Citizenship, Alienage and (Forced) Migration: Of, and for, precisely whom?

If citizenship is treated as the highest measure of social and political inclusion, can people designated as noncitizens as a matter of status be among the universe of the included? To be sure, citizenship is not a unitary or monolithic whole: the concept is comprised of distinct discourses designating a range of institutions and experiences and social practices that are overlapping but not always coextensive. Citizenship is indeed a divided concept. But the trouble runs deeper than the sloppiness of any rhetoric. In fact, the confusions of citizenship rhetoric are themselves a symptom of a more profound condition, one of substantive political theory. Citizenship is not just divided conceptually, it is divided normatively, and the ambiguities that plague any citizenship-talk often reflect this ethical divide. In this paper, I develop a moral philosophical account on why citizenship must conceptually and normatively be sensitive to asylum and forced displacement phenomenon. To begin with, I raise some criticism on scholars who have often treated the national society as the total universe of analytical and moral concern. They rely on the kind of analytical premise made explicit by Rawls, whose theory of justice presupposed a conception of a “democratic society [that is] a complete and closed social system.” In his most influential work, Rawls aimed to develop principles “for the basic structure of society conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies.” One of the problems with this assumption relates to its implications concerning forced displaced persons. In other words, Aliens’ lack of formal citizenship status has rendered them politically disenfranchised; they are formally ineligible for many aspects of “social citizenship,” or the public provision of basic needs; and they are always subject to the possibility of deportation from the territory. I contrast this ‘inward-looking’ citizenship view with one in which particular forms of inequalities and social subordination take place. I analyse how, precisely, disadvantage based on alienage is both like and unlike other forms of disadvantage. My claim is that the constitutive boundary maintenance, instead of excluding aliens’ rights as a condition for preserving a certain political community, must take their positive rights into account since their arrival. To substantiate this claim, I empirically demonstrate how Brazil has responded to Venezuelan large-scale displacement through massive ‘regularisation’ routes to asylum-seekers and economic migrants. By doing so, I develop a normative justification of a more inclusive approach of citizenship at, and from, the margins of Global South states.