If citizenship means membership in a polity, migration challenges this membership by bringing forward potential new citizens and alternative/complementary polities. Citizenship – and the related laws are a means for the parliaments to conceptualise for the citizenry: By ruling on the conditions for access, the parliamentary debate and the laws as the outcomes thereof (re)categorise the citizenry. The background of the individual defines what kind of procedures s/he’s subjected to in the road to naturalisation, but the granted legal status is all the same in the end.
In this paper, I will be concentrating on the conditions for accessing citizenship in the United Kingdom and, more precisely, the revised Nationality, Asylum and Immigration Act of 2002. I will be analysing the concept of citizenship in the context of naturalisation. The focus will be on parliamentary debates around the published White Paper and the Act itself, linking U.K. with the contemporary European examples.
