UK, ceremonies tend to be smaller and held in town halls or
registry offices, although I observed some in other locations, such as a
local library in Liverpool. In Northern Ireland, ceremonies are held in
 Europe Welcomes 85

Hillsborough Castle in Belfast, as it was felt that requiring local regis-

trars to conduct the ceremonies would be too politically divisive in the
Northern Ireland context.16 However, the separation of citizands and
guests was universally practiced in the UK ceremonies I attended, even
when there was a small number of citizands.17
The ceremony observed in the Netherlands was held in the Amsterdam
Town Hall and offered the single exception to all the ceremonies we
observed, as the citizands could sit anywhere in the ceremony room,
and so sat with their guests. However, when they were about to give
the declaration, they were separated from the rest of the audience when
they were called to the front of the hall and asked to say the declaration
individually into a microphone. Before giving the declaration, the citi-
zands were told, ‘the audience is your witness, so you have to look out to
the hall. Stand behind the microphone and raise your right hand’. The
declaration was explained in everyday language: ‘Every citizen declares
two things: 1. Yes: I will respect the Constitution; 2. Yes, I promise to be
a good citizen of the Netherlands.’18
As with the ceremonies in Canada, Australia and the United States,
there was a range of symbols present in the physical spaces in which
the ceremonies took place, and within the ceremonies. These symbols
of power, citizenship and belonging ranged from a local to a national
register, as will be discussed below. What was most interesting was
the almost total absence of European symbols, or indeed, the almost
total absence of any reference to European citizenship in the speeches
or other parts of the ceremonies. The symbols and collective identity
of the national were favoured over the regional. As will be discussed
in reference to the experience of new British citizens in Chapter 5, for
many of the interviewees, an important reason for applying for British
citizenship was that it would also mean obtaining European citizenship.
This offers freedom of movement within Europe, as well as the ability to
work in any of the countries of the union. This mobility is particularly
important in Britain, because it is not part of the Schengen Agreement,
which allows for the free movement of third party citizens within
member countries. Thus, European citizenship ensures the avoidance
of the expensive processes of applying for visas to visit other European
countries, and citizens can pass quickly through the ‘European only’
border lanes at entry points. It also enables employment in any country
and guarantees residency rights in the European Union. Yet despite the
significance of gaining European citizenship for the citizands, at no
point is this acknowledged within the ceremonies. In the ceremonies,
national citizenship trumps regional/European. In both the UK and
86 Making Citizens

the Netherlands, the national is sometimes represented in conjunction

with an emphasis on local (either city or regional) belonging, as will be
discussed further below. The following section will explore a ceremony
in Ireland which retained an exclusively national focus.

‘Cead Mile Failte’ (A hundred thousand welcomes)?

Citizenship ceremonies in Ireland

In Ireland, in contrast to the Netherlands and the UK, citizenship cere-

monies are conducted solely in the national register. Indeed, the cere-
monies are national events, in that all citizands receive their citizenship
in Dublin as part of a large, mass event. In the media, the creation of the
ceremony and the oath of fidelity were taken as a direct imitation of the
United States. As the news source Irishcentral.com put it, ‘new Irish citi-
zens will swear an oath of allegiance to the nation and Ireland copies the
American system’.19 Citizenship ceremonies were introduced in Ireland
in 2011 and were designed, in part, to clear the large backlog which had
developed of people waiting four years or more to have their applications
processed, despite their eligibility based on their length of residence in
Ireland (Cosgrave 2011: 25). As Ireland does not have a visa granting
permanent residency, the failure to process applications for naturalisa-
tion left people ‘living in limbo’, according to the Immigrant Council
of Ireland (Cosgrave 2011). Prior to 2011, taking an oath of fidelity for
naturalisation in Ireland was done in ordinary district courts, and indi-
vidual oath-taking was mixed with other proceedings in the court, so
new citizens might find themselves sworn into citizenship between the
proceedings of criminal cases.
The new government which came into office in 2011 declared its
intention to clear the backlog. In approximately three years since the
general election, almost 42,000 new Irish citizens were created.20 The
ceremonies are also national events to the extent that they are covered
in the national media.21 The ceremonial days – where there may be up to
three ceremonies, creating in total two to three thousand new citizens –
are routinely covered in print, television and electronic media. National
symbols are also prominent at the ceremonies. At the ceremony I
attended, the Garda22 band played as citizands came into the auditorium.
The band stood up for the entry of the minister for justice and equality,
who was accompanied by a retired judge who was the presiding officer
and took the citizens’ pledge. Then the whole auditorium was asked to
stand for the national colours, as three soldiers marched on with a flag.
(We were later told that they were under the command of Captain Neil
 Europe Welcomes 87

McMahon from the Second Eastern Brigade.) A national government

minister, rather than a local official or politician, gave the ceremony’s
welcome speech.23 According to Irish law, the minister for justice and
equality has absolute discretion to decide who should be allowed to
naturalise as an Irish citizen, as long as he or she is satisfied that the
applicant fulfils the statutory conditions for naturalisation, including
good character and length of residency. In addition, the minister does
not have to give reasons for the refusal of an application of naturalisa-
tion, and there is no right of appeal against a ruling (Cosgrave 2011: 5).
The minister, Alan Shatter, appeared to have presided over almost all of
the ceremonies in Ireland.
In the ceremony, Shatter stressed his own role in pushing forward the
effort to clear the backlog of cases and praised himself and the depart-
ment: ‘I think I can safely say that the steps that I initiated within my
department to deal with the backlog of citizenship applications have
been a huge success.’ Shatter called the ceremony a rite of passage for
those who had ‘come to our country from a foreign land’, and said that
it was important ‘for us as the host nation in bestowing this honour
on you’. There was a clear separation set up between the citizen and
non-citizen, summoned by the pronouns ‘us’ and ‘you’. Shatter went
on to say that he had the ‘privilege’ of deciding who got citizenship,
and it is notable that the usual couplet of ‘rights and responsibilities’
were not mentioned in this context. However, whilst the language used
appeared somewhat archaic, with references to ‘honour and privilege’,
Shatter referred to what might be seen as multicultural sentiments in the
idea that new citizens can be seen as ‘enriching’ a local culture. He also
acknowledged that citizands had already contributed before they were
made citizens. His speech had a strong rhetoric of choice (as discussed
in Chapter 3, in the context of the United States):

You have come to our country and have chosen to live among
us. ... Today we welcome you to our nation as its newest citizens, and
we hope that you will continue to contribute to our communities, to
our neighbourhood, and to our society. As a people, we have been
enriched by your presence and, in making you citizens of our ancient
and proud land, we are acknowledging the contribution you have
already made.

Whilst the contributions of the citizens were recognised, at the same

time, there was a continual reinforcement of an idea of an original Irish
community through the repetition of the word ‘our’: ‘our nation’, ‘our
88 Making Citizens

neighbourhood’, ‘our society’, and finally, ‘our ancient and proud land’
There is a risk that this repetition may exclude the citizands and set up
a distinction between them and the community. As we shall see in the
discussion of the ceremonies in the UK, the notion of an ‘ancient’ land
has connotations which work against the idea of a changing and open
society enriched by newcomers. Nonetheless, the minister went some
way toward reducing this idea of the separation between the citizands
and the nation, as he ended his speech by saying:

The history of this state is now your history, and the narrative of your
life is now part of our history. For those of you granted citizenship
today, your future is now interwoven with the future of this state, its
citizens across the globe, and in particular, all of us who live on this
island.

In this act of inclusion, it is interesting that the minister refers to the

Irish diaspora as part of the imagined nation, reminding the partici-
pants that Ireland still has a history intertwined with the experience
of emigration. Indeed, the history of Ireland as an emigration nation is
relatively recent, with Ireland only becoming a nation of net immigra-
tion (where the numbers of those coming to the country exceed those
leaving to live elsewhere) in 1996 (Lentin 2007: 436). Ireland’s relation-
ship to the diaspora was restated in the 1998 ‘Good Friday’ Agreement,
in which the UK and Irish governments agreed to reshape the constitu-
tion of Ireland. The agreement confirmed the principle of ‘ius soli’ (for
those born on the whole of the island of Ireland), thus guaranteeing that
people born in Northern Ireland had the right to be accepted as Irish
or British or both, as they chose. The agreement confirmed an arrange-
ment which had already been in place. As well as maintaining ius soli
citizenship, the agreement added, ‘the Irish nation cherishes its special
affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural
identity and heritage’.24 Ronit Lentin argues that the emphasis on the
Irish diaspora ‘arguably led to enabling the substitution of the historical
ius soli principle of Irish citizenship with ius sanguinis as conceptualised
by the Citizenship and Nationality Act, enacted following the outcome
of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum’ (2007: 435). This emphasis on
diaspora and inheritance of citizenship begs the question of who is more
‘truly’ Irish – new Irish citizens or diaspora Irish, many of whom have
never been to Ireland but have gained citizenship (or have the right to
gain it) through the minimum requirement of having one grandparent
with Irish citizenship.
 Europe Welcomes 89

Whilst there was very little in Shatter’s speech which suggested the
rights which are bound up with citizenship, or the responsibilities
which may be associated with it, there was a statement of the political
grounding of citizenship:

For those of you granted citizenship today, you are becoming citi-
zens of a republic, a constitutional democracy which recognises the
personal rights of each of you as individuals and greatly values inclu-
siveness, tolerance and diversity.

Highlighting tolerance is, as we shall see in the discussion of ceremonies

in the UK and the Netherlands, a key theme in discussing citizenship
in citizenship ceremonies. It can function as a reassurance, but also as
an injunction to those who may be perceived as intolerant. At the end
of the ceremony, the minister returned to ask the new citizens (or their
children) to consider being policemen or soldiers. He also stressed the
importance of voting.
Once Shatter had finished speaking, a retired judge who would lead
the oath of allegiance also welcomed the citizands. His welcome also
underlined a particular notion of Irishness, as he began with a sentence
in Irish Gaelic, which he then explained was a welcome, adding: ‘This
is our language, which I’m sure you’re not familiar with. Your children
will bring home books with pictures and words in Irish, and I hope you
will assist in mastering the language.’ Given that all of the citizands had
lived in Ireland for at least five years before applying for citizenship, and
many waited a long time for their applications to be processed, often
with children at school in Ireland, it seemed odd for the judge to assume
that they did not know about Irish as a language. Urging the citizands
to engage with the Irish language, at least on behalf of their children, set
up a particular cultural model of integration which appeared to set quite
a high bar for inclusion. However, like the minister, the judge did go on
to suggest an appreciation of the cultural heritage that immigrants can
bring. With the use of the notion of ‘the old country’, he also evoked
Ireland’s history of emigration and the desire to maintain links within
the diaspora:

The state does not require you to forget your country, your memories.
Don’t forget your own country, people and tradition. Your memo-
ries are not contraband – bring your music and stories. Tell children
about the old country, do not deny them their legacy – remind them
of that part of their story which is in another country.
90 Making Citizens

The judge then went on to give an extended analogy through sport

where he imagined immigrants from other countries bringing their
sporting expertise: soccer from Brazil, Argentina and other South
American countries, long distance running from Kenya and Ethiopia (‘it
would be wonderful if some of these genes made their way into the Irish
gene pool’) and cricket from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. He then
spoke of other cultural influences, such as the influence of Russian liter-
ature and ballet on Irish culture. Finally, he mentioned what Ireland had
gained in terms of ‘culinary skills’ from China and ‘the caring nature’ of
many Filipinos.
Whilst these analogies may be common in many kinds of everyday
multicultural and cosmopolitan talk, they risk reproducing stereotypes
and, to some extent, rely on biological notions of race. By making refer-
ences to Chinese cooks and Filipino nurses or doctors, the judge appeared
to make a cultural attribute out of a particular structural position in the
global labour market. Finally, the judge returned to the idea of Ireland as
a ‘nation of emigrants’ which is particularly well-placed to both welcome
immigrants and to understand the experience of immigration:

You will be surprised at the welcome you receive in communities.

We are a nation of immigrants, we understand it. Recently we have
experienced the emigration of our sons and daughters and with your
help we will repair the economy and welcome them back.

Here again, the opposition of ‘ours’ and ‘yours’ was restated, as was the
judge’s failure to recognise that the citizens were well acquainted with
Irish society and the welcome or otherwise that is given to migrants.
Whilst this speech in Dublin made particular claims for the welcome
given in Ireland to immigrants, as we shall see in the discussion below,
the idea of welcome and histories of welcome are also repeated in the
UK and Dutch ceremonies. However, as discussed in Chapter 3 with
reference to the United States, Canada and Australia, discourses of
welcome often obscure more troubled histories of the reception given
to immigrants in the country and a history of racism and racialisa-
tion. Chapter 6 explores this idea of welcome from the perspective
of interviewees in the UK. The relationship between colonialism and
racism is particularly complex in Ireland. Ireland and Irishness are at
least in part shaped by the country’s history of anti-colonialism and
the ways the British (and Americans) have, at times, constructed the
Irish as a racially inferior group. At the same time, participation in the
British colonial project as police, soldiers, and administrators means
 Europe Welcomes 91

that Ireland has a shared history with Britain of colonial racialisa-

tion and investment in the idea of the superiority of whiteness. Bryan
Fanning (2012: 16) points out that the Irish missionaries were part of
the expansion of Christianity which accompanied European coloni-
alism in a way which was linked to Irish nation- building, arguing that
‘[t]his missionary nationalism drew upon colonial ideologies of racial
superiority’ (Fanning 2012: 16). In Ireland, migrants have not always
found their arrival and settling in the country to be positively received.
Ireland was an enthusiastic signatory to the 1951 UN Convention
on the Status of Refugees and began accepting Hungarian refugees
in 1956; they were particularly welcomed because they were fellow
Catholics. However, ‘within one month of the arrival of the first refu-
gees it was decided that they should be removed’ (Fanning 2012: 91).
In the 40 years that followed, fewer than 1,500 refugees were accepted
in Ireland, and the state relied on the voluntary sector to provide much
of the support for refugees (Fanning 2012: 91–93).
In the mid-1990s, applications for asylum increased in Ireland and,
although the numbers were still comparatively low, discourses of a crisis
caused by the ‘swamping’ of Ireland were prominent. These were fostered
by officials and political leaders and asylum seekers were depicted as
‘welfare scroungers, in competition with indigenous groups for welfare
resources’ (Fanning 2012: 97). In the next few years, the Irish govern-
ment introduced increased powers at the borders aimed at controlling
entry more strictly. They also increased the state’s powers of deporta-
tion and made it harder to apply for asylum. This resulted in the lowest
acceptance rates for asylum in the whole of the EU – in 2010 Ireland
accepted 1.3% of asylum claims as compared with 24% in the UK and
46% in the Netherlands (Fanning 2012: 99). These low rates of accept-
ance of asylum seekers have been accompanied by exclusion of asylum
seekers from welfare rights in order to discourage further applicants. The
policies were also accompanied by media and public hostility to asylum
seekers, including violent attacks. The large backlog of applicants for citi-
zenship is often refugees who managed to gain refugee status and then
eligibility to apply for citizenship from the 1990s onwards. The mass
ceremonies are an attempt to deal with this backlog. Many migrants to
Ireland come from within Europe and, as they share many rights already,
are less likely to apply for Irish citizenship.
Besides the speeches and the brass band, the ceremony in Ireland was
broadly similar to ceremonies in other countries. However, an inter-
esting difference was that, in some ways, the oath-taking is less perfor-
mative than in other ceremonies, to the extent that the citizands have
92 Making Citizens

already signed the statutory declaration of fidelity to the Irish nation

and loyalty to the state and receive their legal documentation of citizen-
ship before the ceremony and oath-taking rather than afterwards, as
happened in all the other ceremonies observed. The oath-taking in the
ceremony could therefore be regarded as a re-performance rather than
the moment when the citizand becomes the citizen. The ceremonies in
Ireland are focused at the national scale, partly for logistical reasons.
They are given a high national profile, and this is maintained in part
by the minister, who is responsible for naturalisation, presiding over
them. The next section will discuss the ceremonies in the UK, which
were introduced earlier than those in Ireland and had a local element
written into them from the outset.

Ceremonies in the UK: ‘If you really are to be British’

The UK citizenship ceremonies, which were introduced in 2004, are

organised by local registrars and largely take place in register offices
and town halls. Some are organised in different locations such as
schools, libraries and museums. Register offices are the site of the offi-
cial marking of other life events – more traditionally birth, death and
marriage. For the registrars, alongside the civil partnership ceremonies
introduced in 2005, citizenship ceremonies mark a significant extension
in the function of local borough and county register offices. As will be
argued further in Chapter 6, the introduction of the ceremonies received
very little press coverage or attention (compared to the introduction of
civil partnerships as part of the registrar’s work and to other changes in
citizenship regimes). The ceremonies all include what is called a ‘local
welcome’, and the white paper which introduced the idea of citizenship
ceremonies placed emphasis on this aspect. It stresses that the ceremo-
nies should be based in local communities (Home Office 2002). Thus,
local register offices and local council officials involved in the ceremony
were told to make a welcome speech, but were given no instruction on
its content. This openness was designed to allow a variety of practices,
giving events a local character. Nonetheless, my observation of ten
ceremonies around the country suggested that there is quite a lot of
uniformity in terms of how the ceremonies are conducted (see Byrne
2012 for more discussion). Placing the ceremonies outside the direct
role of the UK Border Agency meant that the ceremonial element of
endowing citizenship would be provided by professionals who are used
to providing a sense of occasion and welcome, rather than a government
agency which it is likely many citizands would associate with scrutiny
 Europe Welcomes 93

and a culture of disbelief (Pannett 2011). As a chief registrar who had

been involved in the development of the citizenship ceremony put it:

I don’t think they [the Home Office] realised just how special we
could make it, you know. ... I don’t think they appreciated the warmth
and sincerity that we could bring to the ceremony. ... And whilst
the ceremony is a formal and serious one, that doesn’t mean to say
that the ceremony has to be formal. ... Somebody actually obtaining
British citizenship is a huge thing for them, but it doesn’t mean the
ceremony can’t be relaxed.

The introduction of citizenship ceremonies has involved an expansion

of the staff in register offices particularly in big cities. The ceremonies
have become a source of income for the registrars, with the ceremonies
paid for out of the fees paid by applicants for citizenship. This, rather
ironically, involves the new citizens paying for their own welcomes.
Alongside the registrars, a range of different officials are involved in
giving the local welcomes – these include both elected representatives,
such as city councillors, and unelected officials such as the lord lieuten-
ants or provosts (who are directly appointed by the Queen) who have
largely ceremonial roles. The registrars in Liverpool also mentioned that
on occasion they have speakers who do not hold such official roles such
as a local DJs who had come to see a ceremony because of the anti-immi-
gration discourse and then was invited back to give a welcome speech.
They also on occasion have asked new citizens (such as an academic
from the local university) who have been through the ceremony to
come back and give welcome. The ceremonial officials, such as the lord
mayor, the lord lieutenant and the high sheriff, have striking ceremo-
nial outfits. The lord lieutenants wear quasi-military dress uniforms
and often large rows of medals, trousers with gold braid down the side
and ornate riding boots with spurs attached. The mayors often have
heavy gold chains of office and fur-edged cloaks. There is also a portrait
of Queen Elizabeth displayed in the room – registrars are sent a list of
suitable portraits which they can use, so these symbols of nation are
centrally controlled. I would suggest that the display of these costumes,
along with the portrait of the Queen, adds to the symbolism of nation
and of royalty, which sits oddly next to assertions about the importance
of democracy in Britain and the equality of all citizens. The uniforms
are ‘dress uniforms’ which are purposely old-fashioned.25 They can also
appear anachronistic. As one child of a citizand put it before the cere-
mony, ‘I’ve just seen a guy with a sword!’ Those who have a ceremonial
94 Making Citizens

role will often begin their speech by explaining that they are speaking
‘on behalf of the Queen as her representative’. The national anthem
is played at the end of the ceremony. In this way, there is a clear link
between the UK ceremonies and those in other Commonwealth coun-
tries such as Australia and Canada. However, as we saw in the previous
chapter, unlike Canada, Australia’s ceremony does not include an oath
or pledge to the Queen. Participants can choose to make a religious oath
or non-religious affirmation.26 Nonetheless, there is no possible avoid-
ance of God in the national anthem (Damsholt 2008), ‘God save the
Queen’. In Britain, the oath or affirmation is introduced with the expla-
nation from the set text:

I am now going to ask you to make promises and swear or affirm on

oath to the Sovereign that you will be a faithful citizen. I will then
also ask you to make a formal and public pledge that you will be a
loyal subject and observe the laws of this country.

The European flag was not displayed in the large majority of the cere-
monies I observed in Britain (nor was it displayed at the ceremonies in
Amsterdam and Dublin). One exception was the ceremony in Cardiff,
the capital of Wales, where, alongside the Union Jack, the Welsh and
European flags were hung, although no reference was made to the
European element of the citizenship that was being granted. At the
beginning of this ceremony, the Welsh national anthem was played,
whilst the British national anthem was reserved for the end of the cere-
mony. On display in the room, were portraits of the Queen and the
Royal family, and a gold miner’s lantern, representing a major (largely
historical) Welsh industry. In Scotland, the Scottish flag of St Andrew –
otherwise known as the Saltire – was presented, as well as the Union
Jack, and in Edinburgh there was also the flag of the city. Here we see the
representation of the multiple nature of nation in Britain, but a fairly
consistent downplaying of European citizenship. Perhaps predictably,
reference to multiple nations was present largely in the Scottish, Welsh
and Northern Irish ceremonies. And even in these cases, the references
are muted, as shown by the following extract from the East Ayrshire
speech:

You join us at a time that is particularly exciting for Scotland. We

have forged our own strong identity within the United Kingdom
and, internationally, we are well known for the many discoveries and
inventions that have helped to shape our world.27
 Europe Welcomes 95

Thus, these representations of citizenship, whilst placed within the

local context in the UK speeches, remain focused on abstract notions of
citizenship and also largely at the level of the nation-state, with, as we
shall see, some references to local or city identities. Whilst ceremonies
are designed to reflect both the local and the national in Britain – which
includes reference to the nations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland within
the UK nation-state, European identity is not appealed to. This silence
in part reflects the highly contentious political debates in Britain around
membership of the Europe Community.

Welcome to the local

In Britain, the relationship between local and national are emphasised
in ceremonies by the presence of the mandatory ‘local welcome’ speech.
This had been envisioned from the start of discussions about the intro-
duction of ceremonies. A policy paper by two senior Labour Party politi-
cians had explained the idea:

It is in local areas that people meet, interact with others and root their
own sense of identity. And when a newcomer comes to Britain for the
first time, they also move to Tower Hamlets, Cardiff or Cornwall.
(Kelly and Byrne 2007: 5)

The notion of a ‘local welcome’ is also interesting for the potential perfor-
mative dilemma that it sets up. Can you be welcoming just by saying
‘Welcome’? And more significantly, what does it mean to claim a history
of welcoming? The text above appears to prefer the word ‘newcomer’ to
migrant, perhaps to move away from the negative associations which
migrant may carry. The idea that ‘newcomers’ are – and always have
been – welcomed is a theme taken up in several speeches in the UK.
It accords with government claims in policy documents about migra-
tion and refugees. For example, the White Paper Fairer, Firmer, Faster.
A Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum, published in 1998, cele-
brates ‘Britain’s long-standing tradition of giving shelter to those fleeing
persecution’ (Kushner 2003: 267). However, by the time the citizenship
ceremonies were proposed, the idea of welcome had been somewhat
qualified. The White Paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven made the argument
that local communities in the UK needed reassurance – as provided by
the ‘secure borders’ – before they could offer a ‘safe haven’:

To enable integration to take place, and to value the diversity it brings,

we need to be secure within our sense of belonging and identity and
96 Making Citizens

therefore to be able to reach out and to embrace those who come to

the UK. Those who wish to work and to contribute to the UK, as well
as those who seek to escape from persecution, will then receive the
welcome they deserve. (Home Office 2002: 2 emphasis added)

It is clear that the welcome is already qualified. And as will be suggested

below, the mere claim of welcoming is not the same as an actual act
of welcome. Welcomes and hospitality can be eroded by the idea that
too many conditions rest on them. They can also be undermined by an
account of local or national history which silences more contentious
issues and experiences. In addition, many speeches contained what
might be seen more simply as touristic guides to the local area. This in
itself is interesting, as it seems to take the new citizens as newcomers,
ignoring the fact that the regulations governing the acquisition of citi-
zenship mean that it generally requires several years of residence before
citizenship applications can be made. The touristic descriptions also
serve to inhibit the presentation of new citizens as ‘fellow locals’. The
idea of welcome also potentially suggests the positions of guests and
host, inhabitant and newcomer, and makes space for judgements as to
who should be offered hospitality (Darling 2013). The question of what
is meant by welcome and hospitality, and how the new citizens experi-
ence it, will be taken up in Chapter 6.
In many of the UK welcome speeches, particularly those in rural areas,
the image of what could be called ‘deep England’ or ‘deep Britain’ (Wright
1985) is very strong. These speeches appear to lay claim to representing
the ‘heart’ of the nation through landscape (Edensor 2002). The speech
given in a ceremony in a small market town in Suffolk notes that: ‘the
rural heartlands of Suffolk still support the farming traditions, which
for centuries have supported the local economy’. The significance of
landscape, in these idyllic representations, is that it is unchanging, yet
cultural. The villages are still ‘nestling in the valleys’, and the implica-
tion is that they are socially and culturally, as well as geographically,
static. Thus these narratives are potentially in dissonance with the repre-
sentation of citizenship as inclusive, dynamic and changing, yet they
also are often the point where the local takes centre stage.
In addition to landscape, over half of the speeches have some refer-
ence to local history, and this history intersects with the national in
interesting ways. For many, the necessarily abbreviated account begins
with ancient history. As Gellner (1983) notes, nations, ‘like Everest’,
must be presented as ancient and always there (see also Bhabha 1990 on
the temporality of nations). Of the 25 texts (out of a total of 47) which
 Europe Welcomes 97

mention history, 19 refer to a pre-Norman history, ranging from

Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age through to Saxons, Vikings, Danes
and, most often, Romans. The logic of references to ancient history in
very short speeches appears to vary. For some, it seems to establish a
claim that the area has ancient origins, as in the case of the speech made
in the ceremony in Gloucestershire:

Gloucestershire has been inhabited for many thousands of years,

and successive generations have left behind remains that give us a
glimpse of their lifestyle. Neolithic long barrows and Bronze and Iron
Age hill forts are to be found throughout our region.

In contrast, other speeches mention that ancient history plays a role in

accounts of diversity and difference. Thus, a speaker from the Merton
register office in London says that, ‘Not only recently have people come
to the area – there is evidence that the Romans settled here.’ However,
accounts of previous settlements of ‘outsiders’ can be an uneasy narra-
tive, as it may summon an image of invasion which may be less celebra-
tory than intended. For instance in the following excerpt from the West
Sussex welcome speech:

Right from the early Roman invaders (Chichester was an important

Roman city) and through subsequent invasions by Saxons, Vikings
and Normans (who built our Cathedral just across the street ... .) to
more recent times when people from all continents of the world have
adopted Sussex as their home. (emphasis added)

The switch from invasion to current migration is awkward in the context

of a speech which is intended to welcome migrants, but such dramatic
jumps in the historical account are common. The tension between
invader and settler narratives also serves to remind us that a nation-state
only exists in an international context of other nations-states which
help to define it. Nations need foreigners to exist, just as welcomes can
only occur between occupants and outsiders (Billig 1995: 79). However,
this raises the question of which ‘side’ citizands are on – as foreigner
or insider? The reference to ancient histories is likely to position the
citizands firmly as outsiders – newcomers to the ancient, long-rooted
culture. In the accounts of ancient history, there are claims to origins
which are familiar to the narration of nation (Bhabha 1990). The use of
royal connections (mentioned in more than a third of the speeches) can
serve to provide the sense of an unbroken history, omitting civil wars,
98 Making Citizens

republics and the change in royal lines. The Kingston-upon-Thames

speech is a good example of this claim for continuity: ‘In the tenth
century, Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned here in Kingston. Over the
last thousand years, Kingston has had many close links with royalty.’
Importantly, the speeches significantly evade reference to empire
and to histories of racism and the politics of anti-racism. There is only
one direct mention of the British Empire in 47 speeches (and only one
speech mentions the Commonwealth). This is particularly striking,
given that relations of empire and commonwealth still influence the
migration patterns of many new citizands. Also, as will be discussed in
Chapters 5 and 6, for some of the new citizens, the Commonwealth
gave them a sense of common identity and shared history with the UK,
which was important to them. In addition, knowledge about the more
recent history of immigration also gave some a sense of community
with other immigrants to Britain.
A speech from the citizenship ceremony in Hertfordshire was the
single exception to the silence about empire; it places the British Empire
in the context of a history of immigration, in a way which seeks to
play down conflicts. After mentioning the influxes of Flemish weavers,
Huguenots, refugees from the French Revolution and Jewish immigra-
tion in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it states, ‘As the
British Empire came to a close, many people from the former colonies
were also welcomed. This welcome continues, as evidenced by our cere-
mony today.’
The selective mentions of Hugeunots and Jews, but omission of other
refugees, accords with Tony Kushner’s argument that memories of
refugees are largely silenced, apart from those two waves of what are
constructed as ‘genuine’ refugees. Even in the case of these refugees,
Kushner argues that the focus on the reception of these refugees over-
looks the actual hostility with which they were originally met (Kushner
2006). This speech eradicates all of the tensions, conflicts and debates
around the empire – the struggles for independence, the often-hostile
response to post-colonial immigration, and continuing racism – with
the concept of ‘welcome’. This idea of welcome and the prominence
given to a long history of welcome by many of the speeches made at citi-
zenship ceremonies is an unhappy performative: Saying ‘Welcome’ does
not actually perform the act. This is particularly the case in a context
where past failures to welcome have not been acknowledged. The
history of British immigration policy is, in fact, a history of the progres-
sive imposition of limits on who could be considered a citizen (see in
particular Tyler 2010 on the 1971 Immigration Act). Historically, there
 Europe Welcomes 99

has been persistent hostility to refugees and asylum seekers. Indeed,

Kushner makes the case that, whilst the rhetoric against refugees and
asylum seekers has become ‘tediously familiar’ since the late nineteenth
century, the intensity of that hostility was at an unprecedented level
of intensity from the 2000s onwards, the period which is of particular
relevance for the citizands at the ceremonies (2003).
Some speeches emphasize histories of arrivals, cultural mixing and
change rather than invasion or ancient settlement. The Manchester
speech, which does refer to the Commonwealth, describes Manchester
as ‘a city full of energy and vitality ... A multi-cultural and multi-racial
city promoting tolerance and understanding’. The speech asserts that it
is Manchester’s people and diversity which make up its nature:

Each community has developed in Manchester over the centuries

has enriched the cultural life of the city, which has a long history of
welcoming people to settle here. The history of settlements includes
the Italian, Irish, Jewish, people from the Asian sub-continent,
Commonwealth countries and later from Eastern Europe and non-
Commonwealth African countries. People have come to this country
for a wide range of reasons, often for reasons of their own or their
family‘s safety or because of their political or religious beliefs and
have been welcomed into the Manchester community.

