The Scramble for Citizens by David Cook-Martin

Author:David Cook-Martin [Cook-Martin, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804782982
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

SOURCE: Il Ministero degli Affari Esteri in Cifre, 2001–2009

An outcome of this competition over migrants was a pattern of migration and nationality law that suited each country’s objectives. Sending countries fashioned emigration laws to regulate the departure of its citizens, especially young men, children, and unmarried women; to offer protections from the risks of the migratory sojourn like financial exploitation by unscrupulous travel agents; and to control the identification and documentation of prospective migrants. In the domain of citizenship, countries like Italy and Spain resisted dual legal affiliations but tried to make policies that allowed migrants to keep their nationality, recover it easily, and critical for our purposes, extend nationality to the foreign-born children of nationals abroad. Although the ability to transmit nationality from one generation to the next depended on various regulations, it was possible in the Italian case to pass on nationality across several generations under some circumstances. Affectively, sending states, especially Italy, made efforts to foster a sense of national belonging among its citizens abroad through schools, migrant associations, and the Catholic Church. Receiving countries like Argentina wrote nationality laws that made it easy to acquire full political membership and offered exemptions from onerous obligations like military service. More importantly, these laws presumed that anyone born in the national territory was a citizen. Thus, sending and receiving nationality laws competed for the continued affiliation of migrants themselves but also for their offspring.

A second outcome of this competition over migrants and their descendants was administrative individuation by bureaucracies in the sending and receiving countries. A trail of papers formed in official files as governments in the past tried to identify individuals for the purposes of establishing a relationship with them, extracting taxes and military service, and controlling their movement as individuals reacted to these efforts.5 This residue of documents settled in local civil registries in sending countries and in receiving countries’ civil and immigration bureaucracies. In Italy and Spain, the departed left documentary traces in local municipalities as well as with port authorities. In Argentina, migrants left a paper trail in places like the Argentine National Migration Service and the civil registry. Contemporary applicants for a second nationality rely on this archival paper residue to support their claims on ancestral homeland states. Argentina has not taken measures to preclude plural citizenship among Argentines and has in fact made it an acceptable status as evidenced by easy access to documentation available in Argentine official repositories and by programs to reach out to Argentines abroad.

What patterns of nationality have emerged from how these countries competed over nationals in the past? Argentina defines citizenship much as it did during the era of substantial European migration, as attributable through birth on Argentine soil or a relationship that can be acquired through naturalization and a brief period of residence. A more recent development is that Argentina allows for dual nationality with many countries, including major destinations of Argentine migrants like Spain, Italy, and the United States. The children of Argentines abroad may acquire citizenship with relative ease if they request it before their eighteenth birthday.

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