Intergenerational Circular Migration

Victoria Ferauge on David Cook-Martin’s book on circular migration:

All of these things are described and documented in David Cook-Martin’s book, The Scramble for Citizens: Dual Nationality and State Competition for Immigrants 2013.

He uses the case of Argentina – a country that experienced mass immigration from two European countries of emigration, Spain and Italy.  His point is that this process of welcoming and assimilating immigration is not uni-directional;  it can be reversed in a process that he calls “dis-assimilation.”

“I argue that the citizenship link can be reconfigured because competitive dynamics have produced particular membership patterns that under propitious institutional and structural conditions affect individuals relation to states, the nation, and the resources they monopolize.  People assumed to have been culturally integrated and embraced by a nationalizing state are becoming differentiated along specific and significant dimensions.”

Interesting argument and, if true, easy to see how this might be a bit disconcerting for countries of immigration and downright destructive of a democratic nation-states ambitions to make and keep citizens.  Why?

The first my point is how it skews citizen equality in a particular nation-state that has traditionally been a country of immigration.  A US citizen who is born with the potential for another citizenship is in a much better position to emigrate then his fellow citizens who don’t have that possibility.   The former will find it easier to be globally mobile, while the latter must stand in line and apply often in vain for the right to enter another country.

An individual who wishes to emigrate back to his parents or grandparents country will find that the move is facilitated though that country’s citizenship law and he will arrive in that country, not as a migrant, but as a full citizen.  That is a pretty powerful incentive provided that there are other positive factors in that decision like good employment prospects.  Furthermore, since this emigration is facilitated by blood ties it:

1. Favors the children of more recent immigration those whose families are “native” for many generations wont have this option and
2. It’s not strictly about class or money  – a working class person can, at least in theory, take advantage of it just as easily as those Highly Qualified Migrants provided that an individual has the right parents or grandparents. However, Cook-Martin says that it is mostly the struggling middle-classes that take the opportunity.

The second (his point) is that it is the very act of seeking to claim that citizenship in another country changes people.  As they document and it is much easier to find that documentation with good 20th century record keeping the history of their families and the original move to another country, what started out as a purely practical exercise a “just in case” second passport becomes something else.   They create an emotional tie to the ancestral country.

He talks about this in the long chapter “The Quest for Grandmas Passport.”  As much as some of his contacts talked about how the second passport was “just a piece of paper,” a kind of hedge against the devaluation of their own nationality, they were going to a lot of trouble to get it.  Days, weeks, months of digging through archives to find documentation.  “Clients are emotionally overcome when a search is successful” and they are “thrilled” to have the proof in their hands.  Clearly, that second citizenship is “meaningful” to them, though their attachment is going to be very different from that of a citizen actually born and raised in the ancestral country.

Combine this with concerns over “citizens of convenience” and economic opportunities, we have further variants of instrumental views of citizenship.

Intergenerational Circular Migration