Flophouse Citizenship & International Migration Reading List

One of the worst days of my life was when I realized that one lifetime would not be enough to read all the books I wanted to read and to research all the topics I wanted so desperately to learn more about.

However, having realized this, I strengthened my resolve to make the best use of the limited time available to me.  I am blessed with good friends who are willing to recommend books to me (and willing to put up with my rather argumentative nature) and I have learned to carefully read the bibliographies of recommended books in search of other authors, themes, thoughts, and arguments.  Tracing the evolution of ideas is one of the most stimulating of occupations.  Sharing those ideas with others is pure bliss.

With that in mind, I assembled a short reading list of some of the sources I've been using.  I hope you find them as useful and interesting as I did.  I plan to add more since I am far from satisfied with my efforts to date.  If you have others to recommend, please, please do so via e-mail or the comments section.


International Migration in the Age of Crisis and Globalization by Andres Solimano (2010).
This is a very well-written, well-argued book.  The author is ambitious and confronts some of the most difficult topics around migration:  Why is International Migration Such a Contentious Issue?  Are Goods and Capital More Important then People?  Don't Always 'Blame' the North, and so on.

International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain edited by Caglar Ozden and Maurice Schiff  for the World Bank (2006)  This book contains a number of very interesting essays about the economic impact of remittances and brain drain/gain.  The editors point out that the potential for economic benefit for all parties (individuals and sending and receiving countries)  is substantial but policy decisions need to be made carefully (we are talking about people after all).

Gender and International Migration in Europe by Eleonore Kofman, Annie Phizacklea, Parvati Raghuram and Rosemary Sales (2000).  If you are looking for some empirical evidence (as I was) for how migration, immigration policy and citizenship rights have different outcomes and impacts for women, this is a good place to start.

International Migration and Citizenship Today by Niklaus Steiner (2009).  A very fine book on the political, economic and cultural impact of immigration.  He frames the discussion around two essential questions:  What Criteria to Admit Migrants?  and What Criteria to Grant Citizenship?

Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices edited by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer (2001).  This was one of the best books I read on the topic of citizenship with essays by Patrick Weil, Karen Knop and Richard T. Ford, among many others.   I particularly enjoyed (and will discuss in a future post)  Ford's contribution called "City-States and Citizenship" which was, for me, a real revelation.

The Politics of Citizenship in Europe by Marc Morje Howard (2009).  A really fine study of the citizenship policies of the oldest member-states of the EU.  Read this book to really grasp how citizenship laws have changed over time and the reasons why.

Qu'est-ce qu'un Français? by Patrick Weil (2002).  Mr. Weil spent over 8 years in the archives researching this book and it is fascinating.  France has been something of a test lab for just about every combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis citizenship possible.  Everything has been tried and tried again.  I read the book in French but it is also available in the usual places in English.

Aliens in Medieval Law:  the Origins of Modern Citizenship by Keechang Kim ((2000).  I've been meaning to write a post about this book since it has a very original take on the historical roots of modern citizenship.  I recommend it highly.

Let Them In:  the Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley (2008)  The author makes a very radical argument for simply opening the doors and letting people move where they wish.

Sunday Morning at the Flophouse

We are just coming off a leisurely three-day weekend (Whit Monday) and the weather was terrible with the exception of Sunday morning.  A good thing since Sunday is market day in the center of Versailles.  Let's retrace our stroll and I'll show you a few of the sights:

The pedestrian path on the Avenue de Paris which leads directly to the castle.

The Avenue de Paris is one of the largest avenues in France.  If you continue straight, it will take you to the Versailles Castle.  If you turn around and go the other direction, it will take you to Paris via St. Cloud.

Past the elder Frenchling's high school, La Bruyere

Two more days until the Bac.  The elder Frenchling has attended this school for the past 2 years which has a reputation for its Literature program.  I personally think it's one of the nicest looking high schools I've ever seen.  The architects did a fine job marrying the older and more recent parts of the complex.

And the police station

This is where we went when my papers were stolen.  I can attest to the fact that the exterior is much finer than the interior.  Given how pleasant and professional they were with me, I'd support a move to dedicate some tax money toward making the police station a lot more comfortable for the personnel. 

Pass through the Flower Market

One of my favorite places and I must keep myself under tight control when we walk through since I have been known to seriously warm up my blue card here.  Plants for the garden are to me what crack cocaine is to a drug addict. 

