Public Sociologies Reader by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461641513
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2013-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

STATES AND MIGRATION

States, those territorially bounded sovereign entities that have played such a large part in the history of the twentieth century, play an equally important role in the lives of migrants. (We shall refer hereafter to nations, or nation-states, as states. This is a somewhat technical point in the literature on sociology and political science that deals with such phenomena. States represent, in effect, nations as actors, as organizations that continuously work to exercise their sovereignty both over their territory and their citizens.) States can act to control both who enters and who leaves their domain. Most importantly, as the sociologist Rogers Brubaker so effectively argued (1992), states are also membership associations: they determine who is a citizen and who is not. (Also see Gerard Delanty’s chapter in this volume.) And because of this they can exercise a great deal of control over the lives of individuals, grant them benefits, if they choose to do so, but also deny them rights if those individuals do not qualify, under the rules of a specific state, to attain citizenship.

The impact of state authority over matters of migration is thus considerable. A particular state can deny entrance to individuals, or more precisely, a class of individuals, if it chooses to do so. Moreover, states can also decide which residents are entitled to citizenship, and thus full protection under its sovereignty, and which are not. Not all states, however, use the same rules. Indeed, there has been considerable variation among states. in the use of particular criteria. For instance, until recently citizenship in Germany was based upon the rule of jus sanguinis: this meant that a person was considered a full citizen of Germany if she were related by blood to individuals who were German citizens themselves. Thus, even if someone did not live on German soil, but was in fact the descendant of someone who was German by birth, that person was also considered a citizen of Germany. The effect of such a rule was both expansive and restrictive. It meant that there were German citizens who were scattered across the globe and could, at any time, return and enjoy their full rights in Germany; yet it also meant that other people, many who had resided and worked in Germany for years as part of a broad program of GastArbeiter, or guest workers, were, despite their lengthy residence, not entitled to German citizenship, and thus deprived of the ability to exercise their full rights. This effect was particularly harmful to the hundreds of thousands of Turks who had come to Germany in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the guest worker program.

Other states had different sets of rules, however. The United States, for example, operated on the basis of jus soli: a rule by which anyone who is born on United States territory becomes a citizen automatically, even if her parents are not themselves citizens. This rule, in fact, applies to the children of many migrants, even those that are undocumented, or illegal.

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