This abbreviated account focuses on more recent history, and it also

fits with Manchester’s self-presentation as a cosmopolitan city (Harries
2012). However, it passes over some of the more awkward parts of
Manchester‘s history – not least its long involvement and profit from
the slave trade (Fryer 1984) as well as a history of racist response to
racialised others by some of the population. Notably, the slave trade
is not mentioned in any of the speeches in the UK, despite it having
happened more recently, relative to Roman history, for example. It
would appear that there is a – perhaps understandable – desire to avoid
the contentious or more difficult aspects of UK’s history. (There are also
very few mentions of World Wars.) The speeches avoid reflection on
anti-immigration and anti-asylum discourse as well as the persistence of
racism. However, as Chapter 6 will explore in more depth, the celebra-
tion of the British welcome given to immigrants often does not fit with
the citizands’ own experience.
An interesting contrast in representation of history was offered in one
of the two ceremonies I observed in Liverpool. One ceremony ended
with a reading of the poem ‘The British (serves 60 million)’ by Benjamin
100 Making Citizens

Zephaniah. As with many of the speeches at UK citizenship ceremonies,

Zephaniah, in his poem-as-recipe, begins with ancient history:

Take some Picts Celts and Silures

And let them settle,
Then overrun them with Roman conquerors

However, after adding more ancient groups to his recipe, he then brings
into the mix an additional 25 national groups who have migrated to
Britain:

Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans

Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese
Vietnamese and Sudanese.

The recipe – and therefore the ceremony – ends with a note and
warning:

Note: All the ingredients are equally important. Treating one ingre-
dient better than another will leave a bitter unpleasant taste.
Warning: An unequal spread of justice will damage the people and
cause pain. Give justice and equality to all.

The note and warning fit with those speeches which encourage the citi-
zands to think about their responsibilities as citizens, but in a way which
also acknowledges that Britain is not in a perfect state of tolerance and
equal justice. The registrars at Liverpool also mentioned that some
councillors do speak about slavery when they take part in the ceremo-
nies. (which is a particularly significant part of Liverpool’s history). The
Liverpool ceremony also celebrated diversity by not only naming all the
countries of origin of the citizands but also having small flags displayed
of each country. The Lord Lieutenant explained:

It is a wonderful time to live and work in Liverpool – but you will

want to keep in touch with your home country. The flags are a symbol
of that. Keep in touch with our language and culture as well as being
fully British.

The model of Britishness presented here is one which is not compro-

mised by different languages and cultural practices. The local Liverpool
 Europe Welcomes 101

councillor who was presiding over this ceremony said she agreed with
the slogan of a local Congolese organisation: ‘If I am different, I don’t
threaten you. I enrich you.’ The next section will consider how questions
of citizenship and belonging were represented in other UK ceremonies.

Citizenship and belonging

Citizenship, particularly in the context of migration and ‘naturalisa-
tion’, raises important questions of belonging and identity. The proper
inclusion and participation of those who were not born in the country,
and who therefore have not received automatic citizenship, requires new
ways of thinking about belonging and identity which are open to multi-
plicities of roots and routes. It needs a recognition of what Nira Yuval-
Davis calls ‘multi-layered citizenship’ (2008: 169). This is complicated
in a discourse of citizenship which is tied to notions of nationhood and
the singularity of identity. The speech from the South Ayrshire cere-
mony (in Scotland) acknowledged the new citizens as active choosing28
agents: ‘I am fully aware that you will have thought long and hard
before making the decision you did today’. However this recognition
was rare. In contrast to the ceremonies discussed in Chapter 3, where
metaphors of journeying were a common part of the construction of
immigration nations, very few speeches made any mention of the jour-
neys and potential difficulties involved in migration and applications
for citizenship. Another exception was West Sussex:

Today we are very pleased to be able to say ‘Welcome’ to YOU, to

thank you for the contribution that you bring with you from your
own backgrounds – be it your skills, your talents, or your customs –
your bravery – which it undoubtedly takes, along with enthusiasm,
to embrace life in a different country – but we also want to thank you
now for what you WILL contribute as you continue your life here.
(emphasis in the original)

Yet, as was mentioned above in the discussion of the Irish ceremony, it is

important here to be attentive to the subjects created in this speech: ‘we’
welcome ‘you’. There is an awkward hiatus in the ceremonies. At what
point does the ‘you’ of the foreigner/outsider to the nation, become part
of the ‘we’ of the nation? The use of ‘we’ is particularly instructive. As
Billig notes,

an ideological consciousness of nationhood can be seen to be at

work. It embraces a complex set of themes about ‘us’, ‘our homeland’,
102 Making Citizens

‘nations’ (‘ours’ and ‘theirs’), the ‘world’ as well as the morality of

national duty and honour. (Billig 1995: 4)

There is a risk that, as described in Chapter 3, the ceremony and the

endowing of citizenship are regarded as somehow incomplete or provi-
sional. The speech from West Sussex goes on to suggest that:

Today, as you finally are able to acquire that all-important British

passport, it is the end of the process. It is also the real beginning of
a new life with new status. And that new status brings with it some
responsibilities. If you are to be really British, it will involve much
more. I hope you will think carefully about those responsibilities –
that you will become involved in the life of the community around
you – beyond your own family and close friends – learn about that
community and what makes it function – that you will, in short, join
in. If you do that, it will not only make your own newly acquired
citizenship more meaningful for YOU, but will also enable others to
see that you really do want to be part of us.

This speech suggests that citizenship might be endowed, but full

membership – ‘if you are to be really British’ – requires much more.
The process involves further acceptance based on the right kind of
behaviour and the judgement of others about ‘the correct’ intentions.
It also suggests that there is an audience of ‘real’ British citizens who
are yet to be convinced of the new citizens’ membership. Whilst the
West Sussex speech implied only provisional membership, in contrast,
the speech made at a ceremony in Bradford appeared to assume that
this administrative process would also involve a total severance of
other ties. The speech began by welcoming the new citizens as the
lord lieutenant’s ‘brother and sister’ and ended by welcoming them to
‘the greatest county of the greatest country in the world’, suggesting
that citizenship would automatically transfer a local and national
patriotism. Here we see a form of domopolitics where their nation is
produced as family.
If the ceremonies are intended to contribute to an invigorated under-
standing of citizenship, then they may disappoint. Whilst just under
half of the speeches examined do address features of what might be
expected in a consideration of citizenship (such as democracy and
voting, responsibility, freedom of speech and tolerance towards others),
they do so in a largely passing manner and without much depth given
to the concepts, with tolerance often given the most emphasis. Islington
 Europe Welcomes 103

is a fairly typical example in that it simply supplies a list of the attributes

of citizenship:

The values and principles that underpin British society are of funda-
mental importance. A respect for law and order, valuing tolerance and
freedom of speech, and a respect for one another’s beliefs, are all vital
elements of being a British citizen. It is also necessary to understand
and participate in the democratic process, in order to fulfil your key
role in British society. (emphasis in original)

A slightly more fleshed out description was given in the Liverpool cere-
mony, where suggestions were made as to what might represent active
citizenship and participation in civic society (such as standing for elec-
tion, becoming a school governor, taking part in local politics, volun-
tary and community groups or hospital trusts). As will be discussed in
Chapters 5 and 6, I interviewed two new citizens who had been to this
ceremony, and they found these suggestions inspiring. Other inter-
viewees said that they wanted more information about how to partici-
pate more in their local communities now that they were citizens. The
following section will consider the ceremony which was observed in
Amsterdam. Here, too, we see the emphasis on local belonging and an
account of values which are shaped by national discourses of multicul-
turalism and immigration.

‘Welkom Nieuwe Nederlanders’: a citizenship

ceremony in Amsterdam

Whilst only one ceremony was observed in the Netherlands,29 it is none-

theless interesting to note some of the differences in the ways in which
it was conducted from the ceremonies in Britain. The Netherlands is,
like Britain, a country which has a long history of immigration as well
as emigration. It is also a constitutional monarchy and former imperial
power. The ceremony in Amsterdam was in many ways a less formal
occasion than those in Ireland or the UK. There was a noticeable differ-
ence in the prominence given to national and royal symbols. Unlike
the ceremonies in the UK, in Amsterdam, there was neither a flag flying
nor a portrait of the (then) Queen. There is no declaration of loyalty to
the Queen. This may be partly because such a declaration had negative
associations with the declaration of loyalty that many Dutch citizens
were required to make under German occupation in the Second World
War. The ceremony took place in Amsterdam City Hall, which is the
104 Making Citizens

home of the municipal government and a theatre. This is a modern

public building with open access to the public. Portraits of local poli-
ticians are displayed, and the ceremony took place in front of a large
screen which was used to show old footage of Amsterdam (accompa-
nied by a pianist playing both classical music and traditional songs from
Amsterdam). When the films were not playing, the screen showed the
colours of the Dutch flag, but not the flag itself. By contrast, symbols
of Amsterdam were more prominent, with the three red crosses visible
on both the posters directing citizands where to go for the ceremony
as they entered the town hall and on the paper cups from which they
had tea and coffee after the ceremony. Each new citizen was given a gift
of a book explaining the history of Amsterdam, again decorated with
the three red crosses. They were also told that they could visit the city
archives to learn more of the history of ‘your city’.
The speech made to the citizands by a local politician, even though
it is given before the ‘solidarity pledges’ have actually been made,
welcomes the citizands: ‘You are a Netherlander and Amsterdammer.
I congratulate you wholeheartedly with this.’ It would appear that the
local identity – an Amsterdammer – was given equal significance to
national identity. This may reflect Amsterdam’s position as a global city,
but could also be taken as an attempt to distinguish Amsterdam as a city
from the national discourse, which is more hostile to immigration, as
was discussed in earlier sections.
In the ceremony, a local politician gave the welcome, stressing the
idea that citizenship is a choice. As was argued in the previous chapter,
the construction of choice in migration can serve to legitimate the pride
of the ‘host’ nation:

You have chosen to become a Netherlander. ... As a Netherlander, I may

say that I feel honoured that you chose the Netherlands and Dutch
nationality. With this you indicate that you want to stay here: my
country and my city are now officially also your country and city.

The emphasis on choice is interesting, given the effort expended in the

Netherlands to dissuade some migrants from entering the country, as
discussed in the sections above. The speaker also takes the chance to set
out what he thinks are the particular characteristics of the Netherlands,
in terms of following rules, individual rights and good organisation.

You have been able to judge us Netherlanders. You have probably seen
that the Netherlands knows many laws and rules. They protect the
 Europe Welcomes 105

rights of individual citizens. They also organise other things – such as

the environment, doctor, tap water – have been organised well.

This is a rather bizarre set of values and services seemingly randomly

combined. It would seem that the list was suggested by thinking of the
opposite of all that might be imagined as ‘third world’ conditions – with
a failure of governance, and lack of individual rights and basic services.
The tone suggests that the countries the citizands have left do not have
these facilities or the ability to ‘organise well’. The speaker goes on to
mention that there are ‘unwritten rules’ which govern Dutch society
(such as practices around birthdays in the workplace) as well as placing
a particular emphasis on history in the formation of these unwritten
rules. As with many British speeches, this history shifts rapidly from
distant history to more recent changes:

Many norms and customs have a long history. They originate in

religious conflicts, the Golden Age, the struggle over water. In the
last century, the twentieth century, the Netherlands has changed
rapidly.

The rapid changes in the twentieth century are attributed to war, changes
in industry, secularisation and the ‘influence of young people, who
demand more freedom, the emancipation of women and homosexuals’
as well as the ‘influx of big groups of people from other countries’. It is
notable that, as was largely the case in Britain, colonialism and post-war
decolonisation and post-colonial immigration are not mentioned in this
history.
The speech does, however, give an extended version of rights and
respect, with again a particular emphasis on tolerance:

We are attached to our fundamental rights, which apply to everyone

who lives in the Netherlands: The right to believe what you want, the
freedom of religion, to say what you want, as a fundamental right,
without harming someone unnecessarily. The freedom of expressing
your opinion, without personal traits being looked at. You are not
allowed to discriminate, and you cannot be discriminated against. All
rights ensure that you can be who you want to be, can organise your
life as you want to. The freedom of religion and free speech. The right
to be treated equally. This means everyone can organise their lives
according to their own beliefs. [ ... ] The more freedom we get, the
more we can develop ourselves. The more freedom, the more respect.
106 Making Citizens

Everyone must respect you [ ... ] and respect you when you respect
others. We all want to be respected. Also respect for others, also when
they do not live as we do. And that change is big [ ... ] Amsterdam is
a city with 177 different nationalities; it can only grow if everyone
respects each other, man or woman, black or white, believer or
nonbeliever, homo- or heterosexual, married or not married.

The length of this part of the speech and also the tone suggest that it
is a lecture to those who may be intolerant, rather than a reassurance
that the citizands have the right to respect from others. This appears to
accord with wider public and policy discourse which sees some migrants
as a threat to freedom. This tone also fits in with what Schinkel and van
Houdt characterise as an increasingly ‘moralising’ emphasis in integra-
tion and naturalisation policies in the Netherlands (2010). This moral-
ising tone is, according to Schinkel and van Houdt, accompanied by
reservations about when citizenship can be understood to be complete:
‘Formal citizenship is now regarded as merely the beginning. Real
entry into “Dutch society” is possible only through moral citizenship’
(Schinkel and van Houdt 2010: 704). There is a sense of reserving full
acceptance until the new citizens made at the Amsterdam ceremony
show further proof of commitment. In a very similar way to the speech
from West Sussex, alongside a welcome came a reminder about the need
to contribute and participate in order to be fully welcomed:

You are a Netherlander and Amsterdammer. I congratulate you

wholeheartedly in this. You have said that you want to be part of this
city and participate; that shows willpower. You have already shown
this. Hold on to it. Make sure that you will be even more a part of it,
participate even more. But also stay yourself. Let’s shape the history
of Amsterdam together.

What is also interesting is that this welcome stresses that dual location
of belonging at the level of the local city and the nation. The citzands’
other identities are also suggested in the injunction to ‘stay yourself’.

Conclusion

Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands have all experienced intense

debates in the last 20 years around the subjects of immigration, national
identity and integration. They have, in different ways, shared in the
common European trends outlined above. Citizenship ceremonies, over
 Europe Welcomes 107

the last ten years, in some ways provide the decorative cherry on the
top of a range of more hostile immigration controls and restrictions.
Concerns about the integration of immigrants tend to represent inte-
gration as a one-way process. Integration is framed as something that
is focused on the efforts of the immigrant, rather than a model which
also implies adaptation from what is constructed as the host country.
This sets national norms and cultures as a standard to which the immi-
grant must be measured, with limited changes from the ‘host’ society.
Ceremonies, which set out explicitly to welcome a newcomer into the
country (even though they may actually have been living in the country
for a long time) tend to reinforce the idea of an outsider coming into a
new place, rather than a new status. Citizenship ceremonies are often
conceived of as a way to put more emphasis on citizenship, to mark it
as an achievement to be celebrated and something worth working (and
paying) for. In the cases of the UK and the Netherlands, ceremonies were
introduced as part of a process which made naturalisation more difficult
to acquire. They also were situated within intense debates around immi-
gration, national identity and integration. Somewhat paradoxically,
given the contexts in which they were introduced, the ceremonies are
often used as a space to celebrate the ‘tolerance’ of the host country and
make claims about long histories of welcome.
This chapter has made the case that, perhaps due to the desire to be
celebratory, the ceremonies often give a version of history which evades
those aspects which would not reflect well on the host countries, such
as involvement in the slave trade and histories of racism. The conten-
tious history of empire is also avoided, even though for many citizands
(particularly in the UK, but also the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent,
Ireland), post-colonial links can be a route into claims of shared culture
and belonging. In contrast to the importance placed on history, accounts
of what citizenship might actually mean and how the citizands could
participate as citizens are relatively muted.
5
Routes to Citizenship

A passport does not make a person. A passport is just a book. You

know, a document that you travel with.
Simone

Introduction

Citizenship ceremonies are the moment of marking a particular stage in

the complex processes of migration and international mobility. For indi-
viduals, it signifies the successful navigation of the nation-states’ multiple
technologies of identification and filtering. As I argued in Chapter 2, the
legal framework of nation-states needs to be understood as emerging
out of a history of Western imperialism, which is also gendered, classed
and raced. There have been suggestions that national citizenship is no
longer the most critical membership and affiliation that shapes access
to rights. For Yasemin Soysal, the increasing acceptance of a universal
concept of citizenship which is based on individual personhood – rather
than national belonging – means that resident workers share many of
the rights of national citizens (Soysal 1995). Nonetheless, recently there
has been increased attention given to the reassertion of state control of
borders and the spread of practices of bordering from the external fron-
tiers to locations such as medical practices and universities within the
state. Citizenship status within the nation continues to have important
consequences. Aiwha Ong claims that ‘the multiple passport holder is
an apt contemporary figure: he or she embodies the split between state-
imposed identity and personal identity caused by political upheavals,
migration and changing global markets’ (Ong 1999: 2). Thus far, this
book has examined how the ceremonies have been constructed in

108
 Routes to Citizenship 109

different countries by the state or people acting on behalf of the state. As

was discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, the ceremonies seek to underline this
moment, to mark as a rite of passage the moment of a perceived trans-
formation from one status – perhaps the outsider, visitor or merely resi-
dent – to that of citizen, with the social, political and economic rights
that are associated with citizenship. The ceremonies make various claims
about the nature of both the countries into which the new citizens are
being welcomed, and about the new citizens themselves. This is done
largely without reference to the motivations and experiences of the new
citizens in their migration and settlement in new countries, apart from
occasional metaphors about the journey’s end. The next two chapters
ask what we can learn about the experience of becoming a new citizen
from the new citizens themselves. The ceremonies, like other rites of
passage, create the citizands as a homogeneous group without signifi-
cant differences among them. At the moment they are called to stand
together and say the oath or pledge as one, they are constructed as a
single group of ‘new citizens’ who somehow share a status. As discussed
in Chapter 4, the ceremonies represented the choice to become British
citizens in various ways: as the outcome of strong desire; as a significant
change in identity, signalling a pride in Britain. At the same time, some
ceremonies suggested that they were newcomers who needed introduc-
tion to the local areas and to what it was to be a British citizen.
This chapter will consider some of the differences between the citi-
zands and the diverse range of experiences of migration and settle-
ment that are a product of the many differences (including age, gender,
country of origin, and roots in and routes to Britain) among those who
are brought together in the citizenship ceremonies. Firstly, the fieldwork
will be introduced, detailing how new citizens were approached for
interviews in the UK, and what implications this approach might have
for what they said. Some of the difficulties of attracting interviewees
will be considered and, in particular, I will suggest that the context in
which potential research participants were approached – before and
after the citizen ceremonies – and the apparent reluctance of many to be
involved, can tell us something about their experiences with officialdom
in the process of gaining entry to and the right to stay in Britain. The
many differences between the interviewees and the impact of different
routes into Britain will also be explored to remind us that migration is
a long process which affects many personal relationships and requires
adaption and adjustment from those who migrate. The final section
of the chapter will explore the different reasons that the new citizens
gave for acquiring British citizenship, illustrating the very different
110 Making Citizens

circumstances of the citizands. For some, British citizenship is the only

route open to them to obtain a passport and all the ease of travel and
identification that British or European passports can ensure. For others,
particularly those from Europe, logistics and convenience are less of
an issue, but British citizenship can confirm a sense of belonging and
possibly a commitment to stay in Britain. The reasons for applying for
citizenship (as well as the reasons for not having applied earlier) suggest
that different forms of belonging may be important (for example, being
a resident of a city or having postcolonial attachments). These alterna-
tive connections have the potential to contest an exclusive focus on
national citizenship and belonging.
The chapter will argue that the new citizens’ accounts can tell us about
the impact of shifting policies on immigration and naturalisation and
how these influence the actions and thinking of migrants to Britain.
It also throws light on how citizenship and belonging are experienced
and possibly contested in the everyday. The decision to apply for natu-
ralization has to be understood in the context of the policy regimes in
which it takes place, including continually changing rules, regulations
and costs of immigration, permanent residence and naturalisation. Not
only has the question of citizenship been higher in the public eye since
the ceremonies and testing were introduced, but also costs of applying
for naturalisation continue to rise, motivating some to apply sooner
rather than later, as they fear the process will become even more diffi-
cult or expensive. Interviews with new citizens can shed light on these
changing dynamics.

Talking to new citizens

As well as seeking to observe the various ceremonies both around the

United Kingdom and internationally, I was keen to get the perspective
of those who were the subjects of the rituals – the new citizens them-
selves. As I went round the country witnessing the ceremonies across the
UK, I also approached the citizands to see if they were willing to speak
to me about their experience of coming to Britain and their response
to the ceremonies. This had the advantage that we could talk about
the actual event that they had been a part of, as I was also there, and
it was a convenient way to contextualise the interviews. At the same
time, it became clear that this approach, on the day of and at the loca-
tion of the ceremony, had disadvantages. The ways in which meeting
the participants had shaped their responses to me was brought home to
me because, at the same time as I was interviewing new citizens, I was
 Routes to Citizenship 111

also involved in a project on school choice. This looked at how parents

approached the question of choosing secondary schools for their chil-
dren and how factors of race, class and gender did – or did not – play
a part in their choices. In many ways, the contacting and selection of
interviewees was similar. In both cases, we identified a place where the
potential participants would be and gained permission to try and recruit
them from the institution concerned. In the case of the research in
schools, we (research associate Carla De Tona and I) spoke to parents as
they waited for parent-teacher meetings at their children’s schools. This
was an extremely effective way of recruiting participants for the research.
It was easy to talk to people as they sat outside classrooms waiting for
their turn to speak to the teachers. They were all generally eager to talk
about their experiences of choosing schools. We would approach parents
and try to set up a meeting (usually in their houses) over the next few
days. We achieved a very high ‘hit rate’, with few refusals (which were
mostly because of time constraints). At the interviews themselves, we
also found the parents eager to talk about the various issues that arose
when thinking about secondary schools for their children. Due to the
demographic make-up of at least two of the three selected areas, we also
had a relatively large number of participants who had not been born
in Britain and had also not had their schooling in Britain.1 In general,
apart from those for whom language presented a real barrier, migrant
parents were also easy to recruit and happy to take part in the research,
as schooling was something they were concerned about and interested
in talking about.2
Interviewees for the citizenship project were approached on the day
of their ceremony in 10 different towns and cities3 in the UK. The regis-
trars who organised them were generally very open to giving access to
the ceremonies (which in the UK are officially private events) and facili-
tating my approach to new citizens. Generally, there is a period where
the citizands wait either in the room where the ceremonies will take
place, or in a waiting area. During this period, the registrars sign the
citizands in and check that they have brought all the necessary docu-
mentation. This meant that there was a convenient time where citi-
zands could be approached, given information about the project, and
asked to consider if they might be willing to be interviewed after the
ceremony. Whilst this gave easy access to potential participants, it was
clear that, in other ways, this method of access was perhaps not ideal.
In my introduction to potential interviewees, I would stress that I was
a university researcher and that I had nothing to do with the register
office or the Home Office. Those waiting for their citizenship were polite
112 Making Citizens

and friendly. But they were also quite nervous, often unsure of what
was to come and possibly not clear whether this supposedly ceremonial
event would become another hurdle to be overcome. As a result, there
was a very high rate of refusal, at least in comparison to the project on
school choice. Some of the citizands I approached would say, ‘Is it ok if I
say no?’ I would assure them that they were under no obligation, and at
that point, the conversation would often end. Even those who agreed in
principal to be interviewed did not always follow up with the commit-
ment. People would not answer the phone or did not call back when I
left messages. Others would ask me to call them, and then say they had
changed their minds when I did. Sometimes, when I turned up to pre-
arranged interviews at the interviewees’ houses, they were not there and
avoided making another arrangement when I called them. On one occa-
sion, I was convinced that the woman who had agreed to be interviewed
was in the house (I could see movements inside in response to the door-
bell), but she avoided the interview by not answering the door.
Given that the school choice research also featured a number of
migrant families, who in fact were often more recent arrivals in Britain
with potentially more insecure status, I think the difference in response
to the request for interviews stems from the different relationship that
the potential interviewees from each project had to the institutions
which gave me access. Despite any difficulties that parents may have
with schools, they are generally regarded positively as service providers.
The parents we interviewed largely felt that their children’s primary
schools provided a caring environment for their children, as well as
being supportive in their education. They had also all chosen to attend
parent-teacher meetings, whilst attendance at a citizenship ceremony is
compulsory. For many of those who had succeeded in attaining citizen-
ship, their experience of getting visas to enter and to stay in Britain,
the processes leading to permanent residence and, finally, citizenship
had been slow, often very stressful, and had involved encountering a
culture of disbelief and scrutiny (Tyler 2006; Pannett 2011). Even those
new citizens who had more elite forms of transnational movement – for
example, those whose entry to Britain was managed by the corpora-
tions for which they worked – had often felt a sense of unease under
the scrutiny of the state. Although the citizenship ceremonies are not
organised by the Home Office, but by registrars who make an effort to
be warm and welcoming in their encounters, nonetheless, for some citi-
zands, this distinction may not be so clear. The ceremony and those,
such as myself, who they encountered there, may well still be associated
with officialdom and the scrutiny of the state. In addition, for many,
 Routes to Citizenship 113

the interviews involved talking about difficult experiences, although, as

will be discussed in Chapter 6, they were often downplayed. Migration
and settlement in a new country can be a challenging experience, even
while it may offer opportunities. It involves leaving family members
behind and adapting to new cultural contexts. Thus, it often prompts
mixed feelings.
Another feature of interviewing respondents around the time of their
citizenship ceremonies is that it perhaps made most prominent a partic-
ular part of their experience of moving from one country to another.
Here, after all, was some kind of conclusion to what could be charac-
terised as a ‘journey’. This does not mean necessarily that it could be
considered an end of the road, but the ceremony did mark the end of
a long bureaucratic process. Many respondents felt considerable relief
that the ceremony was over and the process of attaining citizenship was
finished. For some, taking part in the interview appeared to give them a
way of marking that, or reflecting on it at least. As one interviewee put
it, she was pleased to get citizenship ‘because it is my future’. There was
perhaps a tendency within the interviews for respondents to focus on
the positive and minimise the negative. This was a time, as some saw
it, to move on from the difficulties of the process and be positive. This
is not to say that people did not give accounts of the difficulties they
had encountered in coming to and staying in Britain, but I felt these
accounts were somewhat muted by the circumstances in which we met.
Other citizards clearly were affected by the ceremony and did take it
as representing the beginning of a new stage of their life. Participating
in the interview could also contribute to this. A couple of interviewees
explicitly mentioned that agreeing to be interviewed was part of making
a contribution; as one put it as we concluded the interview, ‘Done my
civic duties’.
Thus those who were willing and able to be interviewed for this
research (30 in total) represent a particular subset of the new citizens,
and they share some characteristics. Alongside a willingness to talk, they
were sufficiently confident in their English language skills – although
one interview was conducted in a mixture of English and Urdu with a
translator assisting the process. The participants came from 19 different
countries of origin and, apart from the absence of those originally from
the Philippines, broadly match the range of countries of origin of those
applying for citizenship in the UK.4 Their ages ranged from young adults
to late 60s. Twice as many women as men agreed to be interviewed.
There are slightly more women naturalising each year in the UK than
men, but not enough to account for this difference.5 It is likely that more
114 Making Citizens

women took part because of a combination of reasons. Often couples

were getting citizenship at the same time, and the women volunteered
to be interviewed, possibly because some of the women did not work,
so they were more able to make arrangements to meet again for the
interview (although many of the women I interviewed were working). I
also think that there was a gendered response in that women were more
likely to feel sympathetic to me as another woman and want to help out
and perhaps also more comfortable with the prospect of sitting down
and talking to me in a more private space.
The next section will explore further the differences between inter-
viewees. At one level, they represent an elite group of migrants – those
who are able to come to Britain legally and stay long enough to qualify
for citizenship. However, it’s also important to see the many diverse
routes into citizenship that they have taken, as well as the ways in which
their experiences of migration are often gendered. The accounts that
the interviewees give also show that many feel the need to respond to
ideas of the ‘good migrant’ who deserves to become the ‘good citizen’,
as opposed to ‘the undeserving migrant’, anti-citizen or impossible
citizen.

Routes to and roots in Britain

The diversity of the people I interviewed is in part shown by the

different routes of entry to Britain, as well as differences in their length
of residency in Britain before they applied for citizenship. Many of
those who were interviewed had put in the application as soon as they
were eligible (usually five years, although a shorter period for those on
a spousal visa). However, for others, there had been considerable delay
before they applied. As will be discussed below, these delays reflected
both changes in their own orientation towards British citizenship, but
also changes in the naturalisation regimes which made it seem more
urgent to take up the status before future changes made it more expen-
sive to apply, or even made them ineligible.6 In terms of the routes
they took into Britain, experiences differed widely. For some of the
interviewees, their entry was managed and mediated by the multina-
tional corporations which had brought them into the country for work
and who also managed the visa application process and other logistical
issues. Coming as a professional worker meant not only that applying
for visas may be done for you, but also that you have a ready-made
set of colleagues and broadly familiar work practices to slot into. The
company may also help with finding accommodation and with other
 Routes to Citizenship 115

practical issues such as finding schools for children. Those who come
to work in professional jobs are also likely to speak English well, and
those who are white do not find themselves positioned as an Other
within a racialised schema7 or confronted with racism (see discussion
below).
Others interviewees initially made use of ‘ancestral’ visas which give
individuals from Commonwealth countries the right to stay in Britain
for 3 years on the basis of having a grandparent born in Britain. These
are largely available to white people (see Tyler 2010 for a discussion of
the racialisation of British immigration policy). There were several inter-
viewees who had come on ‘spousal’ visas and, as will be discussed below,
some found it to be a very isolating experience.
Several of the interviewees had come into Britain as asylum seekers
and therefore, unlike others, did not necessarily have a choice of where
they were going to live. Asylum seekers cannot work and have an uncer-
tain status in Britain until refugee status is granted – often a long and
difficult process of establishing claims to a sceptical state (Pannett 2011).
Those who came by this route included children who had arrived in
Britain alone or with one or both parents. Melody8 came to Britain on
her own at the age of 15 as a child asylum seeker after the death of both
her parents in Zimbabwe. Melody felt that she had been supported in
the process, by social workers and her foster family. ‘I felt I was treated
like a special person,’ she recalled. However, she explains with, one
suspects, considerable understatement that:

It was ... it was difficult. It was. And my experience as well, like my

coming over wasn’t a nice experience so, it was very hard for me
because I was young and stuff. [ ... ] leading a life on your own, like,
having to go through life like on your own is hard.