Wind through the stalls at the Notre Dame market

The Notre Dame market in the city center.  You can find just about anything here (including a pumpkin) and avoid the supermarkets entirely.

And here we are at "our" vegetable stand

We've been shopping at this vegetable stand for the past few years.  Very nice folks and their vegetables are impeccable. Anyone who says that good service is not to be found in the Hexagone never went to one of the markets. 

Flophouse terrace and garden

And home again to unpack the goodies and have a cup of coffee in the sun.

The People Paradox of Globalization

One theme in a book full of interesting ideas about global migration is what  the author of International Migration in the Age of Crisis and Globalization, Andres Solimano, calls "the people's paradox of globalization."   Goods and capital are highly mobile, people are less so.  Not all migrants, however, face the same challenges.  There is a category of people with special skills, knowledge, money and social connections who are not required to submit to the same immigration regulation as workers.  IT experts fall into this group, but also artists, healthcare workers, entrepreneurs, scientists, technocrats, and graduate students.  The European Blue Card, for example, targets precisely these people, hoping to entice them to migrate to an EU country as opposed to Canada or the United States.

So we are looking at a global market where regions or countries adjust their immigration laws to be in line with global market requirements.  The demand is high, the supply is limited.  Many of the targeted professions and skills require years of investment on the part of individuals and their home countries, but countries cannot really prevent this human capital from leaving and destination countries cannot force them to migrate to specific places.  As Porter would put it, "supplier power" is high while "buyer power" is relatively low.  This has some interesting consequences for both home and destination countries.

Home countries divert resources to build talent at home and to harness the productive power of their citizens:  tax relief, public education (in some cases this goes right up to the university level) and even regulatory environments that actively encourage people to become entrepreneurs, making it easy for them to start businesses, fail, learn valuable lessons, and begin again.  All these things create people with transferrable skills that can be used in many places and may, in fact, be in higher demand and thus better paid somewhere else.   A diploma, a good CV or the right experience is a ticket to participation in foreign labor markets which is probably not what the citizens of the home country had in mind when they agreed to subsidize such things in the first place.

What pulls these people to migrate?  Economics are certainly a factor but there are others that are just as important.  Solimano gives three examples:  entrepreneurs seeking capital that is more easily found in the destination country, scientists seeking grants and a collegial world in which to develop their ideas, and creative people seeking a more stimulating environment and the chance to be surrounded by peers who have already gained an international reputation.

The receiving countries, on the other hand, are usually delighted to bring in such talent.  Highly skilled immigrants are relatively few in number (about 10% of global migrants overall) but their impact is quite high.  Enough of an impact that the receiving country not only is willing to differentiate them from other migrants but is sometimes willing to offer them a better deal than ordinary residents and citizens.  Imagine the shock of some of my French friends and family years ago when they discovered that, as an employee of a recognized NGO in Paris, I was exempt from French income tax.

Is this migration of talent really a lose-win situation or can it be beneficial for all the parties concerned:  the individual and the home and destination countries?  I honestly think there are some benefits though I am painfully aware of my own bias on this topic.

Few migrations are "one way trips."  A talented individual may spend some years abroad and return to the home country wiser (one would hope) and with a wealth of new contacts, skills, experience and capital.  Even when he or she chooses to remain in the destination country, connections are created between the home and destination countries that mean new opportunities for collaboration between businesses, scientists, and creative industries (culture and the arts).

That said, selective immigration still makes me a bit queasy.  Over the years I have met any number of very talented migrants who, after coming into a country with very limited skills or severe handicaps compared to residents, have become great assets to their destination countries by providing important, even essential, services that nationals no longer deign to provide, by getting an education or training in areas desperately needed by the host country, and by starting businesses that create jobs for everyone.

Perhaps what is so disturbing to me about all this chasing after elite migrants is that it confers an advantage to already advantaged group of people based on what they have done in the past and makes a projection into an unknowable future about what they presumably will contribute. Potential untapped talent, I admit, cannot be measured so easily but we know it is there in people from all places.  They may simply need to be here rather than there in order to realize it.

Elite migration has its place but so do all the other kinds of migration.  I would not argue against special programs for the first but I would hope that we might do a much better job of valuing the potential and actual contributions of the others.

