3 - More Difficult to Get, Easier to Lose, Less in Value

Summary

Chapter 3 gathers a variety of restrictive trends in the acquisition and loss of citizenship under the umbrella of “earned citizenship”, which is not a “right”, as in the liberal past, but “privilege”. “More difficult to get” and “easier to lose” are complementary sides of the same neoliberal-cum-nationalist logic of making citizenship more exclusive and conditional on the immigrant`s individual behavior and desert. Being neoliberal and nationalist in tandem, earned citizenship is the clearest expression of a neoliberal nationalism. Earned citizenship`s third element, to be “less in value”, seems to contradict the fact that a rich society`s “citizenship premium” (Milanovic 2016) has never been bigger than today. However, the same citizenship that re-nationalizing states have claimed to strengthen by making it more selective, has become internally devalued through its infiltration by immigration law and a neoliberal welfare-to-workfare devolution.