Despite praising the care she received, particularly from her foster family,
Melody almost burst into tears as she explained how most of her friends
(both British and of Zimbabwean origin) knew nothing of her past, as
she felt they wouldn’t be able to relate to it and might judge her.
Others who came as adult, rather than child asylum seekers, were
likely to have had less support when they arrived and had to negotiate
the long and very difficult processes of applying for asylum, dealing
with the Home Office and Border Agency, and eventually (after being
granted refugee status, which generally takes years) finding work and/or
applying for benefits. Often much of this had to be done without knowl-
edge of English and sometimes having left family (including partners
116 Making Citizens

and children) at home. Laleh described her experience of coming to

Britain from Iran:

When I came here about eleven years ago my children stayed and I
ran away and it was very difficult. I never forget the first six months.
I used to only cry and walking around the town. My English was very
very poor and I didn’t understand anything. [ ... ] I was very depressed
and I was very upset for myself.

For Laleh, who was eventually joined by her children, the experience of
coming to Britain was possible to tell as one with a classic narrative arc
of difficulty and struggle followed by positive outcomes. Laleh explained
that this time at the ceremony, ‘I only cried myself to be pleased. This
is my home. This is where I really feel safe and free. I like it here. It is a
good country, and it feels good after eleven years’.
The pain of being separate from family is particularly difficult for
asylum seekers and refugees, for whom return is often impossible, but
it was shared by many migrants. Several women had come to Britain to
join their husbands after a recent marriage. This might mean that, even
if they were educated and spoke English well, they could feel isolated
from home and family, without the already established networks that
their husbands had through having lived in Britain for a long time, or
through work. Madhu was a highly educated Indian woman for whom
coming to Britain was associated with a particularly difficult time in her
life:

Because I’d just got married and come at the beginning. Because, in
India, it’s totally different, you know? I had an arranged marriage and
my husband was here when we fixed – I mean ... once I had seen him
and he’d been to see me. We didn’t know each other very well, and
then I came over here and it really was good because the weather was
fine. But when I conceived my daughter, it was winter. And even I
was not expecting ... It was just an accident and it was a horrible time.
I was just crying for all year. Finally, she got born and then I felt okay.
Now I feel lucky to have her. But back then, it was, like, horrible.

A similar experience was related by Amna, who had come over from
Bangladesh to join her husband:

In the beginning it was really, really difficult. The reason I ... the only
problem, is everybody was in Bangladesh, so I had to come here
 Routes to Citizenship 117

otherwise, because I got married with my husband. The main thing is

the homesickness. Apart from other thing, everything’s fine. Just the
homesickness and family. Not seeing the family there.

For Rada, coming to Britain from Bulgaria as a student and then staying
to work had also been a struggle with a gendered dimension:

That was more difficult. I didn’t live like this before. It was a little bit
difficult. It was a time when Bulgaria was not in the European Union
and I wasn’t a British citizen. So I was a single mum and didn’t have
any support. So I worked quite a few hours and I had a lady to look
after him. So I paid the rent and I paid to her and I didn’t have any
child benefit and child support and a really tough time.

Like Laleh’s story, these could be told as ones with early struggles but
more positive outcomes. Whilst the interviewees often talked about
missing their families, they also spoke of being more settled, with friend-
ship networks and greater educational and work opportunities. Gaining
citizenship often also meant that they hoped to be able to bring family
members over for visits. It is understandable that the moment of gaining
citizenship might lead to the production of classic narratives of migra-
tion: the early struggle which is endured and overcome, followed by the
more secure and positive future. This narrative, which echoes the narra-
tive of the American Dream, as was discussed in Chapter 3, did make
sense for some of the interviewees. The context in which the interviews
happened – on the day of, or shortly after the citizenship ceremonies,
may well have helped produce this narrative for some. As Sonia (also
a single mother) explained, even though she didn’t think there was
anything particular to celebrate about getting citizenship:

It just feels like a milestone really. You’ve been travelling so far and
when you finally get to where you want to, because you work hard to
get there, you didn’t just sit on your bum and it would just come to
you, you had to work to pay and you had to work hard to get every-
thing you need and you’re still working hard.

Whilst Sonia does see the ceremony as marking her journey, none-
theless, it is interesting how she also puts this in a defensive narrative
which stresses that citizenship is not a gift; rather it is something she has
worked for. Here we can see the need to navigate some of the discourses
around the idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants. By stressing how she
118 Making Citizens

has worked to earn her citizenship, Sonia appears to pre-empt discourses

which present migrants to Britain as ‘scroungers’ who intend to live off
state benefits (Anderson 2013).
It was not only women who felt isolation. Several of the men had
come to Britain alone, and were only able to bring their partners and
families to join them once they had been in Britain for some time. Habib
had come to Britain as an asylum seeker and spoke of losses he experi-
enced through this forced migration. Habib’s attitude to being in Britain
is positive and starts a narrative of how migration has brought posi-
tive improvements in his life, but he has to check himself, to remember
that his life doesn’t quite fit into that narrative: ‘We are happy anyway,
but ... because my life is so much better than ... actually, it was much
better in Iran ... I had my own house. ... I had my own house and jobs,
and my family was around me.’
Thus, whilst gaining citizenship was something he felt very happy
and relieved about, he reflected on the fact that his current situation,
working in a corner shop despite holding a PhD, with few social networks
and only his wife with him, was a significant step down from his more
middle-class existence in Iran, surrounded by family and friends. Later
in the interview, Habib also explained how his parents had been unable
to visit him, as they had been refused a visa to come to Britain, and then
his father had died in Iran, but Habib had been unable to return before
his death or for the funeral. Dislocation from family was something
which affected him strongly.
Parwiaz, from Afghanistan, had also come to Britain as an asylum
seeker. He had been alone for ten years, until he was able to bring his
wife and child over to Britain. He had waited a long time to get refugee
status, and then indefinite leave to remain, and felt that both this long
wait and the exploitative job situations he had experienced had an inju-
rious effect, from which he was not sure he could totally recover:

I’m more happy now, I’m happy when I’ve got power as well as
everyone else. But at the end of the day it makes damage, I don’t
know. This happens, I just forget. They’ve done it. [ ... ] It is very
stressful. [ ... ] I never knew anything [would] happen to me like
that.

With the phrase ‘it makes damage’, Parwiaz gives a powerful sense of
the way in which experiences of migration and passing through the
state’s immigration and citizenship regimes can alter migrants’ sense of
themselves as well as how they relate to others. Both Parwaiz and Habib
 Routes to Citizenship 119

lived in areas of the country where there were not large communities of
ethnic minorities, and this may have increased their sense of isolation.
The experience of coming to Britain had also required adjustments
and produced changes in other interviewees. For example, Amna said
that living in the multicultural space of Britain had changed in terms of
her approach to cultural (and perhaps implicitly religious) difference:

Because not many [ ... ] foreigners lived in Bangladesh, so if just only

your own people are living around you and stuff. But in this country
when [ ... ] there’s loads of different, people of totally different back-
grounds. So, living with them it’s like I don’t feel, I don’t really think
they are from my country but are my surroundings, my conditions,
that is so – mixing with them or going out, staying with them [ ... ] I
don’t face any problems to mix with some other person who doesn’t
believe in cultural things, so I am adjusting.

Amna appears to have an ambivalent attitude to her new context living

in a multicultural city in Britain. There is a sense that this is a new expe-
rience, but also perhaps a feeling that this exposure to difference also is
quite challenging.9 Many interviews shared this feeling of ambivalence.
Migration has brought gains as well as losses, both in terms of material
circumstances, opportunities and a sense of changing affiliations. For
many of the respondents, wider job opportunities were a major reason
why they had come to Britain, although that does not necessarily mean
that it is an easy process. As Makena, a nurse from Kenya, put it:

Because there are a lot of new things to learn that gives me excite-
ment, getting to know people, people’s encouragement, to work in a
different environment, different experiences, principally exciting. It’s
a bit tough because my family’s not here, that’s the tough part.

Similarly, Helen, a school teacher from South Africa, gave some of the
reasons that had brought her to England:

There’s better job opportunities, lovely experiences. My husband

also, you know, getting brilliant experience as a builder and myself as
a teacher. Amazing experience and I hope that I’ve learned over the
last few years – just mountains of experiences.

These are narratives which, on balance, see migration as having

produced positive outcomes. However, for some of the interviewees, as
120 Making Citizens

with Parwaiz and Habib, the dominant feeling is one of loss. This could
be the case even where the interviewees had not been refugees forced
out of their home countries. Chun, a nurse, explained that she had paid
a heavy price for the decision to ‘come out’ of China. When she left,
Chun had left her young daughter behind with her parents. She now
felt that she was ‘mentally separate’ from her own family. She wanted
to bring her ten-year-old daughter to Britain, but she was settled into
the Chinese system and not keen to come. This feeling of separation
was also underlined by the fact that China does not allow dual citizen-
ship (which will be discussed below). Looking back, Chun regretted the
way migration had changed her life course: ‘When I came out, she was
young. I had my own ambitions. If I could do it again I would never do
it. It’s very hard. I used to look at other children playing and I missed
my daughter.’
It perhaps felt to Chun, who is now married to a white British man,
that leaving China and her daughter had put them on separate tracks
which were not likely to converge. The decision to migrate had more
consequences than she had anticipated. This section has shown how,
whilst there may be positive aspects to migration, moving from one
country to another can be a painful process, causing ruptures in relation-
ships with family and potentially in one’s sense of self. Those for whom
return is blocked or curtailed, including for both refugees, and those in
situations where dual citizenship is not allowed, appear to be the most
affected. The next section will consider the reasons that those I spoke
to gave for applying for British citizenship, which also reveals the differ-
ences (in rights, in experience and expectations) among interviewees. It
will also explore the ways in which the interviewees constructed ideas
of belonging.

Why become a citizen?

There are likely to be multiple and overlapping reasons for applying

for citizenship in a country you have migrated to, some of which are
more practical and others more emotional. The impact of obtaining new
citizenship on individuals depends on their country of origin and the
rights to travel, employment, benefits and so on that they already have.
It will also be influenced by what stage of life they are in and the nature
of family networks. British citizenship will have a varying importance
to people depending on whether they are younger or older; whether
they have children and where their parents and other family members
live. It will also have a impact on those who want, and can afford, to
 Routes to Citizenship 121

travel, and for those who might want to work in other countries in the
European Union. Whilst ease of travel and employment in Europe was
a frequently mentioned reason for applying for citizenship, it is inter-
esting that, as discussed in Chapter 4, the citizenship ceremonies in the
UK (like those in Ireland and the Netherlands) make no comment on
this important aspect of UK citizenship. The next section will explore
some of the difficulties faced for those without European citizenship.

Life without the ‘right’ passport

This section will suggest that accounts about the disadvantages of not
having European citizenship illustrate the stress of certain border cross-
ings, as well as the effect of citizenship on employment prospects.
Hamed, a young man who had come to Britain from Iran as a child,
explained the opportunities which he felt having citizenship would
offer him:

Firstly, having a British passport certainly means I can travel freely,

more freely and in terms of job applications it will certainly help
because employers have less concern if you have a British passport
and British citizenship, so these are the main differences it will make
to my life.

Refugees have to apply for a travel document to be able to travel outside

Britain, which, as Habib explained, could involve extra scrutiny at the
borders, both in order to enter other countries and to re-enter Britain: ‘it’s
definitely different [travelling on travel documents rather than a pass-
port]. They questioned me here, questioned me there.’ In addition, as
Saima explained, this was not just the case with travel, but other admin-
istrative tasks: ‘Without a passport it’s very difficult. Other people ... in
everyday matters, you give your identity. So we have no other identity
without a passport. ... The passport makes life easy.’ For others, the ques-
tion of logistical convenience which went with the legal status of being
a citizen was not stressed to the same extent, with more focus on claims
of belonging and membership of the community. Anuja was of Indian
origin, but she had grown up in Bahrain and married a British man
whom she had met there. She applied for citizenship as soon as she
could:

As soon as I got my indefinite leave to remain; that’s when I thought

that I’ll apply for citizenship as well and just because, you know, I just
thought that – I felt like I was already following the norms and the
122 Making Citizens

culture and everything, and I felt like a part of it already. And I think
that having British – a British citizenship has a lot of benefits as well
and if you – if you are kind of becoming a part of the community and
the culture I thought that it would be good.

Here again, whilst the legal status of citizenship is presented as a practical

resource, it is placed within a context of being ‘a part of’ society, that goes
beyond the legal status. Although Anuja also suggests citizenship will
enable her to ‘become a part of the community and culture’, she clearly
feels that she already is fulfilling that in some ways. Here, belonging is
based on a normative notion of citizenship in which inclusion depends
on ‘following the norms and the culture’, which may also be used to
exclude those who are deemed to be unable to fit in. For others, such as
Madhu, legal citizenship might offer protection against discrimination:

I know a lot of friends who face it [suspicion], in London because,

where you would find a lot of people living illegally there and then,
everybody’s looked at under the, the suspicious eye by, either officials
or, you know, a walking policeman – you know, somebody in the
police station.

Whilst legal status won’t affect all kinds of discrimination (many of

which are based on assumptions triggered by visual markers), Madhu
hoped that legal status would alleviate some of the suspicion and
discrimination she may face. The next section considers those for whom
the legal status of British citizenship offers few extra rights (apart from
voting) because they were already European citizens.

European citizens
When thinking about why people go through the time-consuming and
expensive process of applying for citizenship in Britain, Europeans who
apply for British citizenship are an interesting case. There are relatively
few disadvantages for EU citizens living and working in Britain without
British citizenship. EU citizens can travel freely across European borders,
work without any restrictions, get mortgages and other financial credit,
and, with some exceptions, claim welfare benefits. They can also vote in
local and European elections, although not in national elections.10 So it
is interesting to consider why those who have little practical advantage
to gain apply for citizenship, despite the high costs: At the time of the
interviews, it cost at least £700 to apply for citizenship, a price that did
not include the cost of a passport itself.
 Routes to Citizenship 123

Rada had come to Britain from Bulgaria, initially to study, at a time

when Bulgaria was not part of the EU. She explained that, after many
years, she had applied for citizenship simply because her Bulgarian
passport was running out, and it seemed easier to apply for British citi-
zenship than to make the trip to Bulgaria simply to renew her passport.
She felt the need to add, ‘Not that I’m disrespectful to the nation’.
In some ways, this reflects the dissonance experienced by those who
are undertaking an administrative act of applying for citizenship, but
have a sense of other peoples’ expectation that the pledge or oath of
allegiance will mean something deeper. This difference in sentiment
is likely to be underlined by the ceremony itself. As was outlined in
Chapters 3 and 4, in some ceremonies there is an anxiety that the
citizenship pledge or oath will not be sufficiently deeply felt, or that
real or authentic citizenship relies on other actions and dispositions
beyond the ceremony and oath-taking itself. However, this proposes a
rather restrictive sense of citizenship which ignores the ways in which
people as residents are already fully participating in the national life
and culture.
Rada explained that to function in Britain with an EU passport was
easy:11

Yes, definitely. Nobody is asking you for the passport or nothing.

You’ve got good credit score, you can have your mortgage, the doctor
knows you and the school – your child does well. Nobody even asks
my nationality at all. To do well, behaving yourself. Especially in
London because it’s a cosmopolitan city full of people.

Thus, for Rada, to be accepted in a society does not rest on the legal
status of citizenship. She feels that ‘to do well’, you have to ‘behave
yourself’, which presumably means complying with legal and social
norms of behaviour. She suggests that acceptance is particularly easy
to gain in London ‘because it’s a cosmopolitan city full of people’. This
raises further questions about the nature of certain city spaces and the
ways in which they shape ideas of belonging, which will be returned to
below. In this account, the significance of legal citizenship is reduced.
The ceremony was, for Rada, another inconvenience (along with the
expense) in the process of applying for citizenship. However, it tran-
spired that her British husband appeared to be more affected by the
process, accompanying Rada to the ceremony and insisting on buying
two official photos of her receiving her citizenship, one for their home
and one to be sent to Rada’s mother in Bulgaria.
124 Making Citizens

Whilst for Rada British citizenship was largely a bureaucratic conven-

ience, for other EU citizens, obtaining British citizenship could be
symbolic: a way of further marking a sense of belonging. For example,
Bernard, from Germany, had lived in Britain for more than 30 years. He
explained that, in the context of the attention given more recently to
citizenship, and as he approached retirement, the fact that his daughters
were British and settled in Britain made him feel that he would also like
to be British. In addition, his anger at the way the Labour Government
had taken Britain into war in Iraq, and his frustration about not being
able to vote against Tony Blair made him want to be able to vote in
British General Elections. Only formal citizenship would give him the
right to participate in this way. He had not brought his wife or children
to the ceremony and, in retrospect, regretted this, as he had been more
moved by it than he had expected and wished they had been there.
Adriana was a practicing vet from Spain and, in contrast to Bernard,
expressed no desire to gain or use the right to vote, although notably she
frames this exercise of the right to vote as a ‘contribution’ (I will return
below to the question of citizenship and contribution): ‘Well, I am not very
much into politics and I’m not really much into politics in Spain either, so
no, I’m not sure that I will actually contribute in that respect.’ Adriana had
been in Britain for six years and in fact had applied twice for British citi-
zenship (and therefore had to pay the fees twice). The first application was
rejected because she had not had sufficient years of residency in Britain,
and Adriana felt that the way the rules were explained was misleading. In
addition, ‘I had to apply again, and it wasn’t a nice thing, really. I wish
they were more clear in that respect.’ She was also frustrated that the home
office did not take her particular circumstances into account:

I know that they, they can apply their own criteria, in certain cases, for
instance if you own your own property or if you show that you have
some links with the country, they regard it as fact that I, for instance,
have a property and a mortgage for over five years, they just disre-
garded that completely and I effectively lost £700 approximately.

Despite the considerable expense, Adriana was not put off, and she
applied again as soon as she was eligible. Her main motivation was a
deeply felt Anglophilia:

I don’t really know, I think it’s a sense of pride, I suppose [ ... ] I do

really admire this country. As much as I love Spain, because I am from
there, after six years I can honestly say that I do love this country and
 Routes to Citizenship 125

I am proud to say that I am British as well [ ... ] when I first came here
I thought that I wouldn’t last a year because it was so cold, but the job
opportunities that I have in this country are immense. [ ... ] honestly,
I love English. It’s a passion [ ... ] the more I stayed in this country,
the more obsessed I became with the idea of, not mastering English
because I never will, but I do love my language as well.

Here again, we see an expression of ambivalence, or at least the fear that

expressing a love of English might also mean a lack of love for Spanish.
Part of the ‘pride’ Adriana felt in Britain was an appreciation of what she
termed British values (which she characterised as a lack of racism and
openness to foreigners): ‘That’s one of the reasons why I want to become
British because of pride, it’s pride in values being British.’
These examples of people from the EU taking British citizenship
demonstrate the range and complexity of emotions (or lack of them)
which can be involved in deciding to apply for citizenship, particularly
in the context of the current climate of heightened attention to questions
of immigration in Britain. Two of the interviewees who, like Bernard and
Rada, had lived in Britain for many years before they applied for citizen-
ship, help to demonstrate how public discussions around citizenship
have changed over time in Britain and how this has an impact on those
who have migrated to Britain. The following section, which considers
two cases of new citizens who had applied for citizenship many years
after they were eligible, sheds light on the impact of changing discourses
around citizenship and belonging.

Why apply now, if not before?

Simone had come to Britain from Liberia in the mid 1980s, accompa-
nying her student husband. She had lived in Britain ever since and now
worked as a schoolteacher. She explained that, until recently, she hadn’t
seen the need to apply for citizenship:

Maybe because I have been here for such a long time. I came on a
different status so there didn’t seem to be a lot of need. So I think
if you come on a different form, most folk come on a refugee status
[ ... ] you know, they see that security of citizenship. I didn’t fall into
that category. [ ... ] I needed to feel that this was what I really wanted
to do. [ ... ] I could have applied earlier but I think that it’s something
that you just get assimilated with the society and you just keep going
and then all of a sudden everybody start talking about you. [talking
about] citizenship. You have to start taking the tests, you have to start
126 Making Citizens

to know whereas before you could just apply because of the length of
time. I think I just got comfortable and then my son said once ‘you
have been here for so long how are you going to apply for this thing’.
I say ‘ok I’m going to do it’.

Simone’s account shows an awareness of the changing political and

bureaucratic context in which citizenship is gained. Whilst she can
see that refugees would need the security of citizenship, she felt secure
and ‘assimilated’, at least until ‘all of a sudden everybody start talking
about you’. Having felt comfortable and settled in Britain, with a new
discourse about citizenship being promoted, she felt she was under
renewed scrutiny.
As popular constructions of the anti-citizen or of those who could/
should not belong become stronger, it becomes more important to
establish one’s status as a citizen. In her explanation of why she enjoyed
preparing for the citizenship test, we again get a sense of the risks of
exclusion and of the shifting boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us’.
Simone explained that her increased knowledge will keep her from
being regarded as ‘a dumb foreigner. You will know what you are talking
about.’ Learning about history will give her:

a sense of belonging that, maybe, I mean you’d know that, ok they

might say ‘well, that’s not a British accent and you’re not white’. But
I think it doesn’t really matter what your accent is. I think it has to
be: you belong to something, you feel about a country. I think that is
the difference. [ ... ] I have spent most of my life here.

Despite this sense that being black and having a foreign accent may
make being regarded as British impossible, Simone said that Britain was ‘a
country that gave me more than my own country’. She went on to explain
the education and degrees she had earned in Britain, and the fact that she
owned her own house. British culture had given her a sense of independ-
ence as a woman: ‘It’s like opening doors,’ she contended. ‘And to say that
you’re a woman, and you can be what you can be.’ Simone applied for
citizenship as a way to demonstrate her sense of belonging. She also hoped
that it would ease the stress and humiliation of some border crossings.
She had found that, particularly travelling within the EU and the United
States, a Liberian passport produced extra scrutiny and suspicion:

I think you feel travelling, you feel very inferior and sometimes like
you ... people are trying to look at your passport. I find it very offensive
 Routes to Citizenship 127

because your passport is your identity and they are trying to undermine
it. [ ... ] I think that maybe [it is in] the EU and United States where you
tend to feel a little, you feel different [ ... ] and undermined because of
the country where you [come] from. I think this is very bad [ ... ] I really
don’t think it is right. A passport does not make a person. A passport
it is just a book, you know, a document that you travel with. Although
it is an identity, it should not be an identity that undermines a person
[ ... ] It’s just where you’re born. No-one is responsible for where they
were born. You are responsible for where you go.

This is a powerful statement about the power of citizenship to mark and

exclude people and the stress involved in border crossings. It suggests a
refusal to see citizenship as a central identity. The passport – that proof
of citizenship identity – ‘is just a book’. What matters more to Simone is
what she termed ‘assimilation’, which she elaborated as involvement in
society through education and work: ‘Saying I am willing to work hard,
I am willing to learn, and I am willing to make a difference’. For Simone,
at particular moments, when ‘everyone’ is talking about citizenship and
what tests should have to be passed before you can receive it, the formal
bureaucratic process and recognition as a citizen can become important
in a way that it wasn’t before. Although she had felt she belonged, now
it becomes necessary to prove it in a more official way. Here we see
the tension between legal citizenship and other ways in which people
can feel they belong and participate in citizenship acts – as people with
membership and rights akin to those of citizenship.
Another interviewee who had lived in Britain for a long time without
feeling the need to apply for British citizenship was Ghedi, in his
mid-20s, who had come from Somalia at the age of 10 with his parents
and siblings as asylum seekers. He had not seen himself as someone
who needed to document and back up his claim for citizenship. In fact,
he had delayed applying for citizenship for many years (despite filling
in the forms for the rest of his family to apply some years before). He
explained why he had not, until recently, got round to it:

We were eligible after we’d been here for, I think, seven years, we
were eligible to ... But it’s never stopped me, you know. I was resi-
dent, I was entitled to any of the rights as anybody else; it didn’t stop
me from anything. So never really – never really thought it would
add anything else [ ... ] I’d see people who’ve been here less than I
applying for it and asking me why don’t I apply for it. I knew my way
around the city.
128 Making Citizens

Ghedi, like Simone, downplays the significance of legal citizenship.

He claims rights through being a ‘resident’. This proposes a different
account of who should be ‘at home’ in Britain. Ghedi knows his ‘way
around the city’, and this habitual presence and understanding is what,
for him, endows belonging. The city, and your ease in it and knowledge
of it, can provide an identity.
Ghedi went on to explain that whereas before it had been easy to
get jobs with the documentation that he had, this had become more
complicated when he’d wanted to apply for a job at the airport and
when he had wanted to get a driving license. Whilst this might appear
to be a purely practical, logistical issue, Ghedi also pointed out that
he had sensed a shift in Britain around attitudes to national identity,
something that had never seemed too important. ‘I was a resident in
Manchester,’ he said. ‘I was ... as far as I was concerned, I never really
thought of, you know, what Britishness was.’ But he began to notice
that in public discourses there was a shift away from the potentially
more open (or less exclusively white) identity of ‘British’12 and towards
‘English’, which was not an identity which he thought he could easily –
or ‘comfortably’ – claim:

I used to work in a school, I was security. I had to fill in the forms with
nationality and I was thinking: ‘there’s no-one putting British’. And
then I applied for my university place in Huddersfield, the first year I
went there the lady actually told me off because government devolu-
tions are about government and really nobody puts British down ... .
I don’t know that I could classify myself as an English [person]. I was
comfortable with British, but English: there’s that connotation that
you had to be white [to be English]. I’ve always put British.

Ghedi has been, in certain contexts, calling himself British before he had
been granted legal citizenship of Britain. He based this identity claim on
his residency and his sense of comfort and familiarity. Having lived in
Britain since he was a relatively small child and also having spent time
in Somalia where his father now lived, Ghedi had an understanding of
identity which recognised its fluidity and the ways in which it depends
on recognition as well as self-identification:

When I was outside the UK, I was strongly urged to say I’m British at
all times. But when you’re here you do kind of – it affects how other
people see you, so when the majority see you as either Somali or, you
know, black or ... I mean I’m all those, so I don’t know.[ ... ] When
 Routes to Citizenship 129

I went to Somalia, [ ... ] I feel that I have more connections here, I

don’t know whether – do you know what I mean? [ ... ] I mean my
little brother [on a visit to Somalia] was looking for his mate from
Manchester who lived in another city that was, what, 50 miles away.
So yeah, you do – it shows – it’s like the old thing that [when] you
don’t have it, you know how much at home you feel there. So I know
how to tell them that this is where I grew up, you know.

Ghedi is acknowledging that, however he describes himself, as someone

who is black and originating from Somalia, being recognized as British is
contingent on how ‘other people see you’. He also is aware that, having
grown up in Britain, he doesn’t feel at home in Somalia in the same way
he does in Britain – hence the example of his brother wanting to make
contact with Manchester friends in Somalia, with whom he perhaps
feels he has more in common than those who live where his family
‘came from’. The next section will explore further this question of what
gives a feeling of belonging or connection and how the sense of being a
citizen, with claims and contributions, can predate the legal acquisition
of citizenship.

Belonging, citizenship and participation

Just as Ghedi’s claim to belonging rested at least in part on his knowledge

of and ease in the city of Manchester, it was interesting how, in other
interviews, the focus was also on local, rather than national, identities.
Melody had been in Liverpool since she arrived in Britain as an unac-
companied child asylum seeker. She was chatting about her friends who
wanted to go and live in Manchester, and then went on to discuss the
rivalries between the neighbouring cities of Manchester and Liverpool,
saying, ‘I think Liverpool is trying. We’re, we’re trying.’ Here the stress
on ‘we’ is an act of claiming citizenship in the city space, regardless of
legal citizenship status (Isin and Nielsen 2008). Melody explained that:

[c]ompared to Manchester, I think the Liverpool [people] are more

friendly ... I hate it when it gets to London and it’s the shock, you’re
just getting [ ... ] In London they look at you as if you’re strange. [ ... ]
Like our taxi drivers here, they’ll talk to you as if you’ve known them
for sort of ages.

Melody had a clear sense of a Liverpool that she belonged to, and which
was where she felt safe: ‘And I’m just, I don’t know, when I leave Liverpool
130 Making Citizens

I feel like I’m leaving something behind. Like I’m leaving ... oh I don’t
know to be honest. Really I feel secure here in Liverpool.’ To Melody,
being Liverpudlian appeared to have a real meaning. The city also repre-
sented to her a sense of roots, of where she has affiliations or friends
that would be ‘left behind’ if she were to go anywhere else. Whereas
Britishness was perhaps more difficult to relate to, or to feel included
in, having come over as a child from Zimbabwe and with no immediate
family, Melody was clear that she was very unlikely to want to live in or
travel to Zimbabwe, unless she had children and wanted to ‘show them
where I was from’. Other interviewees who had come as asylum seekers
shared this inability or unwillingness to return. Although some asylum
seekers had already been back to their countries of origin for visits, others,
such as Habib from Iran, no longer had valid passports of their country
of origin. Parwaiz explained that he had no intention of obtaining an
Afghani passport for his daughter who had been born in Britain.
For others, settling in Britain is a reflection of a commitment to family
at a slightly later life-stage. Prakash, originally from India, had worked
in medical sales, living first in Singapore, then Bahrain, then Dubai,
then back to Bahrain where he met his wife, a nurse, who was also from
India. They had moved to Northern Ireland seven years ago when his
wife got a job in a hospital, and he became a healthcare assistant. They
had tried at one point to move to Australia but had now decided against
this further move in order to secure their children’s education:

My son has already got a placement in the grammar13 school. My

daughter is going next year. So I don’t want to break their education
now. So we’ll stay in one place and get the education. ... And also, [ ... ]
there’s no reason to move ... because there are no jobs. So there is no
change in career prospects. It’s not there. So why don’t we stay?

What might seem like a fairly random combination of circumstances

lead to Prakash and his family applying for British citizenship. However,
this has to be understood (as Prakash clearly does) within the context
of the flows and blocks within the international job market for caring
professionals (Arun 2010; Kingma 2005), as well as the importance he
places on education. Moreover, Prakash also goes on to explain how the
decision to settle more permanently in Britain had another logic of close
cultural ties as a result of colonialism:

And India and Britain are considerably ... nearly the same. Practically,
it’s the same tradition, Commonwealth countries, corporations, and
 Routes to Citizenship 131

culturally the same because ... and the language. Everybody can speak
English.

