Requiem or Revival?: The Promise of North American Integration

Chapter 14. Migration and Citizenship Rights in a New North American Space

Street protests across the United States and tense debates in the U.S. Congress have brought to the fore one of the unresolved issues of North American integration: migration. Proponents of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) argued that by bringing wealth and jobs to Mexico, NAFTA would stem the flow of undocumented workers to the United States. Migration was therefore largely left out of the NAFTA agreement. However, Mexicans have continued to travel to the United States in large numbers and under increasingly dangerous conditions, despite U.S. attempts to police its border with Mexico. Migration has thus become a contentious and politicized issue that threatens to undermine the U.S.-Mexico relationship. Contemporary debates on migration both resurrect issues of citizenship and mobility that were not directly addressed during the NAFTA negotiations and undermine assumptions about the primacy of the nation-state. Insofar as globalization raises questions about state sovereignty, borders, and governance, it challenges fundamental understandings of citizenship.1 While this outcome has prompted some scholars to express nostalgia for the nationstate , others have responded by developing new concepts of citizenship that capture these changes: postnational, transnational, and cosmopolitan.2 Much of this latter scholarship has used Europe as a reference point, which is 267 Migration and Citizenship Rights in a New North American Space christina gabriel and laura macdonald 14 14-8201-8 ch14.qxd 7/13/07 4:35 PM Page 267 understandable given that the European Union (EU) permits the free flow of workers among its member states. In this chapter, we examine regional integration , migration, and citizenship in the North American context. Like Europe, North America is a highly integrated region. Trade, investment , and production structures are all regional, as are both licit and illicit migration. But unlike the EU, political elites in North America resist designing institutions to facilitate political integration. New forms of citizenship and liberalized labor mobility have been largely absent from the debate on North American integration as formulated by state and business elites, policy communities , and even critics of NAFTA. Despite a growing consensus that economic integration has been one of the causes (at least indirectly) for increased MexicoU .S. migration, since the 1994 launching of NAFTA there has been little progress in efforts to clarify and strengthen mobility rights in North America. Discussions about deepening integration along these lines have, on the contrary, taken place against the backdrop of a politically charged and at times xenophobic debate in the United States on immigration and border control. Here, the logic of national citizenship and the closure of territorial borders have been reasserted through calls for an extension of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and the design of punitive measures to criminalize undocumented migrants. Yet even as this acrimonious debate is taking center stage, other understandings of citizenship are beginning to find expression within the North American region. Our chapter begins with a brief review of some of the trends and debates in the literature on globalization, migration, and citizenship. In the second section we review theories of regional integration and citizenship and note that the dominant theories of regional integration are heavily Eurocentric; as such, they do little to account for the problems of citizenship, migration, and integration that exist under NAFTA. These two sections frame the next, which reviews some of the proposals for migration reform that have been developed, whether for the United States or for the North American region as a whole. We argue that, although regional integration does indeed destabilize conventional models of citizenship, there seems to be no necessary relationship between regional integration and broader citizenship rights, such as mobility rights, as has occurred in the European context. Citizenship, Migration, and Globalization Theories of citizenship historically assume a direct and natural link between the nation-state and citizenship.3 The status of citizenship is, by definition, 268 Christina Gabriel and Laura MacDonald 14-8201-8 ch14.qxd 7/13/07 4:35 PM Page 268 linked to membership in a political community, which in modern times has been identified as the nation-state. Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson argue, however, that globalization has created new challenges for citizenship (never an uncontested concept).4 New forces—such as increasing crossborder mobility; the growing cultural, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity of national communities; and erosion of the power of elected governments to control the economy and to provide social rights...