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America, Germany, Israel: Three Modes of Citizenship and Incorporation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2010

David Abraham
David Abraham
Affiliation:
University of Miami School of Law
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Abstract

In today's liberal democracies, the “social question” and the “immigration question” have become entwined as rarely before. Elites and citizens alike ask who belongs to the national political and social community of the “we” and what belonging entails in the way of rights and obligations. Under the impact of unprecedented free mobility for both capital and labor and the crises of the social welfare state, the borders and bonds of citizenship have been changing, mostly weakening. This essay takes a preliminary look at how these two questions are intertwined in the United States, Germany, and Israel.

Type
Fixing America's Broken Immigration System
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Fall 2010 , pp. 123 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2010

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References

NOTES

1. Nonetheless, during the “transnationalism/globalization” of the 1990s, naturalization rates in the United States among those eligible dropped significantly: as low as thirty-five percent among eligible Mexican-Americans. Rates remained very high among other groups, however: over eighty percent among Korean-Americans, for example. For an assortment of reasons, rates are rising again.

2. See Abraham, David, “Solidarity and Particularity: E Pluribus Unum?” Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity, and Identities 6 (2005): 147–56Google Scholar.

3. Cohen, Jean, “Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos,” International Sociology 14:3 (1999): 246–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. See Aleinikoff, T. Alexander, Semblances of Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 478Google Scholar. This is not to deny that, as Ernest Renan observed, today's nation “is the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion” that go beyond any shared political principles or constitutional patriotism to create an inherited cultural identity. Renan, Ernest, “What Is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha, Homi (London, 1990), 19Google Scholar. Bernard Yack underscores that, alongside the ethnic nation myth of inherited cultural identity, there is a civic nation myth suggesting that “national identity is nothing but your choice: you are the political principles you share with other like-minded individuals,” in “The Myth of the Civic Nation,” Critical Review 10:2 (1996): 198. None of this is to deny the exclusions, racism, and discriminations that are part of American history and practice.

5. The Fourteenth Amendment defines citizens without empowering them and then proceeds to accord rights to all persons. See San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez 411 U.S. 11 (1973) and Jackson v. City of Joliet 715 F.2d 1200 (2000).

6. See Banting, Keith and Kymlicka, Will, Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies (New York, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. The German Constitutional Court has recently declared that the German constitution provides “a fundamental right to the guarantee of a decent humane standard of living,” literally “menschenwürdigen Existensminimums.” Sud Deutsche Zeitung (February 10, 2010), 1.

8. Bundesministerium des Innern, “Policy and Law Concerning Foreigners in Germany,” (2000), 54.

9. Still right about this is Freeman, Gary, “Migration and the Political Economy of the Welfare State,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 485 (1986): 51–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the recent essays of Miller, David, “Immigrants, Nations, and Citizenship,” Journal of Political Philosophy 16 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which stresses social cohesion as a prerequisite for redistributional politics.

10. Shas is a right-populist nationalist party of subaltern, mostly “Eastern” (i.e., North African and Middle Eastern) Jews, traditional and religious, organized around social-welfare demands and intense resentment of the European, laborist “elites” who controlled the Labor Party and the state for decades. Since the mid-1980s it has built a constituency that some argue “ought” to be socialist. See Fisher, Shlomo, “The Shas Movement,” Theory and Criticism 13 (1999): 329–39Google Scholar.

11. Shalev, Michael, “Liberalization and the Transformation of the Political Economy,” in The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization, ed. Shafir, Gershon and Peled, Yoav (Boulder, CO, 2000), 151Google Scholar. On these interrelated developments, see also Ram, Uri, The Globalization of Israel (New York, 2008)Google Scholar and Hirschl, Ran, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge, MA, 2004)Google Scholar.