This was a theme that Prakash returned to at various points in the inter-
view, pointing out, in a polite rendition of the postcolonial contention,
‘We are here because you were there’ (Kushnick 1993):

You see, Indians are nearly a hundred years in Britain [ ... ]. Like the
tea: all these tea leaves coming from India. So there is, culturally, a
lot of relations between the two countries. All of the Commonwealth
countries ... And language is very ... everybody can speak English.

Here, claims to affinity are made through economic ties and cultural
roots, rather than genealogy, as in the case of Rebecca from South Africa,
who had an ancestral visa, which will be discussed below. Others from
Britain’s former colonies also expressed this sentiment about a shared
history. In addition, Adriana, from Spain also suggested a similar claim
to cultural affinity based on region:

It wasn’t that difficult at all [settling in] and probably because, at the
end of the day, even though we have a different culture, it’s not like
comparing Britain to, I don’t know, China. We Spanish and British
people are similar in many, many things, more than in those that
differ.

These claims of affinity challenge narrow definitions of national

culture, belonging, identity and difference on which anti-immigration
discourses, with concerns about people ‘fitting in’, are often based.
Despite Prakash’s account of his multiple migrations, he also makes
clear that he is embedded in the community in Britain and should not
be seen as a temporary sojourner, whatever his legal status. In answer
to a question about how he felt about swearing an oath to the Queen,
Prakash said, ‘It’s good. No, as far as I am concerned, I am already a
citizen, whether I lived in the past, or in the present or the future. So I
have nothing to worry about.’
Prakash’s assertion that he was ‘already a citizen’ is quite a strong one
to make, perhaps particularly on the day that he has gone through a
citizenship ceremony. The statement contests the restriction of notions
of belonging, or membership in community, to the confines of legal
citizenship. As such, it may be seen as an ‘act of citizenship’ in that it
is a claim for citizenship beyond legal status (Isin and Nielsen 2008).
132 Making Citizens

Part of Prakash’s confidence in his citizenship, which sat apart from the
legal procedure, was his participation in the community. He had set up
a local association for the relatively small community of people living in
Northern Ireland from his home region in India, organising festivals and
cultural and diversity programmes in schools. He had already demon-
strated his involvement in the community. This activity was what made
him a citizen. Prakash was not alone in the feeling that citizenship was
not something restricted to legal status and the swearing of an oath.
Others made claims of belonging and membership of the community
where the legal status was only a small part (if any).
Running through several of the interviews are ideas of what it means to
be a citizen (in terms of legal status or other claims). There is a language
of what they, as individuals, have ‘contributed’ – either economically
in terms of taxes, or socially and culturally in the way that Prakash
suggests. Voting was also seen as positive involvement. Rebecca, from
South Africa, pointed out her active participation in her local commu-
nity, which predated the moment of receiving citizenship:

So one of the things I like to do is tweet. I’m on Twitter quite frequently

and my sense of purpose on Twitter was tweeting an idea every day to
make Brighton and Hove a better place. And I got up to 185 ideas –
and at one stage, the Brighton and Hove council was following me.
So I would love to play more of a part in the community.

For some of the interviewees, citizenship seemed to bring not a sense of

transformation, but of ‘coming home’ in some way. Gaining citizenship
can feel like they are bringing together different aspects of themselves.
Both of the (white) South African women I interviewed were in some
sense seeking what might be called ‘ancestral closure’, a feeling that
they had claims to belong in Britain which were not properly recognised
until they had got British citizenship. Four of Rebecca’s grandparents
had been English, and she explained that:

Because I was born outside of the UK even though my parents had

British passports I couldn’t have a British passport. So it’s always been a
bit of a like sense of pride I think that it would be great to have one day
because I feel a bit of a connection here. [ ... ] I think the driving factor
was this is where I come from in some shape or form. (emphasis added)

However, Rebecca added, as a white person in South Africa, she also had
fears for her long-term stability: ‘Can you imagine if I was the only one
 Routes to Citizenship 133

in my family who suddenly got trapped [without the right to come to

Britain]?’14
Whilst, for some, gaining citizenship feels like the completion of a
journey, or an attempt to resolve questions of identity, for others, taking
on British citizenship may feel like it is raising as many questions as it
answers. Migrancy perhaps always contains ambivalence and questions
around the possibilities of return, yet new citizenship also requires a
performance of certainty and permanency. The citizenship application
form has a question which asks you to state whether you intend to live
in Britain permanently. For some, such as Adriana from Spain, this had
given her some pause for thought:

I assume that if you say ‘no’ they would refuse your application
which is totally understandable, but, at the same time, it’s very easy
to say ‘yes’ because you can change your mind any time, and, at the
moment, actually, I’m thinking of staying here, but, God knows, I
don’t know [ ... ] I miss my friends and my family and I am in that age
where you have to think what you are going to do because, I suppose
you know what I mean. Either I stay here forever or I go home within
a couple of years.

For others, too, there was considerable uncertainty as to whether they

would always stay in Britain. Perhaps, as people who had already under-
taken at least one inter-national migration, they knew that it was diffi-
cult to be certain about long-term plans and what circumstances might
lead them to live elsewhere.

Can I imagine myself living in the UK for the rest of my life? No, but
I also can’t imagine living anywhere else, I’m not quite sure where
I’m at. I don’t know at the moment, I think the right opportunity
might mean, could mean going somewhere else, but I’m not actually
looking for somewhere else. (Rebecca, from South Africa)

As with Adriana, concerns about parents left in the countries of origin

would often draw people back, or alternatively, hopes for a retirement
back in the home country. Rada planned to go back to Bulgaria to a
flat she already owned when she and her husband retired, explaining
that ‘the lifestyle, for retired people is difficult [in Britain]. The social
life there is more open.’ She also explained that ‘on my heart, I’m
Bulgarian’. Particularly for those from outside the EU, a British pass-
port opened up further opportunities which made a decision to stay in
134 Making Citizens

the UK permanently potentially harder to make. Like others, Clare from

Australia explained that applying for citizenship gave her greater flex-
ibility about her future plans:

The primary benefit to us was being able to move around the EU and
live and work in the EU if we wanted to. Also I think as the boys are
getting older, moving back to Australia is becoming more and more
of an option, and if that doesn’t work I want to be able to come back.
So it is also security and [a] safety net as well.

Here we have a sentiment reminiscent of the Hong Kong elites researched

by Aiwha Ong (1999:740). This privileged business class followed a
strategy of gaining multiple passports to guarantee their ability to
choose where to live and work. Although multiple citizenship offers
possibilities for both permanent settlement and also return, a clear sense
of ambivalence about the implications of taking British citizenship can
be seen in the following interview with Neela, a woman who had come
from India to accompany her husband, who was employed by a large
multinational corporation.

NEELA [on getting British citizenship]: I think it’s just making life more
easy in some ways and tougher in others.
BB: How’s it making it tougher?
NEELA: Tougher, you only have to decide when you going to go back
to it, when you want to go back, settle down with your parents or
that. [ ... ] like you would think that this is a wasted exercise if you
want to go back, [ ... ] And then, I don’t know, I don’t know any like
nobody in my friends or like, relatives are British Nationals and who
are living in India, I don’t know any of them so I don’t know what,
what life is for them, so if, if I knew from somebody’s experience
then maybe I could relate to it, but that’s, that’s one thing that I feel
[ ... ]. The thing is, you miss your parents and no matter how much
you talk to them on the phone or you chat on the web, it doesn’t
equal to you know, seeing them once or so, whatever a fortnight or
20 days.

For Neela, having gone through the process of test, application and cere-
mony, it now felt as though she had in some way moved away, or delayed
a moment when she might ‘settle down’ with her parents. Geographical
distance from her family appears to have been made more permanent for
Neela as she gets British citizenship. The required investment of time and
 Routes to Citizenship 135

emotional energy suggests a commitment to stay in Britain (or perhaps

Europe) which keeps her further away from her parents. This may be
particularly heightened for Neela, given that in India she now would have
the status of an ‘Overseas Citizen of India’.
In the interviews with those who had come from India, there was
some confusion about whether or not India allowed its citizens to
have dual nationality. This is probably because in 2005, the regulations
governing citizenship in India were changed; Indian citizens who gain
the citizenship of another country have to surrender their passports and
can then be issued a card attesting to their status as ‘Overseas Citizen of
India’. This card allows unrestricted travel to India, but does not confer
voting rights, or the possibility of being employed by the government
of India. It prohibits the purchase (although not the inheritance) of agri-
cultural land. Some of those I spoke to were fully aware of the situation
but, like Prakash, felt that the card was ‘exactly the same as a passport’.
Neela explained that there would be a six-month delay before she could
be issued this OCI card, and if she wanted to go to India during this
period, she would have to apply for a visa to do so on her British pass-
port. She felt that it would be strange to have to apply for a visa to go to
her home country. However, other interviewees from India, like Anuja,
were convinced that they would keep their normal Indian passport, This
confusion demonstrates how the complexities of shifting state relations
with their diasporas can be hard for individuals to keep track of, and
people can lose their rights without being aware of it.
Not all of the interviewees could have the flexibility of the multiple
passport holder (Ong 1999). This was particularly the case for those who
came from countries which banned dual citizenship and, unlike India,
did not have a way of giving documentation to recognise ‘former citi-
zens’. Mya had come to Britain nine years ago from Burma and had had
to give up citizenship in Burma. ‘I already passed my properties in Burma
to my younger sister and my niece,’ she recalled. [ ... ] ‘It is quite hard, but
then you can’t have two residencies. If I want to go back to Burma, I have
to apply [for a] visa in the Burmese Embassy, and I have to go home as a
tourist’. Citizenship is, for some, more than a legal status. What passport
you hold can have an impact on your identity. Citizenship can give you a
sense of ‘home’, and the loss of status can sever you from your home. As
Chun from China explained, giving up citizenship in your ‘home’ country
in order to take up British identity could be a very difficult decision:

I have to make a choice – choose to be British or Chinese. There is no

dual nationality. I’ve been thinking I’ve been Chinese all these years
136 Making Citizens

but I have to lose Chinese nationality to be British. It does feel like a

big deal. It’s such a pity there is not dual nationality in China.

For Chun and Mya, taking British citizenship clearly gives a sense of
rupture and loss, rather than the ‘completion’ suggested by some of
those quoted earlier in the chapter. As we saw above, Chun has a sense
of loss, not only of her Chinese nationality but also of family as her rela-
tions with family members, including her daughter who had stayed in
China, were no longer as close as she wished.

Conclusion

The accounts in this chapter can tell us much about the varied experi-
ences of those who find themselves gathered with others as citizands in
order to become citizens. They are highly diverse in terms of their expe-
riences of coming to and settling in Britain. Some came for job oppor-
tunities and stayed on, almost by accident. Others had come as asylum
seekers and in order to achieve safety and security. Several interviewees
already had strong cultural links with Britain which gave an additional
logic to their coming to – or staying in – the country. These differ-
ences are shaped in part by the routes by which they came to Britain.
Globalisation may have opened up the possibilities of rapid global travel,
but the reality of nation-state structures means that not all can move
freely. Citizenship regimes regulate the movements of different national
groups across borders and shape the rights which they can claim within
countries, thus setting the conditions of migration and decisions about
citizenship. Experiences of long-term migration are also shaped by
other social structures, including class, gender and race. Several of the
women came to Britain accompanying their husbands – or to join new
husbands, and they had to build a new life without the structure of
work, family, and social networks. For asylum seekers, both men and
women, this experience is compounded by having to prove their cases
to an often-sceptical state and live a life of uncertainty (and without the
right to work) until refugee status is granted. These experiences are very
different for those from Europe, on professional work visas or ancestral
visas, who are less likely to feel the scrutiny of the state and more likely
to have support when settling in Britain.
As the following chapter will examine in more detail, the experiences
of different migrants coming to Britain are also shaped by racialised
responses, in the general public, in popular discourse, and on the part
of the state. Just as there are many different reasons for and experiences
 Routes to Citizenship 137

of coming to Britain, there are also varied reasons for and feelings about
becoming a British citizen. For some, this is an administrative proce-
dure which will make travel easier, particularly for those who find that
border crossing with the ‘wrong’ passport can be a frustrating and even
frightening process. For others, becoming a British citizen is a way of
expressing something of what they feel about belonging in Britain. It
can be about a desire to participate more fully in society – although for
other respondents, legal citizenship status does not determine participa-
tion and contribution. Many already feel like full members of society,
akin to being citizens. However, for some, the decision to take up British
citizenship (something that they may have long been eligible for) comes
out of a sense of insecurity and an awareness that both the citizenship
regime in Britain and popular discourse have shifted in such a way that
they feel the need to ensure their rights and their place in British society.
As Simone put it, ‘suddenly everyone is talking about you’. The following
chapter will take up the question of how it feels ‘when everyone is
talking about you’. It will address interviewees’ sense of whether they
were made to feel welcome in Britain and how they reflect on public
debates around immigration. It will also examine directly what they
thought about the citizenship ceremonies.
6
Welcome to Britain?

They’re not very welcoming people, no. That was the bit I didn’t get.
Sonia

Introduction

Citizenship ceremonies were introduced in Britain in 2004 as part of

a programme of legislation around citizenship rolled out by the New
Labour government over several years. The first ceremony was held at
Brent Town Hall in London, an area known for its high level of ethnic
diversity. The home secretary, David Blunkett (who had introduced the
idea of citizenship ceremonies) and Prince Charles were present at the
first ceremony which created 19 new citizens. At the ceremony, Blunkett
said:

I think the new ceremonies across the country will be the answer to
those who fear difference, who fear the diversity which comes with
migration of people coming across the world to live in our commu-
nity and sends a very clear message that those who choose to be part
of the family are committing themselves.

Prince Charles added:

Being British is something of a blessing and a privilege for us all ... I

very much hope that this ceremony has added something to the
significance of acquiring British citizenship and that it’s reinforced
your belief, if indeed any reinforcement is required, that you belong
here and that you are very welcome.1

138
 Welcome to Britain? 139

These statements reflect two potentially contradictory elements

of the ceremonies. Firstly, Blunkett’s statement reproduces a form of
domopolitics (Walters 2004) where the commitment of those joining
the ‘family’ can be used to alleviate the fears of the host population.
Thus those who fear difference can be reassured with the idea that
pledges have been made. Prince Charles follows this argument with
the suggestion that the ceremonies can both underline the importance
of British citizenship, which he sets up as a ‘blessing and a privilege’,
as well as demonstrating how new citizens are (and have always been)
welcome. The ceremonies serve to build up British citizenship as some-
thing worth having – British is here suggested to be best. Anne Marie
Fortier suggests that the ceremonies are an ‘example of the entan-
glement of technologies of reassurance with technologies of enmity
within the fantasy of national unity’ (Fortier 2008: 101). However, I
would argue that the role of the ceremony as part of the technologies
of reassurance, whilst that might have been the intention behind the
introduction of the ceremonies, is less than clear. If we compare the
coverage given to the introduction of the citizenship ceremonies to
that of citizenship testing introduced a year later (and the ongoing
coverage given to new versions of the test), the ceremonies do not
appear to attract enough attention to be regarded as a reassurance.
The ceremonies are relatively small and officially private, conducted
on a regular (sometimes twice weekly) basis all over the country. Very
few British people will have seen them (largely only when they are
the guests of new citizens). Beyond press and media coverage of the
first citizenship ceremony (and some local media coverage of the first
ceremonies in local areas), citizenship ceremonies appear to attract
very little public attention. In contrast, the introduction of testing
produced a tide of media coverage debating the rights and wrongs of
the test and whether the questions were appropriate. This has been
repeated each time the tests are revised. The ceremonies appear to be
both less controversial and less interesting to the media, particularly
as the idea of testing speaks more clearly to concerns about British citi-
zenship being ‘too easy’ to get and provides a means of talking about
who deserves citizenship and who should be excluded (thus a tech-
nology of both reassurance and enmity). However, whilst the ceremo-
nies do not necessarily function well as a technology of reassurance,
they do provide a shorthand way of making the claim that Britain is
welcoming and inclusive, in the way that Prince Charles suggested.
An example of this can be seen in a report in The Guardian the day
after the murder of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013, where the
140 Making Citizens

description of the local ‘multicultural, multi-faith community’ the day

after the murder is given colour by pointing out that:

Inside Woolwich town hall, a group of immigrants were going

through a British citizenship ceremony. The wood-panelled council
chamber had been decked in Union Flags.2

The mere fact of the ceremony, and the diversity of those taking part,
can be used to make statements about multiculturalism in Britain. They
can be used as a symbol of multiculturalism that claims Britain as a
welcoming space.
Rather than focusing on the intention or practice of the ceremonies,
this chapter will explore the new citizens’ own perceptions of the cere-
monies, including how they felt about swearing allegiance to the Queen
and the citizenship pledge. The chapter will also address directly the
question of welcome. As was argued in Chapter 4, many of the citi-
zenship ceremonies in Britain make claims about a longer history of
welcome in Britain in general or in the local area. In this chapter, the
new citizen’s own experience of arriving and settling in Britain will be
explored. Their experiences show that the image of Britain, local cities
or regions given in the ceremonies of a universal welcome is not neces-
sarily accurate. The interviews demonstrate that many newcomers to
Britain experience a cool reception, if not outright racism and hostility.
At other times, or for other individuals, Britain has been a place where
newcomers have received care and warmth. Using the experiences
discussed in the interviews, I will consider what is meant by a ‘welcome’
in more depth: What is needed for someone to feel welcomed? What are
the roles of the state and individuals for providing warmth and care, to
make people feel welcome? One reason why newcomers to Britain may
not feel welcome is the nature of debates around immigration in Britain.
The fieldwork for this book took place at the same time as the 2010 elec-
tions, and this chapter will examine what the interviewees thought of
these debates, and how their responses to discussions of immigration are
filtered through their own experiences.

Celebrating citizenship

As was discussed in Chapter 5, the new citizens I spoke to come from

very different backgrounds and have taken different routes towards
citizenship. They also have varied and multiple reasons for applying
for citizenship. Thus, it is to be expected that their responses to the
 Welcome to Britain? 141

ceremony were also diverse. The majority of the interviewees liked the
ceremonies. Some said they would have preferred to not have to attend
one, but others appreciated the invitation, like Mya:

I think it is quite good because they welcome you as citizens and

then, like, it’s totally different if you got an envelope in the mail and
get this certificate. It’s something that you’re invited to and you are
welcome. So it’s a very good way.

Some expressed reservations about how meaningful the ceremony was,

or what it meant to them (although all the people with this perspective
also suggested that the ceremonies might have meant more to other
people taking part). Ghedi’s response is one example:

It was an attempt – I can understand a pledge, you know, a commit-

ment to something, I don’t know the parallel with marrying some-
body. I could see what it was meant to be, but I don’t know ... I went
there, I went through the motions. ... Yeah, it was formal; there was
someone from the mayor’s office who spoke a little bit to welcome
us a little bit but said a little bit about [the] diversity of Manchester,
a little bit on how Manchester’s a good place, but it didn’t give me
anything that I didn’t – I put this down to me being here so long, and
I know my way around. ... I don’t know what the difference is; it’s just
welcoming and making people at home. If that’s what it was, it didn’t
come across that well in the – it was slightly, you know, that you had
some official talking to you; it’s not enough. ... So there’s other – I’m
sure there’s other ways of doing it, you know.

Here we see Ghedi struggling to pinpoint exactly what the purpose of

the ceremony was and how it might achieve this. He understood the
nature of a pledge of citizenship and why that might be important, but
was not sure that this was achieved at the ceremony in which he took
part. Ghedi saw little point in being told about, or even welcomed to,
Manchester as a city, a place he had lived for a long time. This suggests
some of the awkwardness in giving a welcome to people who have in
fact already been residents for some time and, as we saw in Chapter 5,
already feel that they belong. This resistance to being seen as newcomers
was a view shared by others, as we shall see below.
For some, acquiring of citizenship is a cathartic moment which signi-
fies the end of a journey, which may have been filled with stress and
uncertainty. Gaining citizenship can bring a feeling of settling down
142 Making Citizens

and security. Parwiaz, a former asylum seeker, after an account of the

difficulties of coming to Britain and obtaining refugee status, concluded
that, ‘You know, I don’t like living in this trap, but eventually I got the
key to my happiness [citizenship]’. Habib, who had also come to Britain
as an asylum seeker, had a similarly emotional response to having
finally achieved citizenship. I met him for an interview the day after the
ceremony, and he explained, ‘I just [am] feeling so different today ... and
I sleep very nice last night.’ It is important not to underestimate the
sense of relief felt by some of those who gain British citizenship, particu-
larly those, such as asylum seekers, for whom routes to citizenship have
been very difficult. The introduction of ceremonies to mark the granting
of citizenship is likely to go some small way in marking that sense of
achievement and relief. For Habib, the ceremony had felt performative,
in that it had changed the way he felt. He explained that it was like
getting married:

When you say ‘yes’ to your wife, and then [she says it back] to you.
And it is just like something different from your heart and inside your
heart, and just so connected ... you know, you get married, you just
feel responsible for each other.

Perhaps, as a refugee, this sense that the state is taking ‘responsibility’ for
you is of particular significance to Habib. Others spoke about how they
had felt welcomed and called the ceremony ‘lovely’ or ‘sweet’. Several
people expressed relief that the ceremony had not been more difficult
or more intimidating. An understandable apprehension that some have
about the ceremony is that it might be another ‘test’ in the process.
Makena admitted:

I was nervous, but I was really trying to calm down ... Yeah. Because I
wasn’t expecting it to be so relaxed. I thought it would be something
like you had to be called in on your own. To make you say things on
your own, so I was like, oh no, but then they told me that they don’t
do that. That we just go in all together so that makes it better, like.
Makes you feel confident.

Responses to the ceremonies were in part shaped by the kind of the

building in which they took place. An attractive building could add
to the sense of occasion, whilst an unattractive one could detract
from it: ‘First of all, I think Hove Town Hall is rubbish,’ Rebecca said.
‘It’s just as ugly on the inside as it is on the outside. So it didn’t feel
 Welcome to Britain? 143

particularly grand.’ Hove Town Hall, which also houses the registrars’
office, is a large concrete structure built in the late 1960s. The lobby
in which citizands waited before going into the wood-lined chamber
was comfortable, but I noted in my field notes at the time: ‘grand
when it was built, less so now’. In contrast to Rebecca’s disappoint-
ment, Neela appreciated the experience of going to the very grand
Hillsborough Castle, where all the ceremonies for Northern Ireland are
held. Hillsborough Castle is a large eighteenth-century building that
is the official residence of the Queen in Northern Ireland and also the
residence of the secretary of state for Northern Ireland. Ceremonies
are held here because it was deemed too politically sensitive to require
local registrars in Northern Ireland to conduct them. Neela explained
how impressive the building was:

It was very grand. We didn’t, I didn’t think it would be that grand,

very grand – that’s what I was saying. My husband, he was like, ‘Why
are we walking through so many rooms?’ I thought, ‘This is the life,
with so many rooms!’ It was very grand, yeah, and it was arranged
very, arranged very nicely. I even liked the piano.

There also was appreciation for the warmth of some of the officials.
Melody said of the ceremony in Liverpool, ‘All of them were lovely
people. Like, they make you feel comfortable and were dead friendly to
us.’ For Melody, this was perhaps an advantage of the localness of the
ceremonies. As we saw in Chapter 5, Melody had a strong affiliation to
Liverpool, where she felt at home.
Those who criticised the ceremony often did so from a sense that
perhaps it wasn’t grand enough. When I asked Claire what she thought
of the ceremony she had been in the day before in Wandsworth,
London, she responded, ‘Honestly?’ She needed a prompt to go beyond
the politely positive response, but then she expressed her feelings:

CLAIRE: I think the intention is in the right place, but I found it quite
cheesy, quite patronising, and very amateurish.
BB: Okay. Which bits were cheesy?
CLAIRE: The music that was playing when people were going up to
meet the councillor and receive their certificate. That was not great.
The way that the MC, I don’t know what his name was, the MC
spoke. The registrar was patronising, I felt, too, particularly to people
who possibly didn’t understand English brilliantly ... I thought it was
very odd. I shouldn’t laugh because it is a very special ceremony for
144 Making Citizens

a lot of people. It was special for us, too; you know, we’ve been here
for nine years. It’s where we live. But it felt like you were boarding
the plane.

Claire also commented on how clear it was that children were not
welcome to the ceremony, with warnings from those organizing the
ceremonies as to how they should behave, but there had been no
discouragement from bringing children. By contrast, in other ceremo-
nies around the UK, children were particularly thanked for coming to
the ceremonies. While Neela appreciated the live pianist at Hillsborough
Castle’s ceremony, Claire listened to recorded classical music, perhaps
contributing to the idea that she was ‘boarding the plane’. Claire had
been looking for a sense of occasion, which was missing in her cere-
mony. She felt that the ceremony could have been ‘more real’ and ‘more
special’. She explained:

The mayor wasn’t engaging with the audience. He was looking at

what he was reading. My husband said it was basically what we would
imagine they pulled off in a small country town in Australia in terms
of its level of amateurishness.

Others, particularly those who had ceremonies in smaller towns, were

more positive about the event. Helen, who attended one in Bury, had a
very positive experience:

It was lovely, actually. I quite enjoyed it. It was very sweet. I remember
my Dad had his in Norwich, and it was much bigger – we went as
guests – but yes, it was lovely, because it wasn’t overdone. It was really
lovely. It was adequate. You don’t have to be standing up there and
doing long speeches on your own. I think everyone feels very intimi-
dated doing that. You know, just stating your name, just doing all
the oaths as a group. You know, it makes a lot of people feel more
comfortable.

Whilst Helen is positive about the ceremony, it is interesting that she

then shifts from describing it as ‘really lovely’ to ‘adequate’, reflecting
a level of ambivalence. For some, the lack of too much grandeur or
imposing size was a good thing. The ceremony in Cardiff had taken
place in the Mansion House, the official residence of the city’s mayor.
While this is a very impressive house built in the 1890s, it is still on a
domestic scale. As Khadija explained:
 Welcome to Britain? 145

I expected it to be grander ... you know, and a lot more people there,
in a big hall or something. Which would have been a bit more scary.
This way it was a bit more comfortable.

Given the range of different experiences that new citizens bring with
them (as discussed in Chapter 5), it is difficult to get the ceremony,
and the speeches in particular, right. This was recognised by Rebecca–
and the point is further illustrated by the fact that others criticised the
speeches for being too complicated:

It’s really hard, because they’re trying to cater for a very diverse, as
they say, audience – from people who’ve only just learned English,
all the way up to professional people who’ve been here for years. So I
appreciate that they’re not going to hit the spot with everybody. I get
that, but there’s no need to be patronising, I don’t think, and to be as
distant as they were.

However, for Claire, the issue of the personal pronoun, as discussed in

previous chapters, may serve to create a sense of distance: ‘You know it
was in the third person, not “you” but “they”’. Claire went on to point
out the part of the speech which stressed participation and the rights of
citizenship, which she particularly appreciated:

I think the best bit was left to the end, where the MC was saying
‘What does it mean to be a citizen?’ I’m not sure that he had to go
back to the Greek definition [of citizenship] however, to put it in
context, but what it now bestows upon people – I think that’s the bit
that could be [stressed].

Claire was not alone in wanting to be provided with more information

on what citizenship might mean and what it might be to be an active
citizen. Rebecca also was frustrated about the touristic information
given:

I’ve lived here for six years – I know all that. Why don’t you tell me
good stuff about how I can be a good citizen? What are the kinds of
behaviours you expect from me? What can I do to make Brighton a
better place? Don’t tell me that Brighton’s got a festival in summer
I know that. [ ... ] Yeah, really strange. And I kind of expected the
mayor to say more of that as well, should be, like, ‘How can you
people in this room be involved in making the city a better place and
146 Making Citizens

making Britain a better place?’ Tell me! I want to volunteer; I want to

do all that stuff.

Rebecca expresses a strong desire to participate. As was discussed in

Chapter 5, Rebecca was, like others, already engaged in ‘citizen acts’. (In
her case, she used Twitter to try to improve daily life in Brighton). The
ceremonies could perhaps do more to recognize these contributions. Some
ceremonies did manage to give information on citizenship and partici-
pation. Both Melody and Anuja attended a ceremony at Liverpool (also
discussed in Chapter 5) and were inspired by what they had been told
about citizenship and participation. The female local councillor speaking
at the ceremony had listed the possible ways people might participate
(for example, by becoming school governors, participating in volun-
tary organisations and community groups, or by standing for election).
Echoing the famous speech by John F. Kennedy, she stressed that it was
‘not just what the community can do for you, but what you can do for the
community.’ Both Melody and Anuja reflected positively on her speech:

MELODY: [after the ceremony] You look at things in a different point

of view. Like, for example, like I ... I always wanted to be involved,
like in a community, doing something that like, working maybe
with young people and stuff like that, but I’ve never felt like I was, I
could do that ... Never felt like I could be a part of that, because you
had to be, like, just – Well, like we, we just can’t do it. But the way
they was saying things on – on – in the ceremony, I thought, ‘Yeah,
I’ll go for it!” I’m just going to try decide what I can do.

ANUJA: I like, like politics. I like listening to stuff like that, so – and when
you do a talk ... it makes you see that you know people are open, like,
you’ve got rights, and you know you are open to stuff, like you can do
whatever you want to do ... So those words are quite like, quite like,
how can I say it? They were encouraging words at the same time they
were ... it was sort of like educational to me, like ... It was, like, they
were pushing you like to say, in a way, you can like being a British
citizen. You have to put something back. It’s not just about getting
a British citizenship ... And about being British but you, you can put
so much of your talent, your gifts and stuff – give it, give back to the
community. ... You never think that the community does need you.
Is – you know, because you think that, “Oh, no, British people – that’s
it. They can do it. But you sort of exclude yourself, but we shouldn’t
be, like, we should know that we are of the community.
 Welcome to Britain? 147

Here it is interesting that Anuja constructs a ‘we’, referring to the

new citizens themselves. This was a relatively rare use of the personal
pronoun which perhaps suggests the beginning of a sense of commu-
nity that she had not felt before. Anuja and Melody’s responses suggest
that at least some new citizens would appreciate a ceremony that
emphasises rights, participation and contribution more. And, as I will
discuss below, such an approach might be a more productive use of the
opportunity offered by the ceremonies than an emphasis on histories
of welcomes. The next section will discuss the new citizens’ responses
to taking the oath.

