Between Interest and Ability – Reviewing the Possibilities for Dialogue Between the Citizenship and Crimmigration Scholarship

People’s increased mobility across state borders has greatly affected the institution of citizenship and citizenship policy. Dual citizenship, the ability of both women and men to pass on their nationality to their child, and supplementary changes in legislation establishing ius soli-based policies have been deemed to mark a liberalisation of citizenship policy within Western democratic states (Vink & de Groot 2010; Gibney 2013). While contemporary works on naturalization incorporate various factors possibly influencing an individual’s pathway towards and through the naturalization process (Huddleston 2020; Vink et al. 2013), the legal frameworks of destination countries have not been explored beyond the categorization of the laws on the books. This review finds that the contextualization of immigration law in its relation to criminal law has to be included in naturalization research in order to overcome a blind spot of the literature concerning immigrants’ lives before their application for citizenship. The determinants of whether or not an immigrant initiates the formal naturalization process are still largely invisible to scholars. Those who never attempt to acquire citizenship might differ significantly from those who try and fail to succeed. Socio-legal scholars of immigration and penality have observed the increasing entanglement of immigration law and criminal law, coining the term ‘crimmigration’ (Stumpf 2006; Sklansky 2012). Both systems of law are utilized to regulate membership: The former governs the entry and exit of persons across border, the latter regulates the conduct within a community (Stumpf 2011). The growing interweaving of criminal law and immigration law creates a legal framework able to control migration through the criminal justice system leading on the one hand to the criminalization of the immigrant and its behaviour and the usage of immigration law for criminal justice purposes on the other hand (van Berlo 2020). This paper utilizes a broad bibliometric analysis of 150 papers published since 2010 to enable a systematic review of the scholarship on naturalization and crimmigration. This first comparative review of the two fields alongside each other offers unique insights into (1) the non-existent dialogue between the disciplines, (2) the merits of extending the analytic focus of citizenship studies beyond the formal requirements for naturalization to include the relevant legal framework as well as (3) the limitations of viewing the acquisition of citizenship only from the moment of formal application onwards. The review finds that the perceived liberalisation of citizenship policy as indicated by the requirements for naturalization is set off by the increased exclusionary power of criminal and immigration law. The inclusion of crimmigration as a concept into naturalization research offers the opportunity to extend previous analyses of citizenship policy to evaluate not only the policies as they have been passed, but also in the context of the legal framework of the respective state. The exclusion of the legal context in which citizenship policies are implemented impedes scholars from discovering the factors determining an individual’s ability to naturalize.