Citizenship, Political Engagement, and Belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States

Introduction

1 Introduction Deborah Reed-Danahay and Caroline B. Brettell The political engagement and political incorporation of immigrants is a topic of pressing concern in both Western Europe and the United States. Political incorporation entails not only naturalization and the rights and duties of legal citizenship, but political and civic engagement (or forms of “active citizenship”). While rates of immigration, and numbers of nonnative-born residents, are comparable between the United States and Western European nations, Europe has been slower to recognize both the presence of immigrants and the issues that immigration presents for newcomers and their host societies. The recent introspection about national identity and citizenship in Europe provoked by the fall 2005 demonstrations and political unrest in Paris, the London bombings in July of 2005, and the failure of France to ratify a new EU constitution in spring 2006 illustrate new questions being raised about what it means, for example, to be French or British. In the post-9/11 context of the United States, with a new Office of Homeland Security pushing for closer scrutiny of both visitors and immigrants, there are ongoing debates about immigration reform, border control, and the role of immigrant labor in the economy. On the streets of major metropolitan streets across the United States, thousands marched in April and May 2006 to protest various proposals (especially those of HR 4437) for immigrant reform and to plead for immigrant rights. Little dialogue between anthropologists working in Western Europe and in the United States has yet taken place, despite these issues that touch both sides of the Atlantic. There is, however, a growing body of work among anthropologists doing research in Europe on issues of immigration and citizenship, which complements the more established ethnographic traditions of research among immigrant populations in the United States (Foner 2003c). This book contributes to such a dialogue by bringing together scholars working on both sides of the Atlantic and exploring common themes in the experiences of immigrants within the institutional contexts of various nation-states. Two other recent books look comparatively at issues of immigration and citizenship (Tsuda 2006 and Portes and DeWind 2007), but not with a specific focus on ethnographic approaches. We explore the contributions that ethnographic studies “on the ground” can make to our understandings of current processes of immigration, political behavior, and citizenship.1 Anthropological studies of immigration underscore the need for an approach to political incorporation that looks not only at naturalization and the rights and duties of legal citizenship, but also at political and civic engagement (or forms of “participatory citizenship”).2 The chapters in this book focus attention on the social agency of immigrants as well as the structures in which they operate. There are formal legal and jural frameworks that determine possibilities for immigrant belonging or exclusion, and there are formal practices such as naturalization and voting. At the same time, there are “on the ground” vernacular practices employed by immigrants and those who come into contact with them. As Stephen Castles and Alistair Davidson (2000: 1) have aptly put it, being a citizen was until recently a “common sense” notion, that involved rights like that of voting and obligations like those of paying taxes, obeying laws, jury duty, and, in several European countries, serving in the military. Why, they ask, “this sudden interest in something that seemed so obvious?” (2000: 2). Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (1994) have pointed out, along similar lines, that after issues of citizenship fell out of fashion midcentury , political theorists were consumed with them by the 1990s. There was also a rise in interest in citizenship among anthropologists in the 1990s (see Verdery 1996), particularly those working among U.S. immigrant populations whose behaviors and experiences belied discrete notions of citizenship based on what Rogers Brubaker has called the “international filing system, a mechanism for allocating persons to states” (1992: 31). The view of citizenship defined by Brubaker as bounded and context-independent (29), or as an “abstract, formal construct” (30) must be rethought in the situations of real social actors and their behaviors. Although nations define individuals in terms of discrete citizenship categories, the ways in which citizenship is enacted, understood, and expressed may vary considerably. Several writers have distinguished between forms of citizenship that might be thought of as legal citizenship vs. participatory citizenship. Étienne Balibar (1988: 724) usefully makes a distinction between citizenship in its “strict sense”—“the full exercise of political rights”—and in its “broad sense...