Taking the oath

During the interviews, I asked specifically how the new citizens felt about
having to make a pledge or oath of allegiance to the Queen. This ques-
tion was particularly motivated by the knowledge that, in the context
of the UK (unlike, for example the US, Canada or Australia), it is very
unusual for citizens to make such pledges of loyalty to the nation in
everyday life. Many British birthright citizens will never have made any
kind of statement of loyalty to nation or sovereign. However, in general,
the interviewees did not see any problem in making such a declaration,
which was taken as a requirement for becoming a citizen. According to
Rada, ‘I felt like I was, how do I put it? Oh, I don’t know how to put it,
but showing that I respect the laws of this country and do what I am
required to do’. Even those who did not really agree with the idea of the
monarchy or allegiance to the Queen still largely saw it as harmless, as
Rebecca explained:

In terms of swearing to the Queen, I find it a bit ... I think it’s kind
of ... Well, it’s a very British thing to do, so you know, it’s a funny
thing. I find it a bit weird in the sense that I’m not really pro-mon-
archy – sorry – I’m kind of atheist and anti, not anti-monarchy. I just,
it just seems dreadfully traditional.

Interestingly, for Rebecca, despite her reservations about the monarchy,

the most affecting part of the ceremony was the singing of the national
anthem – for which she had carefully prepared:

What I did really like and found quite moving, and it got a tear in my
eye – it was quite funny – which was singing God Save the Queen –
and I don’t know if you noticed, but I didn’t look at the words because
148 Making Citizens

I’d gone to the effort of learning the words to that – so I felt that was
quite special and that also it was like ‘Whoa, this is quite a big thing,
you know’.

Bernard, who had stressed political reasons for wanting to become

British (discussed in Chapter 5) was more confident than Rebecca in
putting himself firmly in the republican camp. Bernard explained that
he didn’t mind swearing the pledge of allegiance to the Queen as he saw
that as the terms of entry to citizenship. On the other hand, now he was
a British citizen, he also felt it was his right to oppose the institution of
the monarchy if he wanted to. In contrast, Claire was a republican in
Australia but felt that she would ‘keep’ the Queen in Britain.
The White Paper which introduced the idea of citizenship ceremo-
nies in the UK argued that the oath of allegiance to the Queen and
the citizenship pledge would be at the ‘heart of the ceremony’ (Home
Office 2002: 34). Given the stated importance of the oath and pledge,3 it
was interesting that quite a few of the respondents were confused either
about which version they had taken, or perhaps more importantly, felt
that they had been put in the wrong group (either that they wanted to
say the religious version, but had been put in the other group, or visa
versa):

I was quite surprised when I saw God on mine and then I listened
really intently to hear what the next lot said, and theirs didn’t have
God, and I thought that was definitely supposed to be me in the red
group, and then I thought, ‘Oh. Okay, it doesn’t matter.

In a similar way, Helen explained:

When I booked my place, shall we say, in this ceremony, they did

not ask me whether I wanted to make an oath or any pledges, but I
am absolutely Christian. I would not have had a problem in making
an oath. However, I was put straight away in the other room by the
court ... They did not ask me when I gave them a call. But, quite
frankly, I’m not bothered either way because I can understand that if
they forget to ask you or you forget, sorry, or if you forget to mention,
they will have to assume that you, by default, they will have to assume
that you don’t want to make an oath.

The new citizens had generally been asked on the phone which form
of pledge they would like to take at the ceremony, and it’s not clear
 Welcome to Britain? 149

whether the mix-ups on this question were the result of misunderstand-

ings or a reflection of reluctance to broach the issue on the part of regis-
trars, as Helen suggests.
This section has explored what the new citizens thought of the cere-
mony, showing that there was variation in their responses. Most thought
that the idea of a ceremony in itself was not bad – although some would
have preferred to have the choice not to attend. Some of the interviewees
valued the warmth of the welcome they felt that the registrars gave.
They also appreciated the small gifts (such as paperweights of the city
and free photos) which they were given. There was a general desire for
a ceremony which was formal, in a nice setting, but not intimidatingly
grand. However, in terms of the content of the ceremonies, they would
have appreciated speeches which addressed them more directly as citi-
zens who could participate (or continue to participate) in the commu-
nity in a variety of ways. The next section will consider whether the
interviewees had, in their experience prior to the ceremonies, felt that
Britain was welcoming to newcomers.

Welcome to Britain?

As discussed in Chapter 4, one of the consistent narratives coming from

the citizenship ceremonies themselves is that of Britain as a country
with a history of welcoming strangers and newcomers. Designed to
welcome the soon-to-be new citizens, a key feature of each ceremony
is the ‘local welcome’ that should be given by an area representative
or dignitary. The speeches often not only enacted a welcome, but also
claimed that Britain, or the local area, had a long history of welcoming
outsiders. In response to the claims of welcome given in the ceremo-
nies, I asked the interviewees whether they had indeed felt welcome
when they came to Britain, and whether they considered Britain to
be a welcoming place in general. It is striking that, despite having
just been at the ceremonies which they generally enjoyed, very few
of the interviewees felt that they had been welcomed to Britain or
that Britain was a welcoming place. The general feeling of a lack of
welcome in Britain among the respondents, in contrast to the claims
to a history of welcome in the speeches, raises the question, What does
a welcome mean? What kind of response to strangers or foreigners
constitutes a welcome? This section will consider how welcoming
should be understood, considering whether it is merely an absence of
hostility and gradual acceptance, or if it requires a more positive and
engaged stance.
150 Making Citizens

In contrast to the more common reservations about Britain as a

welcoming place among those I spoke to, Adriana from Spain was very
positive in her reflections on the welcome offered in Britain, particularly
in comparison to Spain. Adriana called herself an ‘Anglophile’ and had
applied for citizenship even though, as an EU citizen, it changed few of
her rights:

I wish people in Spain were like here. We are more racist than you
are here. [ ... ], but I am sure that if it were the other way ’round, if I
went to Spain being British, I would not be as welcome as I felt when
I came here.

However, even Adriana reflected that, although she knew a lot of people,
more meaningful relationships were harder to make: ‘I’ve always had
people to have coffee with, but friends, proper friends. They are still in
Spain.’ Adriana put this down to a life-course effect, where your ‘proper’
friends are made in your twenties, rather than later in life.
For those interviewees who were not from Europe, an early experi-
ence in coming to Britain was shaped by the need to navigate the
immigration regime and the technologies designed for the regulation
and control of migration. For many of the interviewees, the process of
gaining visas to live and work in Britain was stressful and difficult. It
required providing documentation of identity, employment, income,
travel history and qualifications that could stand up to state scrutiny.
There was also the prospect of intense examination of personal life,
including marriage, family and relationships. This was particularly the
case for asylum seekers, but many shared it. Clare, from Australia, had
come to Britain on a secondment within a large multinational organi-
sation. Even within this ‘elite’ route, she had experienced stress in the
process, particularly at the stage of applying for permanent residence
and being called to an interview:

CLARE: I was kind of lucky with the earlier ones [visas] because work
did that for me. So I don’t know how difficult that was. Indefinite
leave to remain was hard, just in terms of getting all your docu-
ments together, and it was a grilling in terms of the questions that
you got.
BB: Did you have to go to an interview?
CLARE: Yes. And I went to the Home Office in Croydon, but I always
find those things quite nerve-racking anyway. [ ... ] It was quite an
intense interview. It went for about half an hour. [ ... ] I probably
 Welcome to Britain? 151

have the wrong attitude, but from day one, I’ve worked, I pay tax,
I’ve contributed. I do things for charity and all that kind of stuff,
and I guess they’ve got to do their homework as well, but it was kind
of like: ‘I’m a fully contributing member of society!’

Even this relatively privileged applicant felt tense about what she
described as a ‘grilling’ by the Home Office. Here we have a sense of what
it feels like to meet the scrutiny of the state in a border-like situation of
applying for a visa. There is a clash of values between the state and the
applicant, as Clare feels her ‘contribution’ has been overlooked. She was
certainly not alone in her discomfort and nervousness when dealing
with the Home Office; many of the interviewees suggested, in different
ways, that they had been made to feel illegitimate when applying to
enter Britain. As Helen explained:

It’s quite a stressful thing to go through to Croydon and get all these
things and documents. That’s stressful. You get there early, and you
feel like you’re having your case prodded, and it’s such a horrible
building in Croydon.

Again we see the emotional effects that buildings can have, as well as
how invasive it can feel to ‘have your case prodded’. Jacques Derrida
considers this question: what is the duty of hospitality to the stranger or
foreigner. The question of ambivalence and qualifications of hospitality
have been raised by theorists since Kant (Benhabib 2004). For Derrida,
hospitality tends to be offered not as an absolute, but with conditions
and limits. One condition is that the stranger is offered hospitality ‘as
a family’ – as an identified person with a family name. But how does
the stranger become known in this way? For Derrida, ‘the question of
the foreigner is the question of the question’ (Derrida 2000: 29). Can
the host demand of the foreigner that he gives his/her name? Derrida
suggests that asking someone’s name can be a loving concern to address
the person as an individual. But I would suggest that it might also be an
interrogation, a demand to stand as a subject before the law. It can feel
like a failure to welcome. As Helen explained:

I can tell you what’s not very welcoming is the attitude that faces
you every time you come into the country on a South African pass-
port with the ancestry visas: “What are you doing here?” You know,
“Where do you work?” “How long have you lived here for?” “How
did you get your visa?” So that’s not very nice ... It’s just rudeness,
152 Making Citizens

really, and I can understand it in one way – they process so many

people, and so many people have just taken their chances. But as
a first thing coming in, it’s not very nice is it? Britain welcoming?
I don’t know if I can answer that question. I think I need to think
about that a bit.

Going through the visa process requires not only that applicants answer
the question, ‘What is your name?’ but also that they prove it before
the law. As Makena (who had come to Britain from Kenya to work as a
nurse) explained, this could require a range of documents and proof –
such as birth certificates and qualifications – that were not always readily
available:

It was difficult. I think it is difficult. Sometimes they ask for informa-

tion that – we do things differently at home, and some things that
they ask for is not as easy ... the culture is different.

For some, the experience of applying for visas, permanent residency and
citizenship brought in a level of scrutiny and was accompanied by a
culture of disbelief that they found distressing. Two male interviewees
(one from Afghanistan and one from Pakistan) had to have DNA testing
to prove that they were the fathers of their children, when applying for
visas to allow their families to join them. Madhu, arriving from India
for the first time, was held at the airport and was required to undergo
an X-ray, as she was told she did not have the necessary health certifi-
cates. The spouses of British citizens who applied for visas also felt like
they had been under the spotlight, and at times, faced with very blunt
questioning where there was an assumption of dishonesty. As Mem, a
Kurdish man from Turkey, explained, ‘The visa director was not believing
we were married. I had to talk to him for half an hour. He said, “I [do]
not believe you are married.”’ This could also be upsetting for the British
citizen who is subject to a similar scrutiny when their spouse applies for
a visa, as Rada from Bulgaria explained:

RADA: I remember the first time I applied. They sent us a few times
letters, and me and my husband were a little bit upset. We found it
quite rude because the way they were treating me. You read between
the lines that [they think] I married to get the passport. And I think
that was the one of the reasons that put me off [applying for citizen-
ship] actually.
BB: To show that?
 Welcome to Britain? 153

RADA: Not to show – but just like – maybe a lot of other people do it,
but for us it was really because we wanted to have a family. I know
they read in the paper, but they can’t put everybody under one sign
in everything. They put everybody the same marker. She’s married
to him; obviously they want the visa. Suddenly, it’s a little bit ... it’s
a little bit, not silly – but too mean. [ ... ] Yes, they asked for proof
of the money. Who is going to support me, even in that moment
I was studying. I worked as an audit adviser, a really strong career.
They were so mean about me, and that moment I even made more
money than my husband. That is something that they should be
careful when they treat people. Because maybe, you know, maybe
50%–70% do this as a business, but they are not the 30%. They like
to have a quality life, quality relationship and I believe there are
people like this. And probably that was one thing that did not make
me to rush about the passport stuff.

Thus, migrants feel not only the power of official scrutiny, but also the
ways in which they are positioned as suspect in wider discourses and the
media, where life choices are interpreted as fitting in a narrow schema
of suspicion and hostility. The effort is then to prove that one is not the
‘wrong’ kind of immigrant. Rada also expressed a reclaiming of agency
based on a refusal to act in ways that would be expected – that she
would rush to become a British citizen as soon as it was possible.
Even when the interviewees did say that they had felt welcomed in
Britain, there was often a lingering sense of a caveat. Hamed, a young
man from Iran who had come to Britain as a child, appeared to want to
give a positive account, but he hedged his response, delicately treading
around the attitudes or actions of ‘a certain group of people’:

BB: And so, the ceremony is a lot about, kind of welcoming. Has
that been your experience generally in Britain – that you found it a
welcoming place when you first came?
HAMED: Yes, certainly. I do believe that English people are very
welcoming and non-judgemental. Obviously, you get other people,
you know a certain group of people, but overall my experience
has been absolutely fantastic. I haven’t encountered any major
problems.

Hamed wants to say that he has found English people to be ‘welcoming

and non-judgemental’, but his references to ‘a certain group of people’
suggests that this account has to be squared with the existence of groups
154 Making Citizens

and individuals who are hostile to immigration. He appears not to want

to present himself as a victim of racism, but there remains some equivoca-
tion in the assertion that he hasn’t encountered ‘major’ problems, which
would suggest that he has suffered from ‘minor’ problems. As I argued in
Chapter 5, this history of both racism and a wider politics of anti-immi-
gration was never acknowledged in the citizenship ceremonies.
For most of the interviewees, responses to the question about whether
they considered Britain to be a welcoming country fell into two different
kinds of accounts. On the one hand, there were direct accounts of racist
attacks, insults and feelings of insecurity. Other accounts, often given by
white respondents, were not of such bleak experiences, but contained
general sense that British culture does not ‘do’ welcome very well or
very warmly. Sonia, originally from Jamaica, gave a response which
was a combination of these two accounts. She began by suggesting that
cultural practices in Britain mean that people ‘stick to themselves’ but
went on to describe a more explicitly racist response which she assumes
is underlying others’ reactions to her. She is also interesting in the way
that she positions this account in direct opposition to some of the claims
made in the ceremony she had been to the day before (‘that was the bit
I didn’t get’):

SONIA: They’re not very welcoming people no, that was the bit I
didn’t get. [Laughs.] Oh, they welcome you to Britain, but it’s not
that way. You’ve got different cultural people living in Britain, 99%
of them stick to their self. They might try to say hello, but that’s
about it. They’re not going to come and sit and have a cup of tea
and find out how you are. If they see you fall down out there, they’ll
walk past you.
BB: So, what would it be – if it was better at welcoming, what would
it be? People would be more friendly and ... ?
SONIA: I think, yes, because sometimes you go out, and you got lost
or something and say, “Excuse me, do you know where such?” “No,
no, no”, or they totally blank you. They’re just not friendly. If you
see a neighbour carrying something, they need a bit of help with
something, it’s, “Oh, would you like some help?” They think you’re
going to flipping rob them. So, they’re like, “Oh, no, no, no! I’m
fine, thank you”, and you’re thinking, “Alright then, struggle. You
can drop over if you want then.” So, they’ve just got an attitude,
or you think sometimes because you’re one colour – or some think
you’re scum. You’re just not good enough.
 Welcome to Britain? 155

Here, the scrutiny and distrust which others feel directed at them
at the border, or when applying for a visa is also felt on the street,
where racialised difference becomes a feature of the encounter.
Several of the interviewees had direct experience of racism and racist
abuse which provided a counternarrative to the idea of Britain as a
welcoming nation. Across the interviews, a picture is painted of a
complex geography of prejudice, acceptance and belonging which
has to be navigated in order to avoid the most brutal forms of racism
and to find places of comfort. As Makena from Kenya explained, it
is not possible to make sweeping references to welcomes (as in many
welcome speeches) or hostility. She also suggested the need to under-
stand ‘welcome’ in its cultural context (perhaps because the culture
in Britain is not generally as welcoming as what would be normal in
Kenya):

It’s different – because I come from a different culture, people of

different cultures. No, it depends. It depends on the people that you
come along with, for some people are not welcoming, but some are
really welcoming here, you know.

Living in Britain for extended periods meant that many new citizens had
not only got used to the particular context of Britain, but they had also
gathered experience negotiating the racialised geographies of Britain.
Ghedi, who came from Somalia with his family when he was a child,
remembers:

GHEDI: When I was young, I can remember us having a lot of prob-

lems and windows being broken [ ... ] But after we lived there for
three or four years, you know, you’d get on with it, you know? I
mean some of the guys that later on moved into the area with us,
one of them was hospitalised because they were hitting him in the
back of the head.
[ ... ]
BB: So not very welcoming, then?
GHEDI: No, not where I lived. I mean, it depends on where you are.

One of the practical competencies you have to acquire as a migrant to

Britain if you come from a visible minority4 is to learn in which spaces
you are more likely to be a recipient of racism and to avoid them. Simone
156 Making Citizens

from Liberia, who had lived in Britain for 25 years, explained that she
probably doesn’t experience much outright hostility now because:

it depends on where you will be. I don’t think I put myself in the
places where I am going to seen for someone to be hostile [to] or
whatever. So, it’s there. It’s indirect. I think you have to be in an area
where you are comfortable.

The welcome speeches in the ceremonies have a tendency to hail the new
citizens as ‘newcomers’ to Britain. They fail to acknowledge either the
citizands’ potential experiences of racism, or their knowledge of British
society. Given this already acquired knowledge, the model of a welcome
(as given by hosts to strangers) is a potentially awkward element of the
ceremony. The nature of racialised experience in Britain suggests that
many citizands have a level of understanding of Britain which may not
be shared (or may be ignored) by the hosts who welcome them. Accounts
of verbal abuse and physical attacks – such as stones thrown through
windows – were depressingly common. But equally common was a sense
that (perhaps particularly in the context of an interview just after a citi-
zenship ceremony) the interviewees did not want to dwell on these expe-
riences. There was sometimes a suggestion that these incidents belonged
to the past, although this might also be because narratives of racism in
the interviews often arose in response to a question which asked whether
they had felt welcome when they first came to Britain, sometimes with
an explicit mention of the welcomes suggested in the ceremony. In any
case, in no interview was there a desire to dramatise or even particularly
elaborate on these experiences. Rather, there was an attempt to minimise
the impact of the racist incidents. The interviewees may not have wanted
to put themselves in the position of the victim of the narrative. Bethan
Harries argues that, in contexts where multiculturalism is celebrated and
discussions of race are avoided, it becomes very difficult for people to
talk about racism without, paradoxically, seeming racist (Harries 2014).
Prakash who, as we saw in Chapter 5, felt that he was already a citizen
in Northern Ireland, uses the moment of talking about racism to firmly
place himself within the community rather than as a newcomer:

Some people have thrown stones at my windows a couple of times.

And calling names and all. My wife used to go to the hospital, and
people were ... even in the hospital, people coming and [saying]: ‘I
don’t want this black nurse’. [ ... ] No, that is there. But we can’t get
everything right, no? We can’t teach everybody the right things, no?
 Welcome to Britain? 157

Prakash’s use of ‘we’ is interesting. It stands in marked contrast with

Adriana’s use of ‘you’ in her comparison of Britain with Spain above,
and indeed Sonia’s use of ‘they’. Sonia is perhaps trying to ensure that I
(as a British person) don’t feel accused in her account, whilst Prakash’s
‘we’ makes a claim to citizenship and community participation which
predates the obtaining of citizenship, in what might be seen as a ‘citizen
act’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008). Prakash here makes use of a well-under-
stood narrative of ignorance as underlying racism. Simone shares this
narrative, although she also adds a sense of Britain as an island:

I know it sometimes seems to me that it’s because it’s an island. It’s

insecurity. I mean for those who haven’t travelled I will say there will
be some ... But usually when I meet people at work that travel a lot,
you know, that [travel] all over the world, it is very entrusting to be
with them because they have seen the world. [They know] that the
world is not just running down to Scotland or going onto France. It’s
far bigger than that.

Here the familiar ‘island nation’ narrative about Britain is given a twist,
as what is often posited as a strength is seen by Simone as a source of
vulnerability. She also turns around the idea of the newcomer migrant.
In her account, it is the native, unmoving British who are ignorant and
need education, as opposed to those who have travelled around the
world and lived in different countries and perhaps developed cosmo-
politan competencies.
Hostility to difference was not just experienced around racialised
difference. It was also motivated by religious suspicion and intoler-
ance. Habib, who had come from Iran, told me that he intended to
change his name from a recognisably Muslim name as he felt this was
hampering his search for a better job. Without this, and the additional
stigma of being a refugee, he hoped to get better work. In a similar way,
Parwaiz, from Afghanistan, who worked as a taxi driver, also hoped
that by becoming British, he would be able to avoid hostile questioning
about Afghanistan from his clients. These responses show the ongoing
influence of Islamophobia in the UK context where individuals may be
discriminated against by virtue of their association with Islam and with
countries regarded as extremist (Kundnani 2014).
As mentioned above, accounts of overt racism and hostility were one
kind of response to the question of whether Britain was (or had been)
a welcoming country. Given the nature of the racialised experience of
living in Britain, these were more often present in the interviews of those
158 Making Citizens

who were racialised as non-white. However, white respondents occa-

sionally showed awareness of racism in Britain. In addition, even those
of the interviewees who were white, and had not experienced aggressive
racism, were not able to say that they found Britain a welcoming place
to come to as a newcomer. Britain had a general cultural style which
some felt lacked warmth and openness in contrast to their experience in
other countries, as Rada explained:

BB: When you first arrived, did you find it welcoming or easy to
settle in?
RADA: You see, they try to be respectful. For welcome, I’m coming
from a country, Bulgaria, really, really warm and welcoming. I
found these people quite reserved personally. I didn’t find them
welcoming. I think they were keeping a distance until they – which
is fair enough, you’re a foreigner. [ ... .] In Spain – my parents live
in Spain – they are much more ... they communicated, invited you
to their house, different. Everything is plus and minus. Maybe that
was a polite way to behave themselves, you know.

Clare says that ‘it isn’t kind of the culture’ to be welcoming in Britain.
This question of welcome and friendliness raises further questions about
what it might entail to be hospitable. It also suggests how the question
of hospitality has a larger remit than the actions of the nation state.
Many of the interviewees felt that British people do not show welcome
or hospitality – as opposed to actually being hostile to the arrival of
outsiders. Philosophical debates about the universal right to hospitality,
especially with regard to those seeking asylum, tend to focus on the
question of whether this right should be qualified (depending on its
effect on the well-being of community) and limited (depending on some
kind of judgement as to the worth of the potential guest) or unlim-
ited (Derrida 2000; Benhabib 2004; Darling 2009). One way that hospi-
tality is often offered, but only conditionally, is in the assessment of
which foreigners are worthy of a hospitable response. The state holds
the power to make that decision (Darling 2009). For Derrida, the aim
should be that of unconditional hospitality, even though it may never
be achieved. But it may also be that a ‘welcome’ is constituted by more
than decisions at the border or visa office, and requires other expres-
sions of care to feel real (Pannett 2011).
Two of the interviewees who felt most supported and welcomed in
Britain were those who had received care. Margaret (Lorraine) Pannett
argues that care for asylum seekers by professionals also involves
 Welcome to Britain? 159

recognition – acknowledgement of the complexity and humanity of

individuals, as well as a commitment to social justice (Pannett 2011:
56). Melody, who had arrived in Britain as an unaccompanied teenager
with no close family, felt she had been well treated by social workers.
Although the trauma of her childhood still lived with her in a way she
found difficult to communicate, especially to friends, she also had found
people who were prepared to give her care:

I like the UK. I’ve made so much like friends, family like. To me, one
of my best friends – her mum’s like my mum in a way because she’s
treating me like a daughter. [ ... ] obviously she’s, she’s from here, but
they just treat me like a daughter, and I feel just like one of them [ ... ].
Anything that could happen, I’d go to her.

Similarly, Madhu, by virtue of having a baby in Britain and being identi-

fied as vulnerable, found that she received recognition and care:

When I was in Watford, I had a Home Start volunteer to come and

help me once a week. She has become more of my friend, my friend
now. Because I didn’t have anybody – I’d just moved there and I
didn’t know anybody in Watford, so this lady used to come once a
week and she – we didn’t do anything initially, she used to just come
have a cup of tea with me, we’d chat, she’d play with the baby and
go back. But anyway, eventually we started going out. You know, we
went for lunch, go to the park, and you know, we used to do a lot of
things.

These examples show that recognition and care may come from
public sector employees offering services. But they also highlight the
importance of individual personal warmth and care in that engage-
ment, and may possibly be ‘lucky’ exceptions rather than the rule.
An important context of the giving of welcome, recognition, care
and justice is the nature of public debates which surround immigra-
tion. The construction of immigrants as a drain on the welfare state
and the proposed restriction of the provision of welfare services to
some immigrants can only limit the ‘welcome’ provided by Britain
to newcomers. The following section will examine both the new citi-
zens’ awareness of debates about immigration and their views on it. It
will show that the new citizens were very aware of political hostility
to immigration, and that they reflect on this through the lens of their
own experience.
160 Making Citizens

Public politics and immigration

Political discussion around immigration was particularly heated

during the time of the fieldwork, partly because it coincided with
party campaigns in the run up to the general election in May 2010.
Immigration dominated the news agenda for some time because of an
exchange on the campaign trail between the Labour Prime Minister,
Gordon Brown (campaigning for re-election), and a member of the
public, Gillian Duffy. Duffy had posed a question to the prime minister
about immigration, and Brown’s disparaging comments afterwards
about this exchange were caught on a microphone (which he was not
aware was on). This moment was seen by some commentators as a key
turning point in the election, which Labour went on to lose. As this was
in the middle of my fieldwork, I decided to add a question which asked
the interviewees directly whether they had followed any of the discus-
sions about immigration and what they thought of them.
Almost all of the interviewees whom I asked about media coverage
of immigration did have an awareness of the debates, and many were
clearly following them closely. As Clare explained, ‘It was quite funny.
We’re not interested in Australian politics [but] we really follow it here.’
This is an example of how experiencing migration may bring with it
increased participation and interest in citizenship practices. The experi-
ence of moving from one country to another, and of having to negotiate
rules and regulations that control mobility may make individuals more
aware of the importance of politics and policy. The interviewees had
particular life experiences to bring to the discussion. Melody, who had
come to Britain as a lone child asylum seeker from Zimbabwe, explained
that she thought there did need to be more controls on immigration
because ‘there’s only so much you can accommodate as in, like a nation
and stuff.’ However, at the same time, this was something she struggled to
totally make up her mind about, particularly given her own experience:

It’s upsetting because I know that there will maybe be a young person
like me who will be wanting to [seek asylum] you know? And obvi-
ously she might not get what I’ve got, because of things, the way
things – the way things are changing. But if it’s best for the country,
then it’s best for the country. There’s nothing else ... you can do.

Melody conveys the sense of being caught between the prevalent

construction of immigration as a threat to the nation, and her own
 Welcome to Britain? 161

experience of why asylum, in particular, might be important. She

illustrates the strength of the anti-asylum discourses which seem to
make it impossible for her to construct an alternative argument (Tyler
2006). Some of the interviewees did produce counterarguments to anti-
immigration discourses. Hamed, who had come from Iran as a child and
had grown up in Britain, explicitly made reference to his own experi-
ence. Whilst beginning with a strong ‘no-borders’ argument, he then
felt the need to introduce some equivocation, returning to a discourse
of immigration control and the demand that immigration should be
economically productive:

Well, it’s hard not to be biased, I guess, so I would probably be in

favour of immigration because, I mean, my personal view is there are
no borders. There shouldn’t be any borders. But then again, I think it
is only fair for some people to be against unnecessary and unproduc-
tive immigration. I think that’s fair.

The question left by this argument is for whom must immigration be

‘necessary’ and ‘productive’? For the state? For those already in the
country? For those who wish to enter? Are migrants only of value if
they can be constructed as ‘assets’ to the nation state (Marfleet 2006)? It
also raises the important question of who gets to make that assessment
of need and worth. Ghedi, who had also been in Britain since he was a
child, argued that:

Most of the immigration comes in from the EU. It’s the politicians
using it as a kind of, you know, something to show the poor man
on the floor, you know, saying, yeah, they’re coming in, and we’re
going to do something about it instead of giving any jobs [ ... ] it’s
been becoming kind of a bit stronger and stronger and stronger lately
but [ ... ] it’s in the society; the people are always afraid of immigrants
coming in. [ ... ] the hostility, it’s always there.

Ghedi indicates that anti-immigration sentiments are increasing in

strength, although he sees them as always having been present. Here we
see an alternative account to that of racism produced merely through
ignorance, but also produced through political manipulation. Ghedi
provides an account of the political context which gives an alternative
explanation to why these debates around immigration are heated, or
even overheated, by politicians – as a distraction from other issues around
162 Making Citizens

inequality and class. Clare stressed the importance of distinguishing

between EU and other immigration:

I think to a large extent it was a red herring because most of the

problem – ‘problem’ – here I think is generated from European immi-
gration. So like people coming in from Poland and they are the people
seen to be taking people’s jobs and putting a strain on the benefit
system and that kind of stuff. And all the pledges around the election
had nothing to do, or very little to do, with the EU.

Clare also spoke about her work colleagues and their hostile attitudes to
immigration. Clare felt sure that they were not thinking of her (a white
middle-class woman from Australia) as a migrant. She described what she
assumed was the imagined figure shaping their responses as ‘Muslims
that migrate to a country and then have 12 children on benefit. You
know – that kind of thing.’ Thus Clare, like some of the other inter-
viewees, shows an understanding of the racialised and Islamophobic
dimensions of the political debates around immigration in the UK.
Prakash, who lives in Northern Ireland, gave an interesting account of
ethnic minorities living ‘crushed between both sides and in the middle
of this [sectarian conflict]’. He described the hostility that ethnic minor-
ities suffered in Northern Ireland and put it down at least in part to an
ignorance of history. He made the case that understanding the localised
history of the town in which he lived would give a different frame to
views on migration:

We can’t blame them because they have had bad memories in their
past, bad past memories ... because of all this type of sectarian trouble
and all, so they don’t trust anybody, no matter what. And if you go
back to history, they should do that because most of the people in
Northern Ireland came from different parts of England [ ... ] people
should know the past. We have to teach the younger generation the
past. In 1700, what was the population in this county? Do you know
that? Only 700 people in Lisburn [ ... ]. So it’s all migration [ ... ] people
are moving around. People are moving around.

Again, Prakash takes on fully his role as part of the community by

asserting the responsibility to teach the past to the ‘younger genera-
tion’. Teaching, Prakash suggests, will involve historically reframing
understandings of history in a way which is not presented in the citizen-
ship ceremony of Northern Ireland. Interestingly, Amna made a similar
 Welcome to Britain? 163

point about understanding immigration in its longer historical context,

as a defence against the hostility of others. But in her case, the knowl-
edge came not from a localised understanding of history, as explained
by Prakash above. Rather, it was a conclusion she drew from learning
the historical accounts of immigration in preparation for the citizenship
test. Amna explained that, despite her initial reluctance to learn for the
test, she appreciated the new way it had given her of seeing her own
place in Britain:

I realised that this [revising for the test] helps me feel more like –
when I understand that when – back to the forties when people are
invited in England after Second World War, all those things, and they
helped Britain to build in different ways. [ ... ] then I will never feel
that I am someone from a different country or somewhere outside.
But there are a few peoples who I can sense that they feel we’re not
supposed to live here. Knowing all those information from that book,
I feel that I’m not here without any reason because they have invited
us from previous [ ... ]Yes, long history, that’s what we have.

These counterclaims against an anti-immigration and anti-immigrant

political climate are interesting because of the ways they draw on a
different understanding of which immigrants are being targeted by the
anti-immigration lobbies: racialised minorities, rather than the ‘white’
EU migrants. The interviewees also reframe the history of immigration
and their own position in it. In some cases, these arguments, perhaps
especially on the re-telling of history, can reshape understandings of
citizenship and the place of immigrants in Britain. In Amna’s account,
above, and similarly in Anuja’s comments discussed earlier, there is also
a creation of a ‘we’ – a community of immigrants to Britain over time:
‘long history, that’s what we have’. Amna makes the long history of
immigration to Britain integral to its ‘building’, in a way that few of the
welcome speeches at the ceremonies in the UK managed to capture.
These accounts reposition immigrants as an essential part of the nation
or society and central to building it. This is clear in Anuja’s response to
the question of immigration. She had clearly been following the elec-
tion campaign closely (‘the latest incident with Gordon Brown with
Sarah (sic) Duffy, that was quite amusing really’) and had a nuanced
response to the issue of immigration:

But I know, it’s a real grey area, isn’t it, the subject of immigra-
tion and – because you think about, there are pros and cons to it
164 Making Citizens

as well. Yeah, you do have a lot of foreign nationals coming to the

UK, working there, but they’re also building the economy. They are
helping the country. [ ... ] The economy is building, and the salaries
will be better, and the company develops, but it’s one of those things,
really. And then if you say well, let’s move all the foreign nationals
out, but then that would probably cause a detriment to the prosperity
of the country, I suppose.

Anuja then went on to say that ‘I’m investing in myself through the –
by educating myself, by furthering education.’ Here we begin to see
the claims about participation and involvement which might be taken
as a reframing of understandings of citizenship, as was suggested in
Chapter 5.
There were other interviewees who had a clearer anti-immigration
position, or at least who found these arguments persuasive. However,
this required them to reconcile their own positions within Britain as
immigrants. In order to do this, there was the construction of other
migrants who were less worthy to become citizens of Britain, through
the creation of a division between the desirable or deserving immigrant
and the unwanted immigrant. In creating these narratives, they are of
course drawing on well-established discourses within the British public
culture of deserving and undeserving asylum seekers and desirable and
undesirable migrants (McGhee 2005). These narratives are what Derrida
would regard as a failure of hospitality (Derrida 2000; Darling 2009).
They result from a failure to recognise the Other as those who merit a
welcome. The accounts also draw on the kind of argument put forward
by Anuja, about the contribution that migrants should make to a society.
The risk of this argument is that it leaves open the door to argue that
those who are not seen to be making a contribution should be excluded.
This is particularly difficult for refugees who are locked out of the labour
force, sometime for several years, while they await a decision on their
claims for asylum. The discourse of ‘contribution’ tends to make no
reference to those who could be understood to have a ‘right’ to asylum
and refuge (Tyler 2006). Key terms within this narrative, which cropped
up in some of the interviews are of ‘contribution’, ‘deserving’, ‘fair’,
‘legal’ and ‘tax-paying’. All of these terms have their (usually silenced)
opposite terms which fit into an easily understood binary of good and
bad. These opposites would be: ‘wasteful’ or ‘draining on resources’,
‘undeserving’, ‘unfair’, ‘illegal’. It is possible to track these concepts
in debates within the media about illegal migrants and ‘bogus asylum
seekers’ who act as a drain on resources, particularly housing, education
 Welcome to Britain? 165

and health(Tyler 2006). An important opposition in this representa-

tion is set up between the industrious (and preferably skilled) migrant,
constructed as an ‘asset’ who makes an important economic ‘contribu-
tion’ and the (too large) asylum seeker family who are conceived of only
as a drain on resources.
Mya had come to Britain from Burma to complete her medical educa-
tion and to work as a doctor. She was also clear that there was a distinc-
tion between people like herself, who make a contribution, and other
immigrants who do not:

I feel there are many immigrants in this country – some are not giving
contribution to society. Since I come to the UK, I give contribution,
all my skills and all my expertise to the community. Some people and
they come in with big family – only one giving contribution. There
are other people that don’t give any contribution.

Neela, who had come from India to join her husband, who worked for
a large multinational engineering company, said that she followed the
debates about immigration ‘religiously’ and went on to explain:

NEELA: I think, yeah, some things are wrong, and some things are
right. Yes you should, you should make immigration more, more
strict, you should make immigration more strict. People who don’t
have any status to live in the country should not be allowed to live
in the country [ ... ] that’s the only way I think Britain can survive
[ ... ] I mean, after some, if, if your immigration population increases
beyond a certain control of a limit then, then they will tend to rule
over, I wouldn’t say rule over the locals but then every, everybody
brings in his or her bad qualities, so you wouldn’t want to have bad
qualities.
BB: Really? Do you feel you’re bringing in bad qualities?
NEELA: Not me as an individual, but somebody who’s staying here
without, like, like say somebody who comes from, somebody who
doesn’t know English who, so Britain is giving him the opportu-
nity to talk to somebody who doesn’t know English. That is wrong,
Britain should say. No, you should know English because English is
your language.

There was clearly an element of classed discourse in Neela’s account, as

she distinguished herself (taught in English-medium schools in India)
from other immigrants who didn’t know English. She is picking up on a
166 Making Citizens

range of anxieties around immigration and spoken English (Alexander,

Edwards et al. 2007). Neela went on to elaborate further on her image of
the ‘bad’ immigrant, which picks up on familiar discourses of dirt and
the Other (see McClintock 1995). Her account also suggests religious
suspicion:

There’s still, but there are still so many people who don’t – I don’t
know, who don’t really deserve to be here because they’re making the
country more dirty physically and because when I, (this was 4 years
ago me and my husband, we went to London) and we went to an
area by mistake, it was full of, I don’t know it was full of Muslims,
and the lady brought dirt from her house and threw it on the street.
You would be shocked to see that in a place like London, wouldn’t
you, I mean.

Despite her strong feelings about the question of immigration (it was a
part of the interview where she produced the longest responses to ques-
tions), there appears to be quite a lot of confusion about the different
status of immigrants, and asylum seekers in particular. Her response
to asylum seekers could be understood as an example of the changing
meaning that this term now carries in British public discourse, where
asylum seekers are always understood to be ‘bogus’ (Tyler 2006).

One of those things which I feel very strongly about asylum seekers,
one, one part of my mind telling me that no, they should not, they
should not be allowed to stay here – partly because it’s not fair. It’s
just not fair to another, another person who’s doing it by fair means,
because obviously Britain will have let’s say 5000 citizenship applica-
tions that day, will apply, and that they will grant. And one person
getting it because he’s an asylum seeker is closing down the door for
somebody who, who has lived here legally for 5 years, paid his taxes,
paid his contributions, you know.

Again, we see how the idea of ‘contributing’ to society in general, and

paying taxes in particular, is the route to claims to citizenship. There is
also the sense of a competition between immigrants for a fixed number
of places. Imogen Tyler argues that ‘[i]t is through the production of the
imaginary figure of the asylum-seeker as an ‘illegal’ threat to ‘our’ sense
of national belonging that ‘we’ learn to desire and demand ‘their’ exclu-
sion’ (Tyler 2006: 191). Neela’s suspicion of asylum seekers suggests that
the ‘we’ of national belonging is also open here to those who are born
 Welcome to Britain? 167

outside the country but who absorb the cultural suspicion (and also mix
it with prejudices that they may already have had).
The division between the ‘good’ immigrant and the ‘bad’ immi-
grant was also at play in other accounts. For Habib, as with Neela, it
partly rested on the question of English competency. These accounts
thus reflect public debates around speaking English and citizenship
(Alexander, Edwards et al. 2007; Byrne 2013). In response to the experi-
ence of being in a group of new citizens at the ceremony, Habib seemed
unhappy about some of those who had got citizenship. For example,
he was surprised that a whole family, including young children, were
receiving their citizenship. He was also shocked that some of the new
citizens didn’t seem to speak English:

I heard some of the people didn’t speak English very good. I don’t. I
must say my English is not good no. [ ... ] that the ladies were sitting
next to me. Where she just [had to] repeat after that lady. She, she said
everything wrong. Not, you know, proper words. Like I believe when
you come to a different country you should learn, learn then to live
with different cultures, you should learn the cultures and languages.
[ ... ] But, like, you see some Pakistani who was [ ... ] living here like
25 years, 20 years, but the parents couldn’t speak a single word of
English, you know? But they didn’t know anything about, like, what
is the knowledge living here, you know?

However, Habib is also aware of the restrictions for asylum seekers (as he
had himself been) in being able to fully participate in society, and the
barriers they face in learning English:

I have a friend you know, they come here, being with asylum seekers,
he is asylum seeker. Like, he would love to go and speak English, he
would to go college but he’s waiting three years [ ... ] to get to college.
[ ... ] Which is no good at all. And go and have friends and go have
a relationship in, in English. His only relationship is with Iranian
people. [ ... ] Which is not good at all. And the only thing he can say:
yes please, thank you [ ... ]. Which is not good at all.

Thus the new citizens come to the ceremonies with, as shown in the
previous two sections, experience of the racialised geographies of Britain
and its racialised politics, particularly the politics around immigration,
language and the ‘contribution’ of migrants. This experience can lead
them to question the welcome given to foreigners in Britain, but it
168 Making Citizens

can also involve some of them in discourses of worthy and unworthy

immigrants, where they need to place themselves within a frame of the
‘contributing’ immigrant who should be made citizen, as opposed to the
wasteful and demanding Other.

Conclusion

Having explored some characteristics of citizenship ceremonies in other

chapters, in this chapter I have shown what new citizens themselves
think about the ceremonies. Understandably, given that they went to
different ceremonies, and they are themselves very different people (as
discussed in Chapter 5), responses to the ceremonies were varied. Some
would have preferred to choose not to attend a ceremony (the ceremo-
nies are compulsory), but none of the interviewees objected strongly to
the content of the ceremonies. Generally, they seemed happy to make
the oath of allegiance and the citizenship pledge. Some interviewees
were pleased to have been invited and were happy with their experi-
ence of the ceremonies. These recently invented traditions did convey
to some a sense of an achievement and a conclusion which is recog-
nised and celebrated. However, for others, the tone was wrong in various
ways, perhaps particularly where a sense of distance was created between
those presiding over the ceremonies and the new citizens. This could be
produced through the ways in which the new citizens were referred to as
distinct from the community, and seen as tourist-like figures who needed
introduction to the area. There did seem to be an appetite among some
of the new citizens for a call to participation as fellow members of the
community (with perhaps also recognition that the new citizens were
already active residents and members of the community) while bearing
in mind that not all birthright citizens make direct contributions to the
community.
Further, this chapter has explored the idea of the ‘welcome’ given to
immigrants in Britain. The question posed to the interviewees about
whether they felt welcomed in Britain was prompted by the citizenship
ceremonies, which claimed to welcome new citizens but also frequently
referred to a long history of welcome in Britain. These claims do not
fit easily with the new citizens’ own experience or their understanding
of political debates within Britain around immigration. For those citi-
zands who were not European, settling in Britain had already involved
negotiating the bureaucracy of visas and, for some in particular, facing a
culture of disbelief and intensely personal scrutiny. Some of those who
were not white, once they were in Britain, were met with racist violence
 Welcome to Britain? 169

and abuse. Building on the accounts given by the interviewees, this

chapter has argued that welcome means more than merely an absence
of hostility and threat. It also needs a sense of warmth, care and recogni-
tion of individual worth in the reception given to newcomers. For some
of the interviewees, this was felt and appreciated. However, for others,
even those who had not suffered explicit hostility, there is something
about the British culture which they don’t associate with the idea of
welcoming.
Political debates on immigration provide one context for considera-
tion of the welcome given to migrants in Britain. These tend to present
immigrants as a potential economic and cultural threat to the nation.
Those I spoke to had a high level of awareness of, and engagement with,
these debates. Some contested the terms of the debate, whilst others
incorporated them into their thinking. The debates about immigration,
about who should be given legitimacy and who should be conceived of
as a threat, potentially create a sense of competition between worthy
and unworthy immigrants (and therefore potential new citizens), so
that new citizens, unlike citizens from birth, are required to assert their
worth and contribution. This undermines the idea of a welcome. It may
not be appropriate to deal with contentious politics (or the existence of
racial hostility) within the celebratory ceremonies. Makena, who said
that she had faced hostility in Britain, said that it would not be appro-
priate for that to be mentioned in the ceremonies:

I don’t know how they can put it for people to understand. I don’t
know how they can put it. If they are going to put it bluntly ... I think
it would send the wrong message and especially if you have children
there, you know, who don’t understand.

However, the experience of racism and hostility nonetheless suggest

that claims of long histories of welcome may also be inappropriate.
The accounts of the interviewees would indicate that a more forward-
looking ceremony which celebrates the ways in which new citizens may
contribute – and may have already contributed – to the communities to
which they belong would be more inspiring.
7
Conclusion

In the middle of a crisis in the Middle East and a political crisis at

home, which included the kidnapping of his daughter by terrorists from
‘Qumar’ and a situation of ‘high alert’ over Washington and much of
the US, the fictional President Bartlett of The West Wing (a US political
TV drama) hears that a bomb scare has meant that a group of citizands,
mostly from ‘Arab countries’ have had their swearing of the citizenship
oath cancelled. In response to this, he says to his aide, ‘We’re talking
folks who have been interviewed and background-checked by two agen-
cies, taken classes to learn our language, passed exams on our history
and government, and been fingerprinted twice; these are the kinds of
Arabs we’re talking about?’1 When his aide says ‘Yes’, he is instructed
to find an auditorium somewhere to hold the ceremony. At the end
of a difficult day, at the end of the episode, he is called to see the cere-
mony in fact taking place within the White House. He leads the Pledge
of Allegiance, and the words of the pledge play over shots of his wife
and daughter getting into a limo to leave the White House to go to
their country residence, away from the trauma of the kidnapping, the
daughter with her head on her mother’s lap.
In these short scenes, we have the dramatisation of the nation-as-
family (represented by the actual family of the president) under threat
in multiple directions from bad Arabs who must be fought in order to
protect the nation-family. This is juxtaposed by the good Arabs, who
must be welcomed, given hospitality and brought into the democratic
family by their oaths of allegiance and citizenship. The naturalisation
ceremony is used as a symbol of the idea of inclusion and democracy.
The President talks to the participants about the Founding Fathers of
America and the Declaration of Independence. In their desire to become
citizens, having passed all the state scrutiny, they have proved their

170
 Conclusion 171

worth and earned a welcome. They have answered the ‘foreigner ques-
tion’, which Derrida suggests undermines absolute hospitality (Derrida
2000). Their acceptance into the nation-family also serves to prove the
integrity and worth of the US state (despite the ethical quagmire that the
President has recently entered into, including the order for the assassi-
nation of a ‘Qumari’ minister). The words of the Pledge of Allegiance, in
their familiarity to the (American) viewers and to the character himself,
offer a soothing sense of normality returned and the comfort of the
embrace of the nation-state which offers protection.
In this book, I have argued that the moment of the making of new
citizens – citizens of election rather than birth – is worthy of attention
because of the important insights it can reveal about how citizenship
of the nation-state is understood. These public rituals of citizenship
can tell us about both who is excluded from this conception of citizen-
ship and what forms of citizenship are valued. The ritual is not only
about the making of citizens; it also marks a border crossing from being
foreign to being a citizen, but still not necessarily into being ‘native’.
These ceremonies need to be understood in their contemporary context:
as a public discourse which signals a retreat from multiculturalism, with
an emphasis on loyalty to nation and integration into national culture.
This discourse also shaped responses to migration and a reconfiguration
of immigration and citizenship regimes.
The relationship between the citizen and the foreigner is important
because, despite previous optimism about a post-national future, the
global citizen has largely failed to gain material reality. The idea of global
citizenship has its attractions and supporters. For instance, the ‘Global
Poverty Project’ asks us to declare ‘I am a global citizen’ as a declaration
against poverty and to ‘change the world’.2 In a similar spirit, Oxfam
UK has learning packs for teachers to guide their teaching on global
citizenship and to help children have ‘a sense of their own role as a
world citizen’.3 According to UNICEF, a global citizen is ‘[s]omeone who
understands interconnectedness, respects and values diversity, has the
ability to challenge injustice, and takes action in personally meaningful
ways’.4 These campaigns seek to highlight the injustices of extreme
poverty and to foster a sense of the world as an interconnected place.
They also echo some of the more optimistic scholarly accounts of the
direction in which globalisation was meant to be taking us. Here, too,
we were presented with the figure of the cosmopolitan or global citizen
who would move freely across the globe. This citizen’s rights would be
protected by universal human rights formalised by international codes
and laws, rather than depending on nation-states (Soysal 1995).
172 Making Citizens

Yet, in the long decade since 9/11, alongside increasing calls for ‘global
citizenship’, we also see the rising demand that nation-states should
strengthen their abilities to monitor and control national-state borders.
It is perhaps at the border that the idea of the ‘global citizen’ is most
challenged. You do not leave or enter a country as a ‘global citizen’, but
as a national citizen. Passports, the national documents of identifica-
tion, do matter. What passport you hold will determine how easy it is to
cross international borders legally; not all passports are equal. Indeed,
not all bearers of the same national passport are equal – increasingly
travellers are ‘profiled’ by factors such as race, gender, place of birth, age
and travel history, which leads to accelerated passage through border
zones for some and increased scrutiny of others.
As was laid out in Chapter 2, this profiling builds on earlier colonial
conceptions of who should be included and excluded from full member-
ship of the nation-state. Despite the pressures of globalisation, which
are often seen to undermine the state, national sovereignty continues
to be rigorously defended and exercised by the state. As Hannah Arendt
asserted: ‘sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in matters of
emigration, naturalization, nationality, and expulsion’ (1958: 278). All
these powers remain central to state powers, and deportation in partic-
ular appears to be on the rise (Walters 2002; De Genova 2010). Nations
are defined by what they are not, and the border is one way of delin-
eating it. Wendy Brown (2010) claims that the border walls springing
up across the world can be taken as failing attempts by the nation-state
to shore up a power over movement that they are losing. Nonetheless,
tighter immigration regimes, and the walls which are a particularly
visual mode of enforcement, have very profound impacts on people’s
lives and life-chances.
The book has asked: What does it mean to be a citizen? What roles are
immigrants and new citizens given in these national rituals? What form
of participation is imagined for new citizens, and how are their experi-
ences of migration understood within the ceremonies? Examination of
citizenship ceremonies has shown that different nations share a similar
range of national symbols. These are the familiar symbols of what
Michael Billig (Billig 1995) would call ‘hot nationalism’: the flags, the
anthems, the formal statements and swearing of allegiance to the sover-
eign or the flag. However, the ceremonies also reveal the way in which
the nation is narrated in different international contexts. The United
States, Canada and Australia share a narrative of being nations of immi-
gration. However, there are some differences in the ways in which the
exclusions – of histories of pre-colonial settlement and of slavery – are
 Conclusion 173

dealt with. In Ireland, the national narrative is not one of immigration

but of emigration, and the relationship between this history and the
new era of immigration represents an interesting tension in the citizen-
ship ceremonies. In both the Netherlands and the UK, colonial histories
and post-colonial connections are largely silenced in the ways immigra-
tion, the state and citizenship are represented.
The book has also proposed that, whilst the national is clearly impor-
tant, in many ceremonies, the narrative encompasses local places,
regions or cities as well as the nation. With the exception of the ceremo-
nies in Ireland, which are held only in Dublin as a national ceremony,
the ceremonies are held in cities and towns and the ceremonies reflect
these local spaces. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Californian
ceremony discussed in Chapter 3 has a feeling of show-business razz-
matazz, whilst the Brooklyn court house (discussed in the same chapter)
distributes information on human and employment rights. The cere-
mony in Amsterdam (as we saw in Chapter 4) welcomes new citizens
to their status as ‘Amsterdammers’, perhaps in an attempt to sidestep
the increasingly hostile national debates around immigration and
integration. The ceremony in Bradford (in the same chapter) expects
new citizens to embrace a loyalty to the county of Yorkshire. However,
although there is an expression of the multi-scalar nature of citizen-
ship (including in the UK the nations of Scotland and Wales within
the state), this does not extend to extra-national regional identity. The
ceremonies in Europe which were explored in Chapter 4 are endowing
European as well as national citizenship, yet make no mention of this
fact – despite its importance to those becoming new citizens, as explored
in Chapter 5.
More significantly, the interviews with new citizens of the UK,
discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, raise important questions about the nature
of ‘welcome’ which most ceremonies purport to offer. Firstly, the inter-
views explored how the participants – although they are newly legal as
citizens – are not necessarily new to the area and thus may already feel
like they have an affiliation with, and sense of belonging in, local cities.
As Ghedi (in Chapter 5) put it, until recently he had not felt the need
to acquire citizenship because he was a ‘resident’ in Manchester and
‘knew his way around the city’. The interviewees also revealed the ways
many new citizens felt that relationships and ties which spread beyond
the nation – through colonial and post-colonial connections or shared
citizenship in Europe – mean that they also had a sense of belonging.
Some were already engaged in ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen
2008) which contest the state’s claim to control definitions of who is or
174 Making Citizens

is not a citizen. Ceremonies hailing the citizands as newcomers to the

city or nation may create a sense of dissonance with their own feeling of
their belonging and experiences and the claims they make about their
social (as well as economic) participation.
In offering a welcome, the citizenship ceremonies also risk reinscribing
the new citizens as strangers who are outsiders and need to be welcomed
(Ahmed 2000). The offer of hospitality comes with a claim to owner-
ship or exclusivity; it creates both the host and the guest (Derrida 2000;
Darling 2009). Nonetheless, the welcome may be important in part
because of the work it does in creating the nation. By asserting not only
the present moment of welcome, but also (as ceremonies commonly do)
a longer history of welcome, the nation is given the comforting repre-
sentation of itself as a multicultural nation (Fortier 2008).
Chapter 4 discussed the single ceremonies observed in the Netherlands
and Ireland and the 10 observed around the UK (as well as the texts of
almost 50 speeches given at local ceremonies in the UK). The chapter
also explored the development of new citizenship regimes in ‘Fortress
Europe’, which include not only the development of citizenship cere-
monies but also citizenship testing and a range of processes of rebor-
dering. In all three countries, immigration continues to be an area of
intense, and often highly racialised, political debate, often accompa-
nied by Islamophobia. The examination of the ceremonies in Europe
produced some interesting similarities as well as differences. In Ireland,
the idea of the Irish diaspora (travelling in the opposite direction to the
new citizens who had come into Ireland) was threaded through the cere-
mony. This raises questions of what it takes to be Irish and who can be
considered ‘truly’ Irish, those who have settled in the country or those
who have Irish ancestry? Exploration of the speeches given at citizen-
ship ceremonies in the UK revealed some inconsistencies in how history
was related. Many, perhaps surprisingly, drew on ancient history – of
Saxon, Roman and Norman invasion; for some, this was a way of intro-
ducing the multicultural nature of Britain and the idea that foreigners
had always been welcome. Others relied on more recent history to make
the same claims. However, as I argued in Chapter 6, the assertion that
Britain not only has a long history of being settled in by people from
abroad, but also a tradition of welcoming migrants was not something
that struck a chord with many of the new citizens.
For some, this idea of welcome had to be squared with direct experi-
ences of racist abuse and attack. For others, who were white and thus
not generally the targets of racism, there was still a sense that Britain
was not a place where the culture of welcome was strong at the level of
 Conclusion 175

everyday encounters or state reception at external or internal borders.

In particular, the notion of Britain as welcoming did not accord with the
nature of political debates around immigration, which the new citizens
were mostly very aware of. In addition, ceremonies which gave historical
accounts of Britain and its relations to those who have come from over-
seas failed to mention one of the key relationships that the UK has had
with the global – that of colonialism. In this way, a more contentious
period of history was avoided, but equally, an important and ongoing
relationship, which for some of the interviewees represented real links
and a sense of affinity, was silenced.
The US, Canadian and Australian ceremonies had similar areas of
omission and silence in their accounts of the state, which is portrayed
as a ‘nation of immigrants’. A nation built on the back of immigration
also has a power in creating a portrait of nations as multicultural and
open, but these generally fail to account for the long history of racial-
ised immigration controls in all three countries, as well as a highly
contested politics around immigration, particularly in the United States
and Australia. Additionally, the idea of the United States as a nation of
immigrants was accompanied by a representation of America as terra
nullius, in which the history of Native American settlement before colo-
nial settlement and the forced importation of slave labour, as well as
the continuing disadvantage of and discrimination against African-
Americans, are erased.
Discourses and practices of securitisation and rebordering are contin-
ually reconfiguring the relationship between nationals and the state
and regimes of immigration and citizenship. Because of anxiety about
‘enemies from within’, many states have sought to encourage a route of
settlement leading to citizenship and a desire to make citizenship both
more meaningful and more difficult to get – something that has to be
earned. This can act as a technology of reassurance that comforts ‘natives’
about the credentials of new citizens. It can also provide an attractive
self-representation of the nation as open, multicultural and welcoming.
The emotional investment in ideas of the nation and citizenship can be
seen in the ways the ceremonies produce, and in some cases require, the
performance of a range of emotional displays. At the same time, these
ceremonies appear unable to deal with their nations’ more contentious
past and present. They tend to erase the deeply racialised histories of
nation-states which, as suggested in Chapter 2, need to be understood
not only as a relatively recent modern invention, but also as a product
of deeply unequal colonial relations. Furthermore, many ceremonies are
shaped by an uncertainty about the relation between ‘them’ and ‘us’
176 Making Citizens

or ‘you’ and ‘we’. There is hesitation about when the citzands become
citizens – part of ‘us’ – and different perspectives about what has to
happen for that to be achieved. These differences include uncertainties
about what form of cultural or emotional severance from other national
allegiances is required. In UK, this hesitation was also present at times
in the interviews with new citizens. For some, ‘the British’ was a cate-
gory that they still saw as separate from themselves – a ‘they’, although
some city identities were more easily claimed – of being a Mancunian or
Liverpudlian. Nonetheless, others claimed (at times even before gaining
legal citizenship) a sense of community as a ‘we’. The interviews showed
that journeying to British citizenship was for many a long process which
could have profound effects.
There is a central problem in ceremonies which are proposed as
‘welcome ceremonies’. For a welcome to feel real, it has to begin much
earlier than at the very late point of gaining citizenship. The book has
argued that welcome requires a sense of institutional as well as personal
care, recognition and social justice. This could include programs, such as
those in Canada, often run by publically funded local community-based
organizations, which set out to support migrants as they settle into the
country, find employment and learn English and/or French (Bloemraad
2012). However, the nature of the political climate and attitudes towards
immigration also influence whether a welcome is felt. A general trend of
political discourse, which is becoming more hostile to immigration and
multiculturalism, can have a significant impact on whether a welcome is
felt. In creating the sense of a host welcoming in a stranger, the ceremo-
nies appear unable to fully acknowledge that the new citizens are fellow
residents and should also be regarded as potentially or already active
citizens. Thus their new legal status recognizes an existing relationship,
rather than being the beginning of something new.
Notes

1 Introduction
1. http://mondepasrond.net/why-is-the-world-not-round/ last accessed 4
January 2013.
2. These include episodes of Ugly Betty, The West Wing (which will be consid-
ered in Chapter 7), The Real Housewives of Orange County, Hell’s Kitchen and
NCIS, which all include portrayals of citizenship ceremonies. Popular repre-
sentations of citizenship testing are also common, but both are outnumbered
by fiction which centres around ‘citizenship marriages’, where people have
marriages of convenience to allow them to stay in their country of choice
(these include Green Card, Muriel’s Wedding, The Proposal and The Wedding
Banquet).
3. In this context, securitisation can be understood as the justification of the
suspension of normal political functions by the state in response to what is
constructed as an extraordinary threat posed by the ‘War on Terror’.
4. This mirrors the ambivalence that Homi Bhabha argues is present in any
narration of nation (Bhabha 1990).
5. See Anderson 2008 for the discussion of revocation in Canada.
6. See Austin 1962; Ahmed 2004.
7. Isin and Turner argue that dual citizenship is being ‘increasingly discour-
aged’ (Isin and Turner 2007: 11). However, others have shown that in fact,
empirically, dual citizenship is increasingly accepted by states (Hansen 2008;
Blatter, Erdmann et al. 2009; Böhme, Bracalenti et al. 2009).

2 Bounded Citizenship
1. http://antoinecassar.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/call-for-haiku-on-
migration-and-borders/
2. For Marshall, citizenship was important in the protection it provided for the
worker from the market, as the development of social rights offered some
redistribution of resources (Turner 2009).
3. Although, as Jenny Morris (Morris 2005) points out, very little attention has
been paid to the ways in which disability affects the acquisition and exercise
of these rights. See also Barton 1993.
4. However Vron Ware’s (Ware 2012) work on ‘military migrants’ reminds us
that participation in the military and citizenship are not as closely inter-
twined as the rhetoric would suggest.
5. The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW), established in 1979, provides that neither marriage to an
alien nor a husband’s change of nationality should make a woman stateless
(Kerber 2005: 747–748).

177
178 Notes

6. http://www.visalaw.com/01mar2/12mar201.html (3 July 2013).

7. See Altan Olcay and Balta 2012 for an interesting discussion of practices of
Turkish elites ensuring US citizenship for their children, creating citizenship
as a market commodity.
8. http://canada.usembassy.gov/visas/information-for-canadians/first-nations-
and-native-americans.html Accessed 19/12/13. With thanks to Lorraine
Pannett for this information.
9. Here Anderson is referring to an exile caused by the mobility produced by
industrialisation and imperialism rather than forms of political and legal
expulsion (Walters 2002).
10. See Nyers 2006 for a discussion of the ‘accidents’ that systems of citizenship
produce.
11. Examples of this would include populations transferred from India to
Bangladesh and Pakistan at the time of the Partition in 1947, and the multiple
shifting of the French/German border in the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century. For an examination of the post-war movement of Germans in
Europe see Douglas 2012.
12. See for example, coverage of the buying citizenship in Malta (announced in
2013 to cost $900,000) and the cost for other national citizenships http://
www.cnbc.com/id/101198433 (last accessed 3 April 2014).
13. For Chatterjee, it is the power to declare the colonial exception that defines
empire, rather than direct rule or settlement (Chatterjee 2005).
14. See De Genova 2007 for an argument that the focus has shifted in the United
States from one of ‘illegal aliens’ to ‘enemy aliens’. See also Bloch and Schuster
2005: 491 on the ‘normalisation’ of deportation, detention and dispersal in
the UK.
15. For example, Ian Cobain writing in The Independent reported that in the
period between May 2010 and August 2011, the Home Office had allegedly
revoked the citizenship of 37 people. This was done on the basis of a new law
introduced in 2006. An unnamed official was quoted saying ‘British nation-
ality is a privilege and the home secretary has the ability to remove it from
dual nationals when she perceives it to be in the public good’ (Cobain 2011;
see also Herzog 2011).
16. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffqVJWP5OeU (accessed 3 July 2013).
17. As Mongia points out, there were fewer anxieties about policies against
Chinese appearing to be racist, as China was not a part of the British empire,
and also did not have a treaty agreement with Britain (unlike Japan) (Mongia
1999: 546).
18. This is achieved through a masking of race through cultural racism, akin to
that identified by Paul Gilroy in a much later period (Gilroy 1987).
19. See also Tyler 2010, 2013.
20. See, for example, the headline in The Express in November 2013: ‘Flood
of immigrants make “township ghettos” out of Britain’s seasides’ http://
www.express.co.uk/news/uk/442169/Flood-of-immigrants-make-township-
ghettos-out-of-Britain-s-seasides. Accessed 20/12/13.
21. See for example the headline in The Sun newspaper in the UK in May
2012 ‘Dirty, drunk and defiant: meet the Roma gypsies defiling Park Lane.
Sun girl goes in squalid camp’ http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/
features/4323814/Meet-the-Romanian-gypsies-defiling-Londons-prestigious-
Park-Lane.html. Accessed 20/12/13.
 Notes 179

22. One can argue that, with the Schengen Agreement, borders have been
displaced. The borders between the individual nations within the agreement
have become less significant compared to the collective outer borders of
Europe.
23. In the UK, the government is currently proposing that landlords should be
obliged to check that tenants have the legal rights to be in Britain.
24. See Salter 2006 for a discussion of the global visa regime.
25. Baldwin is referring specifically to the figure of the climate change migrant, but
I think the argument can equally be made about migration in general where the
argument (apart from those put forward by the extreme far-right) are frequently
framed in terms of the risks of future increased or sustained migration.
26. See Sassen 2006 for a discussion of how this imagined threat is poorly related
to trends and the complex processes of migration.
27. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/16/asylum-seekers-living-in-
australia-forced-to-sign-code-of-conduct 16.12.13. Accessed 20/12/13.
28. See Barbero 2012 for an examination of the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla,
‘protected’ from migrants by three metre high walls.
29. There are also walls which attempt to restrict the spread of information,
including, for example, the ‘Golden Shield’ through which China censors
internet communication (Isin 2012a: 10).

3 Taking the Oath

1. Oakland ceremony observed 28 October, 2010 by Bethan Harries.
2. With thanks to the British Academy small grants.
3. Bethan Harries overheard an audience member in Oakland making a similar
point. Referring to a video shown about the history of Ellis Island, the man of
Latin American origin joked that it was supposed to show the first Americans
but portrayed a version of history that made it appear ‘as if Americans have
been here forever’.
4. On other occasions (in speeches where he is present at the ceremonies),
President Obama does sometimes (although not every time) mention these
two groups. For instance, at a ceremony on the Fourth of July 2012, he said,
‘We are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are one of the first Americans, a
Native American, we are all descended from folks who came from somewhere
else – whether they arrived on the Mayflower or a slave ship, whether they
came through Ellis Island or crossed the Rio Grande’. http://www.whitehouse.
gov/the-press-office/2012/07/04/remarks-president-naturalization-ceremony
(last accessed 2 April 2014). However, the rendition of slaves as fellow immi-
grants remains a very odd formulation which does not seem to do justice
to what Obama, in a famous pre-election speech, called ‘the original sin of
slavery’. See Byrne 2011 for further discussion of this speech.
5. The other values were respect for the dignity of the individual; commitment
to the rule of law; equality of men and women; and mutual respect and
compassion for those in need. http://www.humanrights.gov.au/publica-
tions/submission-discussion-paper-australian-citizenship-much-more-just-
ceremony Para 26 (accessed 11 October 2013).
6. In 2005, in recognition of this ambivalence, the idea of Australia Day Dawn
was introduced, to encourage ‘a moment of reflection before celebration’.
180 Notes

http://www.australiaday.org.au/australia-day/history/australia-day-26-
january-a-day-for-all-australians/ (accessed 4 October 2013).
7. With thanks to Bethan Harries for a discussion on this point.
8. A prominent exception to this would be the ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ at a
wedding.
9. Bethan Harries conducted this observation.
10. This observation and an interview with the official were conducted by Nadia
Kidwai.
11. This observation and an interview with the official were conducted by
Katherine Jones.
12. In Canada, a citizenship judge presides over the citizenship ceremonies; the
judge has a quasi-judicial role and deals with citizenship cases, ensuring
requirements such as residency are met and conducting oral language tests
when necessary.
13. This figure is slightly inflated as it counts countries according to how they
appear on the original application form. Thus Czechoslovakia and the Czech
Republic are both counted separately.
14. The US Immigration and Nationality Act allows for an expedited natu-
ralisation process for current members of the US armed forces and those
who have been recently discharged. Applicants are exempt from residency
requirements. However, citizenship can be revoked if the new citizen leaves
the military under ‘other than honourable conditions’ before five years of
honourable service. Some ceremonies are conducted abroad and on US naval
ships.
15. This was not a novel concept. Theodore Roosevelt has been quoted as saying,
‘Who says that he is an American but something else also, is not an American
at all’ (Aptekar 2012: 943).
16. See also Tate 2009.
17. http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/12/12/niqabs-burkas-must-be-removed-
during-citizenship-ceremonies-jason-kenney/ (accessed 29 September 2013).
18. With thanks to Nadia Kidwai, personal communication.
19. This can be omitted for those who have religious beliefs which oppose the
taking of a combatant role http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuite-
m.5af9bb95919f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=facd6db8d7e37210Vgn
VCM100000082ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=dd7ffe9dd4aa3210VgnVCM1
00000b92ca60aRCRD (accessed 29 September 2013).
20. http://www.uscis.gov/us-citizenship/naturalization-test/naturalization-oath-
allegiance-united-states-america (accessed 31 July 2014).
21. http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919f35e66f61
4176543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=facd6db8d7e37210VgnVCM100000082ca60aR
CRD&vgnextchannel=dd7ffe9dd4aa3210VgnVCM100000b92ca60aRCRD
(accessed 29 September 2013).
22. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/208022/oath-ice/john-j-miller
(accessed 29 September 2013).
23. See http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1753.html (accessed 29
September 2013).
24. http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/acton/2013/09/acton_family_
takes_pledge_of_allegiance_challenge_to_supreme.html (accessed 1 October
2013).
 Notes 181

25. The National Australasian Conventions in the 1890s did consider using the
concept of citizenship in the new constitution, but ‘subject’ was the term
used (Mercer 2003: 422).
26. http://www.australianaffirmation.org.au/ (accessed 1 October 2013).
27. http://www.australianaffirmation.org.au/what/affirmation (accessed 1
October 2013).
28. With thanks to Lucy Winter and Sophia Winter, personal correspondence.
29. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/lawyer-charles-roach-dies-with-
citizenship-dream-unfulfilled-1.1292161. The article goes on to report an
unsuccessful campaign to have Roach given ‘posthumous citizenship’.
30. http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243
c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=2335743ebbe8a310VgnVCM100000082ca60aR
CRD&vgnextchannel=2335743ebbe8a310VgnVCM100000082ca60aRCRD
(accessed 29 September 13).
31. The code makes provision for those, for instance, who have suffered a stroke,
so they cannot read aloud. The pledge is read to them, and they should
indicate their agreement. It also points out that a child under the age of 16
cannot make the pledge for themselves; it must be done by a parent.
32. See Kaskowitz 2013 for an account of the political history of the song, ‘God
Bless America’.
33. Chapter 6 considers the responses of new citizens to citizenship ceremonies
in the UK.
34. This didn’t happen in Oakland, however, perhaps because the large number
of participants wouldn’t permit it.

4 Europe Welcomes
1. See the video embedded in http://www.ria.ie/Publications/A-History-of-
Ireland-in-100-Objects.aspx (last accessed 15 February 2014).
2. See www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld (last accessed 15 February 2014).
3. For an account of anti-Semitism in Ireland, see Fanning 2012.
4. See Byrne 2012 for more detail.
5. In 2004, Frontex, or The European Agency for the Management of Operational
Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European
Union was created to coordinate national border security strategies. In 2013,
Eurosur, a pan-European surveillance system, was established. http://frontex.
europa.eu/feature-stories/eurosur-goes-live-Z8ZM4f (accessed 5 February 2014).
6. See Weber 2012: 486 for a similar argument about the US-Mexico border
where the increased fortification leads to migrants taking more dangerous
routes across desert areas.
7. https://www.iom.int/cms/en/sites/iom/home/news-and-views/press-brief-
ing-notes/pbn-2013/pbn-listing/its-time-to-take-action-and-save.html
(accessed 19 December 2013).
8. See Bloch and Schuster 2005; Bloch and Chimienti 2012 for the constraints
on conducting their everyday lives that illegality places on those who are
living in Britain as irregular migrants.
9. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-ministers-king-james-bible-
speech (last accessed 30 January 2014). For further analysis of this speech,
see Byrne 2014.
182 Notes

10. However, Sara Wallace Goodman (2010) points out that countries of recent
accession to the EU – Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Poland, and Slovenia – as well as non-EU countries such as Croatia, Moldova
and Norway, require new citizens to renounce their other citizenship. These
countries enforce their opposition to dual citizenship to different degrees. In
addition, Germany, Austria and Denmark do not allow dual citizenship.
11. The other trends outlined by Vink and de Groot are the increasing avoidance
of statelessness (except in cases where there has been fraud in the naturaliza-
tion process) and the increasing relevance of EU membership (2010).
12. Migrants from Europe and a select group of Western countries – such as the
United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland – are
exempt.
13. Although perhaps the place for the worst extreme should be reserved for
the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, which in 2006 introduced a test
which applied specifically to applicants for citizenship from the Islamic
League. The test was a ‘guide for questioning’ and provided 30 open-ended
questions designed to reveal levels of integration. For example, one ques-
tion asked the applicant to ‘Just imagine that your grown-up son tells you
that he is homosexual and would like to live with another man’. Another
asks whether terrorism is ‘freedom fighting’ or ‘killing’. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
programmes/newsnight/4717568.stm (accessed 21 November 2013; Joppke
2013).
14. This also includes increased focus on citizenship education. See Kiwan 2008;
Kiwan 2008; Kiwan 2013.
15. Apart from the countries discussed in this chapter, other European coun-
tries which hold citizenship ceremonies include France, Germany and Italy –
although the Italian ceremonies are often no more than the taking of an oath
in front of a registry official.
16. Personal communication, anonymous official.
17. In the UK, it is possible, at an extra cost, to have a private ceremony. No
private ceremonies were observed for this research.
18. The text of the declaration is ‘I swear/declare that I will respect the constitu-
tional rules of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, her freedoms and rights and
swear/declare that I will faithfully fulfil the duties that citizenship entails’.
This is followed by either ‘So help me God Almighty’ or ‘This I declare
and promise’. ‘Ik zweer (verklaar), dat ik de grondwettelijk orde van het
Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, haar vrijheden en rechten respecteer en zweer
(beloof) de plichten die het staatsburgerschap met zich meebrengen getrouw
te vervullen’.
19. www.irishcentral.com/new-Irish-citizens-to-take-American-style-oath-of-al-
legiance-124062104.html (last accessed 21 November 2013).
20. www.irishtimes.com/news/4–400-new-irish-take-part-in-citizenship-ceremo-
nies-1.143133 (last accessed on 21 November 2013).
21. For example, see http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/over-
4–000-to-become-new-irish-citizens-1.1507162 (accessed 5 February 2014).
22. The Garda are Ireland’s National Police Service.
23. This was the case both in the ceremony I observed and in others covered by
the Irish media.
24. Quoted in Handoll 2012: 6.
 Notes 183

25. Women can also be lords lieutenant, in which case, they have a large brooch
but no uniform.
26. Citizands can choose whether they make a religious oath or secular affirma-
tion. Everyone then makes a pledge. The oath is ‘I, (name), swear by Almighty
God that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true alle-
giance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors,
according to law’. The affirmation is ‘I, (name), do solemnly, sincerely and
truly declare and affirm that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful
and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her
Heirs and Successors, according to law.’ And the pledge that everyone says
is ‘I will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and
freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully
and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen’. The oath affirma-
tion and pledge can also be made in Welsh at ceremonies in Wales. (http://
www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/britishcitizenship/applying/ceremony/ (last
accessed 12 May 2013).
27. This speech in East Ayrshire was made before the Scottish referendum of
September 2014 had been announced. In the run up to the referendum,
questions of immigration and citizenship had not gained much prominence.
However, the SNP have confirmed that they will maintain the Queen as head
of state of Scotland, even if they gain independence.
28. Although, see Chapter 3 for further discussion of discourses of choice
migration.
29. Dieuwertje Dyi Huig conducted the ceremony observation and interviewed
an official.

5 Routes to Citizenship
1. We did not ask them about their citizenship status.
2. See Byrne and De Tona 2012 for a discussion of migrant experiences of
choosing schools.
3. These were Cardiff, Edinburgh, London (Wandsworth), Brighton, Bury St
Edmunds, Manchester, Sheffield, Belfast, Bradford, Liverpool. In some cases,
more than one ceremony was observed in the same city or town.
4. In 2012, the largest groups naturalizing in the UK, by citizenship, were: India
(15%), Pakistan (5%), Nigeria (5%) and the Philippines, South Africa and
China (4% each) (Blinder 2013: 2).
5. In 2012, there were 41% adult women, 39% adult men and 20% children
naturalising in Britain (Blinder 2013: 6).
6. Registrars commented to me that any proposed changes in the citizenship
regulations would prompt an increase in applications for citizenship.
7. See Byrne 2006b for more discussion of racialised schemas.
8. All names of the interviewees have been changed.
9. See Byrne 2006a for further discussion of the idea of ‘exposure’ to difference.
10. In contrast, Commonwealth citizens can vote in all elections.
11. Bulgarians did not yet have rights of free movement into Britain at the time
of this interview (it was restricted until 2014). Rada had permanent leave to
remain in the UK prior to applying for citizenship.
184 Notes

12. See Byrne 2007 for a similar discussion.

13. Grammar schools, which have competitive entry and are often considered
to be of higher quality than other state schools, are part of the state-funded
education system in the United Kingdom.
14. See Andruki 2010 for a discussion of ancestral visas and white South
Africans.

6 Welcome to Britain?
1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3487892.stm (accessed 13 March 2014).
2. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/23/woolwich-attack-multicul-
tural-multi-faith-community (last accessed 13 March 2014).
3. As discussed in Chapter 4, the oath is religious, with an oath to God, and the
pledge is non-religious.
4. The idea of a ‘visible’ minority has to be understood as shifting rather than
fixed (Byrne 2006b). In the context of debates around the immigration of
Eastern Europeans, they, too, may be seen as visibly different.

Conclusion
1. The episode ‘Jefferson Lives’ was first broadcast in 2003.
2. http://www.globalcitizen.org/ (accessed 20 May 2013).
3. http://www.oxfam.org.uk/education/global-citizenship/what-is-global-citi-
zenship (accessed 11 June 13.
4. http://teachunicef.org/sites/default/files/documents/globalcitizen_
activity_9–12_8_26.pdf.
Bibliography

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality. London,
Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2004). ‘Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-performativity of Anti-
racism.’ Borderlands Ejournal 3(2): 1–59.
Alexander, C., R. Edwards, et al. (2007). ‘Contesting Cultural Communities:
Language, Ethnicity and Citizenship in Britain.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies 33(5): 783–800.
Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colour
blindness. New York, The New Press.
Altamirano-Jiménez, I. (2004). ‘North American First Peoples: Slipping up into
Market Citizenship?’ Citizenship Studies 8(4): 349–365.
Altan Olcay, Ö. and E. Balta (2012). Citizenship a-la-carte: Property Relations, Market
Mechanisms and Transformation of Citizenship. Istambul, Koç University: 1–35.
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. (Revised Edition). London, Verso.
Anderson, B. (1994). ‘Exodus.’ Critical Inquiry 20(2): 314–327.
Anderson, B. (2013). Us and Then? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control.
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Anderson, B., M. J. Gibney, et al. (2011). ‘Citizenship, Deportation and the
Boundaries of Belonging.’ Citizenship Studies 15(5): 547–563.
Anderson, C. G. (2008). ‘A Long-Standing Canadian Tradition: Citizenship
Revocation and Second-Class Citizenship under the Liberals, 1993–2006.’
Journal of Canadian Studies 42(3): 80–105.
Andreas, P. (2002). ‘The Re-bordering of America after 11 September.’ The Brown
Journal of World Affairs VIII (2): 195–202.
Andruki, M. (2010). ‘The Visa Whiteness Machine: Transnational Motility in
Post-Apartheid South Africa.’ Ethnicities 10(3): 358–370.
Anthias, F. and N. Yuval-Davies (eds) (1989). Woman-Nation-State. London,
Palgrave Macmillan.
Anthias, F. and N. Yuval-Davis (1993). Racialised Boundaries. Race, Nation, Gender,
Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle. London, Routledge.
Aptekar, S. (2012). ‘Naturalization Ceremonies and the Role of Immigrants in the
American Nation.’ Citizenship Studies 16(7): 937–952.
Arendt, H. (1958). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland and New York,
Meridian Books.
Arun, S. (2010). ‘Global Migration and Gender.’ in D. Howcroft and H. Richardson
(eds), Work and Life in the Global Economy. A Gendered Analysis of Service Work.
Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
——. (1997). Philosophical Papers. Oxford, Oxford University Publishers.
Australian Human Rights Commission (2013). Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Human
Rights. Australian Human Rights Commission.

185
186 Bibliography

Baldwin, A. (2012). ‘Orientalising Environmental Citizenship: Climate Change,

Migration and the Potentiality of Race.’ Citizenship Studies 16(5–6): 625–640.
Barbero, I. (2012). ‘Orientalising Citizenship: The Legitimation of Immigrant
Regimes in the European Union.’ Citizenship Studies 16(5–6): 751–768.
Barton, L. (1993). ‘The Struggle for Citizenship: The Case of Disabled People.’
Disability and Society 8(3): 235–248.
Benhabib, S. (2004). The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge,
Polity Press.
Benhabib, S. (2008). Another Cosmopolitanism. With Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie
Honig and Will Kymlicka, Robert Post (ed.). Oxford, New York, Oxford
University Press.
Berger, S. (2007). The power of national pasts: writing national history in nine-
teenth and twentieth century Europe. In S. Berger (ed.) Writing the Nation: A
Global Perspective. Houndsmill and New York, Macmillan: 30–62.
Berlant, L. (1997). The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Essays on Sex and
Citizenship. Durham and London, Duke University Press.
Betts, K. and B. Birrell (2007). ‘Making Australian Citizenship Mean More.’ People
and Place 15(1): 45–61.
Bhabha, H. K. (1990). ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation.’ Nation and Narration.
H. Bhabha K. London, Routledge: 1–8.
Bibler Coutin, S. (2003). ‘Cultural Logics of Belonging and Movement:
Transnationalism, Naturalization, and US Immigration Politics.’ American
Ethnologist 30(4): 508–526.
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London, Sage Publications.
Blatter, J. K., S. Erdmann, et al. (2009). ‘Acceptance of Dual Citizenship: Empirical
Data and Political Context.’ Working Paper Series. Global Governance and
Democracy. University of Lucerne, Institute of Political Science.
Blinder, S. (2013). Naturalisation as a British Citizen: Concepts and Trends. The
Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
Bloch, A. and M. Chimienti (2012). Irregular Migrants: Policy, Politics, Motives and
Everyday Lives. London, Routledge.
Bloch, A. and L. Schuster (2005). ‘At the Extremes of Exclusion: Deportation,
Detention and Dispersal.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(3): 491–512.
Bloemraad, I. (2006). Becoming a Citizen. Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in
the United States and Canada, University of California Press.
Bloemraad, I. (2012). ‘Understanding “Canadian Exceptionalism”.’ in Immigration
and Pluralism Policy. Washington, Migration Policy Institute: 1–18.
Bloodsworth-Lugo, M. K. and C. R. Lugo-Lugo (2008). ‘Citizenship and the
Browning of Terror.’ Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 20: 273–282.
Böhme, V., R. Bracalenti, et al. (2009). ‘Be Naturalised – Or Become a Citizen.’ The
European Commission.
Brandi, S. (2004). ‘Unveiling the Ideological Construction of the 2004 Irish
Citizenship Referendum: A Critical Discourse Analytical Approach.’ Translocations:
The Irish Migration, Race and Social Transformation Review 2(1): 26–47.
Brooks, T. (2013). The ‘Life in the United Kingdom’ Citizenship Test. Is it Unfit for
Purpose? Durham, NC, Durham University.
Brown, W. (2010). Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York, Zone Books.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits Of “Sex”. London,
Routledge.
 Bibliography 187

——. (2004). Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London, Verso.
Byrne, B. (2006a). ‘In Search of a “Good Mix”. “Race”, Class, Gender and Practices
of Mothering.’ Sociology 40(6): 1001–1017.
——. (2006b). White Lives. The Interplay of “Race”, Class and Gender in Everyday
Life. London and New York, Routledge.
Byrne, B. (2007). ‘England – Whose England? Narratives of nostalgia, emptiness
and evasion in imaginations of national identity.’ Sociological Review 55(3):
509–530.
——. (2011). ‘Post-race? Nation, Inheritance and the Contradictory Performativity
of Race in Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” Speech.’ Thirdspace: A Journal
of Feminist Theory and Culture 10(1): 1–16.
——. (2012). ‘Local Welcomes: Narrations of Nation and Belonging in Citizenship
Ceremonies.’ Citizenship Studies 16(3–4): 531–544.
——. (2013). ‘Neurotic Britishness: Why Are We Threatened by the Multi-lingual
Home?’ Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/
bridget-byrne/neurotic-britishness-why-are-we-threatened-by-multi-lingual-
home.
——. (2014). ‘Rhetoric and Multiculturalism – David Cameron’s “King James”
Speech and the Crisis of Multiculturalism.’ in J. Atkins, A. Finlayson, J. Martin
and N. Turnbull (eds), Rhetoric, Politics and Society. Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan.
Byrne, B. and C. De Tona (2012). ‘“Trying to find the extra choices”: Migrant
Parents and Secondary School Choice in Greater Manchester.’ British Journal of
Sociology of Education 33(1).
Castaños, P. (2013). A More Inclusive Citizenship Open to Immigrants. Opinion of
the European Economic and Social Committee. European Economic and Social
Committee.
Castles, S. and A. Davidson (2000). Citizenship and Migration. Globalization and the
Politics of Belonging. London, MacMillan.
Chapnick, A. (2011). ‘A “Conservative” National Story? The Evolution of
Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Discover Canada.’ American Review of
Canadian Studies 41(1): 20–36.
Chatterjee, P. (2005). ‘Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years after Bandung.’ Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies 6(4): 487–496.
Chavez, L. R. (2008). The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens and the
Nation. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.
Cobain, I. (2011). ‘Home Office Stripping More Dual-Nationality Britons
of Citizenship.’ The Independent. Retrieved 17 January 2014. http://www.
theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/15/home-office-law-dual-citizenship.
Cohen, R. (1994). Frontiers of Identity. The British and the Others. London,
Longman.
Cosgrave, C. (2011). Living in Limbo: Migrants’ Experiences of Applying for
Naturalisation in Ireland. Dublin, Immigrant Council of Ireland.
Damsholt, T. (2008). ‘Making Citizens: On the Genealogy of Citizenship
Ceremonies.’ in P. Mouritsen and K. E. Jørgensen (eds), Constituting Communities:
Political Solutions to Cultural Conflict. Basingstoke and New York, Palgrave
MacMillan: 53–72.
Darling, J. (2009). ‘Becoming Bare Life: Asylum, Hospitality and the Politics of the
Encampment.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 649–655.
188 Bibliography

Darling, J. (2011). ‘Domopolitics, Governmentality and the Regulation of Asylum

Accommodation.’ Political Geography 30(5): 263–271.
Darling, J. (2013). Asylum and the Post-political: Domopolitics, Depoliticisation and
Acts of Citizenship. Antipode.
Darling, J. (2013). ‘Moral Urbanism, Asylum, and the Politics of Critique.’
Environment and Planning A 45: 1785–1801.
De Genova, N. (2002). ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life.’
Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–47.
De Genova, N. (2007). ‘The Production of Culprits: From Deportability to
Detainability in the Aftermath of “Homeland Security”.’ Citizenship Studies
11(5): 421–448.
De Genova, N. (2010). The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and Freedom of
Movement. Durham, Duke University Press.
Derrida, J. (2000). Of Hospitality. Palo Alto, Stanford University Press.
Donovan, C., Heaphy, B. and Weeks, J. (1999). ‘Citizenship and Same Sex
Relationships.’ Journal of Social Policy 28(4): 689–709.
Domínguez, V. R. (1986). White by Definition. Social Classification in Creole
Louisiana. New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press.
Douglas, M. (1996). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo. London, Routledge.
Douglas, R. M. (2012). Orderly and Humane. The Expulsion of the Germans after the
Second World War. New Haven and London, Yale University Press.
Edensor (2002). National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford, Berg.
Enloe, C. (2000). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics. Berkley, University of California Press.
European Commission (2012). The EU Citizens’ Agenda. Europeans Have Their Say.
Directorate-General for Justice, European Commission.
Fanning, B. (2012). Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland. Manchester,
Manchester University Press.
Flynn. D. (2005). ‘New borders, new management: the dilemmas of modern
immigration policies.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(3): 463–490.
Fortier, A.-M. (2008). Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil
Nation. London, Routledge.
Fortier, A.-M. (2010). ‘Proximity by Design? Affective Citizenship and the
Management of Unease.’ Citizenship Studies 14(1): 17–30.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York,
Random House.
Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France. New
York, Picador.
Fozdar, F. and B. Spittles (2009). ‘The Australian Citizenship Test: Process and
Rhetoric.’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 55(4): 496–512.
Fryer, P. (1984). Staying Power: The history of Black people in Britain. London, Pluto
Press.
Gedalof, I. (2007). ‘Unhomely Homes: Women, Family and Belonging in UK
Discourses of Migration and Asylum.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
33(1): 77–94.
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Gilroy, P. (1987). Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London, Routledge.
Gilroy, P. (2005). Postcolonial Melancholia. New York, Columbia University Press.
 Bibliography 189

Glenn, E. N. (2002). Unequal Freedom: How Race And Gender Shaped American
Citizenship And Labor. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press.
Glover, D. (2012). Literature, immigration and diaspora in fin-de-siecle England: a
cultural history of the 1905 Aliens Act. New York, Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, D. T. (1993). Racist Culture. Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning.
Oxford, Blackwells.
Goldberg, D. T. (1997). Racial Subjects. Writing on Race in America. London,
Routledge.
Goodman, S. W. (2010). Naturalisation Policies in Europe: Exploring Patterns of
Inclusion and Exclusion. Florence, EUDO, European Union Institute.
Goulbourne, H. (1993). ‘Aspects of Nationalism and Black Identities in Post-
imperial Britain.’ in M. Cross and M. Keith (eds) Racism, the City and the State.
London, Routledge: 177–192.
Government of Australia (2011). Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code. ACT,
Department of Citizenship and Immigration.
Grillo, R. (2007). ‘An Excess of Alterity? Debating Difference in a Multicultural
Society.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6): 979–998.
Handoll, J. (2012). Report on Ireland. Florence, EUDO Citizenship Observatory,
European Institute Florence: 1–24.
Hansen, R. A. (2008). A New Citizenship Bargain for the Age of Mobility? Citizenship
Requirements in Europe and North America. Washington, DC, Migration Policy
Institute.
Harries, B. (2012). ‘Talking Race in the Everyday Spaces of the City.’ Sociology.
Manchester, University of Manchester. PhD.
Harries, B. (2014). ‘We Need to Talk about Race.’ Sociology: 1–16.
Henderson, J. S. Y. (2002). ‘Sui Generis and Treaty Citizenship.’ Citizenship Studies
6(4): 415–440.
Herzog, B. (2011). ‘Revocation of Citizenship in the United States.’ Archives
Européennes de Sociologie 52(1): 77–109.
Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, Canto:
1–14.
Home Office (2002). Secure Borders, Safe Haven. Integration with Diversity in Modern
Britain. London, HMSO.
Isin, E. F. (2004). ‘The Neurotic Citizen.’ Citizenship Studies 8(3): 217–235.
——. (2012a). Citizens without Frontiers. London, Bloomsbury.
——. (2012b). ‘Citizens without Nations.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 30(3): 450–467.
——. (2012c) ‘Citizenship after orientalism: an unfinished project’ Citizenship
Studies 16(5–6): 563–572.
Isin, E. F. and G. M. Nielsen (eds) (2008). Acts of Citizenship. London, Zed
Books.
Isin, E. F. and K. Rygiel (2007). ‘Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps.’ in
E. Dauphinee and C. Masters (eds) Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror.
Basingstoke, Palgrave: 181–203.
Isin, E. F. and B. S. Turner (2007). ‘Investigating Citizenship: An Agenda for
Citizenship Studies.’ Citizenship Studies 11(1): 5–17.
Jacobs, D. and A. Rea (2007). ‘Open Forum: The End of National Models?
Integration Courses and Citizenship Trajectories in Europe.’ IJMS: International
Journal on Multicultural Societies 9(2): 264–283.
190 Bibliography

Jaggers, J., W. J. Gabbard, et al. (2014). ‘The Devolution of US Immigration Policy:

An Examination of the History and Future of Immigration Policy.’ Journal of
Policy Practice 13(1): 3–15.
Johnson, G. R. (1987). ‘In the Name of the Fatherland: An Analysis of Kin Term
Usage in Patriotic Speech and Literature.’ International Political Science Review
8(2): 165–174.
Joppke, C. (2013). ‘Through the European Looking Glass: Citizenship Tests in the
USA, Australia and Canada.’ Citizenship Studies 17(1): 1–15.
Joseph, M. (1999). Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship. Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press.
Kaplan, A. (2003). ‘Homeland Insecurities: Some Reflections on Language and
Space.’ Radical History Review 85: 82–93.
Kapur, R. (2007). ‘The Citizen and the Migrant: Postcolonial Anxieties, Law and
the Politics of Exclusion/Inclusion.’ Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8: 537–569.
Kaskowitz, S. (2013). God Bless America. The Surprising History of an Iconic Song.
New York, Oxford University Press.
Kelly, R. and L. Byrne (2007). A Common Place. London, The Fabian Society: 1–39.
Kerber, L. K. (2005). ‘Toward a History of Statelessness in America.’ American
Quarterly 57(3): 727–749.
Kingma, M. (2005). Nurses on the Move: Migration and the Global Health Care
Economy. Ithaca, NY, ILR Press.
Kiwan, D. (2008). Education for Inclusive Citizenship. London and New York,
Routledge.
——. (2008). ‘Towards a Theory of Inclusive Participative Citizenship.’ in A.
Lentin and G. Titley (eds), The Politics of Diversity in Europe. Strasbourg, Council
of Europe Publishing: 183–197.
Kiwan, D. (ed.) (2013). Naturalisation Policies, Education and Citizenship:
Multicultural and Multi-national Societies in International Perspective. Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan.
Klapdor, M., M. Coombs, et al. (2009). Australian Citizenship: A Chronology of
Major Developments in Policy and Law, Parliament of Australia. Department of
Parliamentary Services.
Kostakopoulou, D. (2010). ‘Matters of Control: Integration Tests, Naturalisation
Reform and Probationary Citizenship in the United Kingdom.’ Journal of Ethnic
and Migration Studies 36(5): 829–846.
Kundnani, A. (2014). The Muslims Are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the
Domestic War on Terror. London and New York, Verso.
Kushner, T. (2003). ‘Meaning Nothing but Good: Ethics, History and Asylum-
Seeker Phobia in Britain.’ Patterns of Prejudice 37(3): 257–276.
Kushner, T. (2006). Remembering Refugees: Then and Now. Manchester, Manchester
University Press.
Kushnick, L. (1993). ‘“We’re Here because You Were There”: Britain’s Black
Population.’ Trotter Review 7(2): 17–19.
Lee, M. M. (2010). Birthright Citizenship under the 14th Amendment of Persons
Born in the United States to Alien Parents, Congressional Research Service.
Lentin, A. and G. Titley (2011). The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal
Age. London, Zed Books.
Lentin, R. (2007). ‘Illegal in Ireland, Irish Illegals: Diaspora Nation as Racial State.’
Irish Political Studies 22(4): 443–453.
 Bibliography 191

——. (2007). ‘Ireland: Racial State and Crisis Racism.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies
30(4): 610–627.
Lewis, G. (2004). ‘Do not go gently ... ’ Terrains of Citizenship and Landscapes
of the Personal.’ in G. Lewis (ed), Citizenship. Personal Lives and Social Policy.
Bristol, Policy Press: 1–38.
Lister, R. (2003). Citizenship. Feminist Perspectives. Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan.
——. (2007) ‘Inclusive citizenships: realizing the potential.’ Citizenship Studies
11(1): 49–61.
Macklin, A. and F. Crépeau (2010). Multiple Citizenship, Identity and Entitlement
in Canada. IPRR Study. Montreal, Institute for Research on Public Policy. No
6: 1–33.
Malkki, L. (1992). ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the
Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.’ Cultural
Anthropology 7(1): 22–44.
Mamdani, M. (2004). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the
Roots of Terror. New York, Pantheon.
Marfleet, P. (2006). Refugees in a Global Era. Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan.
Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Massumi, B. (2005). ‘Fear (the Spectrum Said).’ Positions 13(1): 31–48.
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Context. New York, Routledge.
McGhee, D. (2005). Intolerant Britain? Hate, Citizenship and Difference. Maidenhead,
Open University Press.
McGhee, D. (2005). ‘Patriots of the Future? A Critical Examination of Community
Cohesion Strategies in Contemporary Britain.’ Sociological Research Online
10(3).
Meer, N. (2010). Citizenship, Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Basingstoke
and New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Meer, N. and T. Modood (2014). ‘Cosmopolitansim and Integrationism: Is British
Multiculturalism a “Zombie”Category?’. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and
Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2013.875028.
Mercer, D. (2003). ‘“Citizen Minus”?: Indigenous Australians and the Citizenship
Question.’ Citizenship Studies 7(4): 421–445.
Mignolo, W. (2013). Citizenship, Knowledge and the Limits of Humanity.
Presented at Citizenship held 4–5th July 2013 organised by the BSA Theory
Group and held at the Birmingham Midland Institute in Birmingham, UK.
Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Mongia, R. V. (1999). ‘Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport.’
Public Culture 11(3): 527–556.
Morris, J. (2005). Citizenship and Disabled People: A Scoping Paper Prepared for
the Disability Rights Commission. London: 1–48.
Muller, B. (2010). ‘Unsafe at Any Speed? Borders, Mobility and “Safe Citizenship”.’
Citizenship Studies 14(1): 75–88.
Nagel, J. (1998). ‘Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the
Making of Nations.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 21: 241–269.
Nyers, P. (2006). ‘The Accidental Citizen: Acts of Sovereignty and (un)Making
Citizenship.’ Economy and Society 35(1): 22–41.
192 Bibliography

O’Hagan, A. (2006). ‘Short Cuts’. London Review of Books, London.

Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality, Duke
University Press.
Pannett, M. L. (2011). Making a Liveable Life in Manchester: Doing Justice to People
Seeking Asylum. School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture. Manchester,
University of Manchester. DPhil.
Paul, K. (1997). Whitewashing Britain. Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era. New
York, Cornell University.
Perucci, T. (2009). ‘The Red Mask of Sanity: Paul Robeson, HUAC, and the Sound
of Cold War Performance.’ The Drama Review 53(4): 18–48.
Phillips, A. (2007). Multiculturalism without Culture. Princeton, Princeton
University Press.
Pitcher, B. (2009). The Politics of Multiculturalism. Basingstoke, Palgrave
MacMillan.
Ranger, T. (1996). ‘Introduction.’ in T. Ranger, Y. Samad and O. Stuart (eds),
Culture, Identity and Politics. Aldershot, Avebury: 1–25.
Salter, M. B. (2006). ‘The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of
the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics.’ Alternatives: Global, Local,
Political 31(2): 167–198.
——. (2008). ‘When exception becomes the rule: border, sovereignty, and citizen-
ship.’ Citizenship Studies 12(4):365–380.
Sassen, S. (2006). ‘The Numbers and the Passions are Not New.’ Third Text 20(6):
635–645.
Schinkel, W. (2010). ‘From Zoepolitics to Biopolitcs: Citizenship and the
Construction of “Society”.’ European Journal of Social Theory 13(155): 155–172.
Schinkel, W. and F. van Houdt (2010). ‘The Double Helix of Cultural Assimilationism
and Neo-liberalism: Citizenship in Contemporary Governmentality.’ The British
Journal of Sociology 61(4): 697–715.
Shachar, A. (2007). ‘The Worth of Citizenship in an Unequal World.’ Theoretical
Inquiries in Law 8: 367–388.
Soysal, Y. (1995). Limits of Citizenship. Migrants and Post-national Membership in
Europe. Chicago, University of Chicago.
Sparke, M. (2006). ‘A Neo-liberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of
Citizenship on the Border.’ Political Geography 25(2): 151–180.
Stasiulis, D. and D. Ross (2006). ‘Security, Flexible Sovereignty, and the Perils of
Multiple Citizenship.’ Citizenship Studies 10(3): 329–348.
Stephens, A. C. and V. Squire (2012). ‘Politics through a Web: Citizenship and
Community Unbound.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30(3):
551–567.
Suvarierol, S. (2012). ‘Nation-Freezing: Images of the Nation and the Migrant in
Citizenship Packages.’ Nations and Nationalism 18(2): 210–229.
Sweet, F. W. (2005). Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the
One-drop Rule. Palm Coast, Backintyme Publishing.
Tate, J. W. (2009). ‘John Howard’s “Nation”: Multiculturalism, Citizenship and
Identity.’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 55(1): 97–120.
Torpey, J. (2000). The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the
State. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Turner, B. S. (2007). ‘The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility.’
European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 287–303.
 Bibliography 193

Turner, B. S. (2009). ‘T. H. Marshall, Social Rights and English National Identity.’
Citizenship Studies 13(1): 65–73.
Turner, V. (1987). ‘Betwixt and between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.’
in L. C. Mahdi, S. Foster and M. Little (eds), Betwixt and between: Patterns of
Masculine and Feminine Initiation. Peru, Illinois, Open Court Publishing.
Tyler, I. (2006). ‘“Welcome to Britain”: The Cultural Politics of Asylum.’ European
Journal of Cultural Studies 9(2): 185–202.
Tyler, I. (2010). ‘Designed to Fail: A Biopolitics of British Citizenship.’ Citizenship
Studies 14(1): 61–74.
Tyler, I. (2013). Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal
Britain. London, Zed Books.
Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond Societies. London, Routledge.
van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. London, Routledge.
Vink, M. P. and G.-R. de Groot (2010). ‘Citizenship Attribution in Western Europe:
International Framework and Domestic Trends.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies 36(5): 713–734.
Walby, S. (1994). ‘Is Citizenship Gendered?’ Sociology 28(2): 379–395.
Walters, W. (2002). ‘Deportation, Expulsion and the International Police of
Aliens.’ Citizenship Studies 6(3): 265–292.
Walters, W. (2004). ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics.’ Citizenship Studies
8(3): 237–260.
Ware, V. (2012). Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR Country (Migration, Diasporas
and Citizenship). Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan.
Weber, C. (2012). ‘Design, Translation, Citizenship: Reflections on the Virtual
(De)territorialization of the US-Mexico Border.’ Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 30(3): 482–496.
Wimmer, A. and N. Glick Schiller (2002). ‘Methodological Nationalism and
Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences.’ Global
Networks 2(4): 301–334.
Wright, P. (1985). On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary
Britain. London, Verso.
Yuval-Davis (2008). ‘Intersectionality, Citizenship and Contemporary Politics of
Belonging.’ in B. Siim and J. Squires (eds), Contesting Citizenship. London and
New York, Routledge: 159–173.
Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and Nation. London, Sage.
Index

Aboriginals, 16, 48–50 Australia Day, 49–50, 63

Act of Settlement and Removal, 21, 22 Australian Citizenship Code, 53
Africa, 24 Australian Human Rights
African Americans, 15, 17, 47, 48, 175 Commission, 45
Agamben, Giorgio, 23, 31
agency, 5, 46, 153 banal nationalism, 19, 53, 101,
airlines, carrier liability of, 76 172
Aliens Act, 21–2 Barbero, Iker, 3, 13, 24, 77
American Dream, 43–4, 46, 47, 71, Belgium, 80
117 belonging, 4–5, 10, 11, 13, 16, 69–70,
American identity, 57 79, 101–3, 110, 129–36
Anderson, Benedict, 19 Benhabib, Seyla, 14–15
Angel Island, 41 Bhabha, Homi, 177
anti-apartheid movement, 5 Biblier Coutin, Susan, 46
anti-citizens, 3, 13, , 36, 77, 82, 114, Billig, Michael, 19, 53, 101 172
126 biopolitics, 19–20, 25, 26
anti-immigration see immigration, birth rate, 20
anti-immigration Blunkett, David, 138–9
Aptekar, Sofya, 43 borders,
Arendt, Hannah, 13–14, 16, 22, 23, anxiety around, 30
24, 60, 172, 180 as state of exception 31
assimilation, 7, 23, 78, 80, 127 control of, 8–9, 11, 14, 19, 20-1,
asylum seekers, 24, 30, 33–5, 45, 59, 25–36, 31, 36, 41, 42, 76–7, 91,
81, 82, 91, 99, 115, 116, 118, 130, 108, 172
136, 142, 150, 158–9, 164–7 crossings, 1, 3–6, 7, 14, 21, 30–1,
Austin, J. L., 65 49, 74, 77,126, 127, 136, 137,
Australia 171
Aboriginals in, 16, 48–50, 53, 62, 71 death at, 6, 77
asylum seekers and, 33–4, 45, 59 EU, 76–80, 122
citizenship ceremonies, 2, 8, 9, 39, racialised, 31
45, 49–50, 53–4, 58–9, 62–3, 67, rebordering, 9, 32, 74, 76-77, 174,
175 174
immigration to, 38–9, 45, 48–9, smart, 21
58–9, 172 bounded citizenship, 12–37
Nationality and Citizenship Act, Britain, see United Kingdom
48, 62 British citizenship, 2, 27–8, 120–9,
naturalisation in, 61 136–40, 176
oath of citizenship in, 62–3, 64, 65 British Museum, 72
Stolen generation 49 Brown, Gordon, 160
Torres Strait Islanders 49, 53, Brown, Wendy, 32, 33, 77, 172
62White Australia policy, 26–7, Burlingame Treaty, 27
45, 48–9, 58 Bush, George W., 31, 57–8

195
196 Index

Cameron, David, 78 European, see European citizenship

Canada, 2, 9, 18, 38 See also gender
citizenship, 50–1, 64 genocide and, 23
citizenship ceremonies, 8, 9, 39, global, 11, 171–2
44–5, 50, 52, 53, 64, 66, 67, 175, inheritance of, 4, 18-16, 17-18
180 illegality see migration and illegality
First Nations people in, 18, 50–1, 71 multi-layered, 101
History, 18, 28-9, 50-1, 64 nation-state, 3–4, 12, 13-15, 16, 19,
immigration to, 27–8, 38–9, 44–5, 20-21, 23, 31, 39, 108
50–1 oaths of, 59–67, 70, 71, 147–9
national narrative, 41, 44, 50-1, 64 participation and, 129–36, 146, 168
naturalisation in, 61 probationary, 6
oath of citizenship in, 59, 62, 63–4, questions of, 12
66 racialisation of, 3, 4, 16-17, 18–19,
oath and wearing the niquab, 59 22, 24, 26–9, 36, 41 see also
support for migrants, 176 racialisation
US border with, 21, 32 reasons for applying for, 120–9
Canadian Citizenship Act, 64 rights of, 3, 6, 14–15, 16, 17, 22, 23,
Cassar, Antoine, 1, 12 24, 29
ceremonies, of citizenship, see routes to, 4, 108–37
citizenship ceremonies securitised, 30–6
Ceuta, 76, 179 sexual, 16, 20
Chatterjee, Partha, 22–3, 178 studies, 8, 39
Chavez, Leo R., 58 tests, 59, 74, 80–3, 174
children citizenship acts, 5–6, 127, 146,
citizenship of, 17–18 173
forced removal of Aboriginal, 49 citizenship ceremonies, 1–5, 7–11, 40,
Chinese Exclusion Act, 27, 41 108–9, 175–6
Chinese immigration, 27, 73 attitudes toward, 54
Chinese, racism against, 27, 42, 178 in Australia, 39, 45, 49–50, 53–4,
citizens 58–9, 62–3, 67, 175
ideal/good, 7, 13, 25, 31, 41, 42–3, in Canada, 39, 44–5, 50–1, 53, 64,
85, 114 67, 175
neurotic, 32–3, 36, 58, 59 in Europe, 2, 9–10, 72–107
new. see new citizens identity and, 67–70
second-class, 13–19 in Ireland, 72–4, 84–5, 86–92
rational, 20, 22 in Netherlands, 85, 103–6, 107
securitized, 30-6 new citizens views of, 10–11, 109,
without frontiers, 5 110–14, 140–7
citizenship oaths of citizenship during, 59–67,
belonging and, 101–3, 129–36 70, 71, 147–9
biopolitics and, 25 as rites of passage, 51–9, 70
bounded, 12–37 symbolism of, 2, 85, 94–5, 170–1
class and, see class in United Kingdom, 2, 39–40,
of children, 17–18 73, 84–6, 92–103, 107, 138–40,
coloniality and, 3, 25–30, 36 149–59, 174-5
construction of, 3–4, 5, 1213, 18–19 in United States, 38, 39, 45–8, 52–3,
disability and, 17, 45, 177 55–9, 66–70, 175
deportation and, see deportation welcoming and, 30, 95–101,
see dual citizenship, 80 138–40, 173–4, 176
 Index 197

civic nationalism, 14 Fortess Europe, 174

civil society, 16 Fortier, Anne Marie, 9, 139
Civil War, U.S., 27 Foucault, Michel, 19–20,
class differences, 3, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 25, 26
21, 23, 26, 118, 134, 136, 162, 165 Fourteenth Amendment, 27, 47
Cobain, Ian, 178 France, 22
Cohen, Robin, 28 Frontex, 76, 181
colonialism, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12, 19–20,
22–30, 36, 73, 90, 91, 105, 130, Gedalof, Irene, 35
172, 175 gender, 3,4, 16-18, 20, 22
Convention on the Elimination of All citizenship and, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14,
Forms of Discrimination against 16-18, 20, 27, 48, 78, 81
Women (CEDAW), 17 interviewing and 113-4
Cyprus, 80 migration and, 81, 114, 116-8,
136,
de Groot, Gerard-Rene, 78, 79, 182 military and 16
deportation, 7, 24–6, 67, 71, 76, 77, rights and, 3, 15, 16-18, 23, 24, 48,
91, 172, 178 59, 78, 172, 177
Derrida, Jacques, 24, 30, 151, 158, genocide, 20, 23, 50, 70
164, 171 Germany, 23, 78
dis/ability, 17, 20, 23, 45, 177 Gilroy, Paul, 178
documentation, 17, 20, 22, 28, 30, 31, Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, 17
32, 121, 127, 128, 135, 150-2, 172 global citizenship, 11, 171–2
domopolitics, 9, 34–6, 42, 44, 47, 49, globalisation, 35, 72-3, 90, 104, 108,
102, 139 136, 171-172, 175
Douglas, Mary, 30 Glover, David, 22
dual citizenship, 7, 25, 61, 64, 79, 80, Good Friday Agreement, 88
120, 177, 151, 182 Goulbourne, Harry, 29
China and, 120, 135-6 governmentality, 8–9, 25–31
India and, 135 Greenpeace, 5
Netherlands and, 79 Grillo, Ralph, 77–8
United States in the, 61, 64 Guantanamo Bay, 34
Duffy, Gillian, 160, 163
Dutch citizenship, see the Netherlands Hansen, Randell A., 16
Hanson, Pauline, 58
Ellis Island, 40, 41, 42, 43, 179 Harper, Mark, 83
European citizenship, 9, 15, 22, Harries, Bethan, 40, 156, 179,
74–80, 85, 94, 120–9, 168 180
European Commission, 75 heteronormativity, 16, 17, 20, 35
European Union homeland security, 32, 33 34
borders, 76–80 Hong Kong, 134
citizenship ceremonies in, 2, 9–10, hospitality, 11, 42, 96, 151, 158 164,
72–107 170, 171, 174
deportation regime, 77 Derrida and, see Derrida
multiculturalism in, 77–8 hot nationalism, 53, 172
rebordering of, 74, 76–7 Howard, John, 49
exile, 19 Huig, Dieurwertje Dyi, 75, 183
Humane Borders, 6
First Nations people, 50–1 human rights, 23
flags, 2, 53, 40, 44, 66, 68, 103, 94, 172 Hunter, Colin, Jr., 49–50
198 Index

identity, 4, 13–14, 16, 30, 57, 59, invented traditions, 8, 14, 60, 168
67–70, 79, 83, 85, 95, 98, 101, Iran, 57
108, 127, 128–9, 131, 135 Iraq, war in 124
documentation and, 20, 22, 28, 32, Ireland
68, 121, 127, 150 asylum seekers in, 91
identity, national, see national border with US and, 32
identity Citizenship and Nationality Act, 88
imagined communities, 19, 20, 73, 88 citizenship ceremonies, 2, 9–10,
immigration, 72–4, 84–92
anti-immigration, 10, 11, 22, 30-1, citizenship referendum, 79
33, 58, 77, 93, 99, 131, 140, 154, emigration and, 9, 72-73, 88-9, 90
159, 161-6 history of, 88, 90–1
Australia and, 45, 48–9, 53, 58–9, 70 see also immigration and,
Canada and, 44–5, 50–1, 70 language and, 89
control of, 9, 22, 25–6, 27, 29, 30–6, national narrative, 72–3, 88, 90 173
38-9, 74, 107, 161 naturalisation in, 78–80, 84
Europe and, 74, 76, 77-8, 79, 80, 83 Irish diaspora, 73
experience of, 90, 114–20, 149–59, Isin, Engin, 5, 6, 12–13, 16, 32
168 Islamophobia, 25, 31, 58, 59, 77, 78,
illegality and, 3, 5, 24, 32, 34, 42–3, 157, 162, 166 174
71 Italy, 80, 88, 182
Ireland and, 73, 79, 86-8 ius sanguinis, 16, 18, 78, 79
Netherlands and, 74, 79, 80–1, ius soli, 16, 28, 29, 78, 79, 88
103-4
public politics and, 8, 77-8, 82, 107, Jay Treaty, 18
110, 125, 140, 160–8, 169, 176 Jewish refugees, 22, 23, 98, 99
race and, see racialisation Jim Crow laws, 15, 47
regimes of, 2,3, 26, 27, 35, 150, 172, Johnson, Gary R., 44
174 Jones, Katherine, 180
regulations, 3, 18, 26–9, 35–6, 41, Joppke, Christian, 80
79, 95, 98-9
United Kingdom and, 29, 74, 82-3, Kaplan, Amy, 34
95, 98-9, 115 Kapur, Ratna, 7
United States and, 26–9, 40–858, Keating, Paul, 58
70,, 160-8 Kenney, Jason, 59
immobility, see mobility Kerber, L. K., 18, 26, 127
imperialism, 22–3 Kidwai, Nadia, 40, 180
see also colonialism Kostakopoulo, Dora, 76
see also racialization and empire Kushner, Tony, 98, 99
India, 27–8, 29, 42, 130-1, 152, 178,
183 Liminality, 21, 52, 54, 55, 68, 69, 84
Overseas citizen of 135 Lords lieutenant, 93, 183
Indian Citizenship Act, 15
indigenous peoples, 39, 47–50, 51, 58, Magna Carta, 21
70, 175 Malcolm X, 26
see also Aboriginals; Native Malkki, Liisa, 21
Americans Manus Island, 34
International Organisation for Marshall, T. H., 14, 15, 177
Migration (IOM), 77 Massumi, Brian, 32–3
 Index 199

McGhee, Derek, 82 see also gender and

Melilla, 76, 179 see also citizenship and
Mercer, David, 48–9 borders of, 8, 9, 20–1, 26, 30–6, 172
Merkel, Angela, 78 see also borders
Methodological nationalism, 4 as family, 16, 49, 170–1
Mignolo, Walter, 26, 36 formation of, 12, 19, 22imperialism
Migrants 1, 3, 7, 23,30, 35, 36, 39, 46, and, 22, 28, 39, 172
73, 76-7, 90, 95, 111-2, 118, 153, legal framework of, 36, 75 108
155, 157, 163, 179, 181 membership and, 13, 20, 37
see also immigration mobility and, 19–25, 136
contribution of, 43, 48, 161, 166–8 Native Americans, 4, 15, 18, 26–7,
good vs. bad, 31, 42–3, 58, 164–6 40–1, 47, 48, 50, 51 175
integration of, 7, 80–1, 107–8, 91, 176 naturalisation, 4, 12, 13, 15, 19, 39,
undocumented, 3, 5, 24, 32, 34, 61, 72, 74, 78–80, 101, 110
42–3, 71, 77, 78 164–5, 166–7 British Empire and, 61
military, 16–17 See also citizenship
Minutemen, 5–6, 41, 42 Ceremonies see citizenship
mobility, 4–7, 14–15, 17, 19–25, 85, ceremonies
108, 178 Ireland and, 86, 87
see also border crossings Netherlands and, 76, 106
of Aboriginals, 49 United Kingdom and, 114
control of, 8–9, 18, 30–6, 82, 160 United States and, 27, 42-3, 47, 48, 180
immobility, 7, 35-6 Netherlands, 173
internal mobility, 21 citizenship ceremonies, 2, 10, 85-6,
Mongia, Radhika Viyas, 27–9, 178 103–6, 107
Morocco, 76, 77 citizenship testing in, 80–3
Morris, Jenny, 177 dual citizenship and, 79
multiculturalism, 2, 7, 11, 31, 50, 58, immigration to, 74, 80–1
74, 77, 78, 80, 87, 90, 103, 156, naturalisation in, 79, 80–1
171, 174, 175, 176 Wet Inburgering Nieuwkomers
in Australia, 58-9, 62 (WIN) scheme, 81
in Canada, 67 neurotic citizen, see citizennew
in the UK, 82, 119, 140, 174 citizens, 6, 7, 43
multi-layered citizenship, 101 official ceremonies for. see
Murray, LesMuslims, 25, 58, 77, 78 citizenship ceremonies
perspectives of, 10–11, 109–14,
national citizenship, 3–4, 12, 108 129–36
national identity, 4–5, 13–14, 16, 79, reasons for applying for citizenship
83, 85, 128–9 of, 120–9
nationalism, 14, 19, 53, 172 responses of, to citizenship, 140–7
national narratives, 40–1, 43–4, 46–7, sense of belonging for, 69–70,
70, 72–3, 173 129–36
see also national identity status of, 67–70
see also Australia, Canada, Ireland, welcoming of, 1, 11, 30, 95–101,
Netherlands United Kingdom, 138–69, 173–6
United States, niqab, 59
nation of immigrants, 26, 38-9 40–7, No More Deaths, 6
48, 70, 71 172–3, 175 Northern Ireland, 79, 84-5,88
nation-state, 3, 4, 5, 6, 171, 26 Ceremonies in, 143,162
200 Index

oath of citizenship, 40, 50, 59–67, 70, Robeson, Paul, 23–4

71, 84, 86, 91–2, 123, 147–9, 168, Roosevelt, Theodore, 180
170-1, 172 Rudd, Kevin, 49
Obama, Barack, 43, 46, 66, 179
O’Hagan, Andrew, 83 Shachar, Ayelet, 16
Ong, Aiwha, 35–6, 108, 134, 135 Salter, Mark, 30, 31
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 78
Pakistan, 29, 178, 183 Schengen Agreement, 32, 76, 79, 85
Pannett, Margaret (Lorraine) 158-9, 178 securitisation, 3, 7, 8, 30–6, 64, 175, 177
passports, 1, 17, 23, 28, 29, 31, 32, 49, segregation, 47-8
108, 110, 121–2, 123, 126-7, 130, Settler colonies, 2, 26, 28, 38-9, 48,
132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 151, 172 61, 70
pledge of allegiance, see oath of 7/7 bombings, 82
citizenship sexuality, 3, 14, 17, 18, 20, 36, 81,
Poor Laws, 22 105-6, 182
post-colonialism, 3, 26, 28, 73 Shatter, Alan, 72, 87–9
probationary citizenship, 6 slavery, 15, 27, 41, 47, 71, 175
smart borders, 21
Royalty, 10, 53, 62, 63, 64, 93, 94, 98, Soysal, Yasemin, 108
103, 140, 143, 147–8, 183 statelessness, 17, 22, 24, 25, 182
Racialisation, 26, 27, 31, 36, 90, 115, surveillance, 6, 19, 24, 32, 35, 36, 76,
155, 167, 172 77, 181
Immigration and, 27, 28, 29, 42, 45, Sweden, 80
48, 58, 70, 115, 136, 163, 174, 175
Empire and, 13, 19, 26, 28-9, 36, 41, Tate, John William, 49
91, 108 technologies of reassurance, 9, 36, 59,
Citizenship and, 2, 4, 8, 9, 12, 14, 83, 89, 106, 139, 175
16, 26, 47, 77 tolerance, 78, 80, 89, 99, 100, 102–3,
Nationalism and, 14, 18 105, 107, 157
racial state, 9, 13, 18, 19, 22, 26-9, 45 Torpey, John, 20, 21, 26–7
racism, 10, 11, 22, 26, 28, 46, 47, 48, Turner, Brian, 35, 177
51, 71, 78, 90, 98-9, 125, 140, Turner, Victor, 52, 54, 69
150, 154, 155–8, 161, 168–9, Tyler, Imogen, 32, 34–5, 166
174–5, 178
Reconstruction era, 15, 47 United Kingdom, 73, 81-3, 109-110
refugees, 22, 23, 35, 41, 91, 95, 98–9, See also colonialism
116, 120, 121, 142, 164 See also imperialism
Rigby, Lee, 139–40 citizenship ceremonies, 2, 9-11,
rights, 3, 6, 14–15, 16, 17, 23, 108, 39–40, 55–9, 73, 84–6, 92–103,
109, 120, 127, 135 107, 138–59, 174-5
claims of, 6, 128 citizenship testing in, 80–3
citizenship rights, 5, 6, 8-9, 12, history of, 22, 24, 29, 30, 32,
14-18, 22-4, 26, 28, 29, 34, 46, 74, 99–100, 173
75-6, 78, 79, 145, 171 immigration to, 74national
denial of, 26-7, 34, 35, 47-8, 49, 50, narrative, 72–3
62, 70, 91 naturalisation in, 78–9
see also gender oath of citizenship in, 147–9
see also race politics of immigration in, 160–8, 169
Rights of Man, 22-3 routes to, 114–20
rites of passage, 51–9, 70 sense of welcome in, 149–59, 174–5
 Index 201

United States van Gennep, Arnold, 51

border controls, 21, 32 van Houdt, 106
Canadian border, 21 Vink, Maarten P., 78, 79,
Chinese immigration, 27, 42 182
citizenship ceremonies, 2, 8, 9, 38,
39, 45–8, 52–64, 66–70, 175 Waldron, Jeremy, 15
citizenship regulation, 23, 29, 47, Wallace Goodman, Sara, 182
61, 64 Walters, William, 21, 24, 25, 34, 44,
Civil War, 27 139
Department for Homeland Security, Ware, Vron, 177
32, 34 War on Terror, 7, 82, 177
dual citizenship, 61, 64 Weber, Cynthia, 5–6, 181
immigration regulations, 18, 27–9, welcome, 1, 8,10–11, 30, 41, 65, 67,
42, 178 89, 90, 95–101, 106, 138–69,
immigration to, 26–8, 38, 40–8 173–6
Mexican border, 5–6, 41, 181 welfare state, 15, 159
Nation of immigrants, narrative of Wet Inburgering nieuwkomers (WIN)
26, 38,39, 41-47, 175 scheme, 81
Native Americans, 15,26, 41-2, 48, WikiLeaks, 5
51, 175, 179 Winter, Lucy, 181
naturalisation law, 47–8, 61, 64 Winter, Sophia, 181
oath of citizenship in, 60–2, 65–6 World War I, 23
racialized restrictions to World War II, 23, 103, 163
immigration, 42, 47 Wynne, Richard, 59
Reconstruction era, 15, 47
Slavery in see slavery Yuval-Davis, Nira, 29, 101
United States Citizenship and
Immigration Service (USCIS), 40, Zephania, Benjamin,
43, 53, 55, 61, 65 99–100