Tree of Life



Tree of Life from
http://www.betsytruedesigns.com/gallery.htm


This I liked very much.  The New York Times on-line has a page called Mixed America's Family Tree where Americans can construct a simple but elegant family tree complete with photos.  The design is lovely (a tree with colored leaves representing different national origins) and the site developers have made it child's play to use.  Hundreds of people have already submitted their family information.  Have a look.  There is no better way to see how mixed a country of immigration becomes after a few generations.

There was a time in my country's history when openness about one's mixed origins was rarer.  I distinctly remember my paternal grandmother talking about some of my ancestors with the air of someone divulging a closely held, not to be repeated outside the family, secret.  Now we have people, clearly proud of the diversity of their family tree, posting their genealogies on a website for all the world to see.  

Times have changed.  Today we can openly honor our ancestors and celebrate the diversity of the present generation.  This is the progress we have made and this, I believe, is how we will feed our dreams for the future.

There is no past, no present nor future. The present of the past is the memory. The present of the present is action. The present of the future is imagination.
Saint Augustin (354-430)
 From Jean-Jacques Auffret's "Quote of the Day" 

Shared Reality

Yesterday evening the residents of my apartment complex held their annual party, a chance for all of us to meet our neighbors over a kir right before the summer vacation.  We all have something in common living in the same complex and the organizers believe it is a Good Thing to know ones' fellow residents.

We have been here over three years and we have managed to miss every one.  Last year was an exception - I was coming back from a business trip and I was trapped in the corridor between two building by a woman who handed me a glass of wine and convinced me to stay long enough to have a conversation or two.

This year  I made a firm commitment to participate.  I even brought cookies baked by the Frenchlings.

Imagine my surprise when the first gentlemen I talked with at length who, after hearing that I was American,  explained to me that his son had studied in Seattle (my hometown) at the University of Washington (my alma mater) and had worked in California near San Francisco (my brother lives in Sacramento).

And the second person I spoke with, a woman with Spanish origins,  talked about being born in Algeria before independence (like my husband), coming to France as a teenager to pass her Bac, and her child who is presently working in Shanghai (a city I worked in when I was living in Japan).

Finally, the couple living just above us who moved in just a few months ago.  A Frenchman of North African origin who met a lovely Lithuanian woman in Sweden where they were both studying and now they live in France, have a son and they speak English at home and Arabic, Lithuanian and French.  Much discussion about multi-lingual environments and how hard it is to live a language at home when the the people around you seem ambivalent about your efforts.

I left the party basking in the glow of one too many kir bretons feeling truly humbled.  I had forced myself to attend thinking that I would finally meet more of my franco-French neighbors and discovered that: 1. they have as many (if not more) connections to the wider world as me and 2. our lives are like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram in spite of the fact that we were born thousands of kilometers apart.

Human beings don't only search for meanings, they are themselves units of meaning;  but we can mean something only within the fabric of larger significations...
Starting so far apart, we have, through painstaking back and forth, forged a language in common.  We keep describing the flow of experience to each other with the impetus to truth, and thus we keep creating new maps and tapestries of a shared reality.
Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation 

European Blue Card - Update June 2011

The Blue Card, an EU-wide work permit, was voted back in 2009 with implementation planned for Summer 2011 in all member states except the UK, Ireland and Denmark.

The new status would cover "any third country national applying to be admitted in an EU Member State to fill a job requiring high professional qualifications (engineers, IT professionals, medical professionals, etc.), including university students having completed their undergraduate studies." You can read more about the original proposal in the European Commission's Citizen's Summary here or Eur-Lex here.

Last time we talked about this it appeared that implementation was stalled in the participating members states' Parliaments and at that time there was no visibility on when or how their governments would start accepting applications.

Look like things are finally moving. Apparently Bulgaria is the first EU state to implement, Slovakia is right behind and the others are supposed to be ready by July 1, 2011. We'll see - the EU member-states are masters at the art of procrastination when it comes to implementing EU directives.

According to this website, Bulgaria started accepting applications on June 1, 2011. I was able to confirm on the Republic of Bulgaria National Assembly website that it was indeed adopted but I have been unable to find out how one goes about applying. A search of the official Bulgarian government website did not reveal more information. If anyone has a link, please pass it along. Another option would be to go through some of the private immigration services websites like this one. Please note that there may be some restrictions in the way Bulgaria is applying the directive. The Sofia Echo says, "The Bulgarian version of the law says that holders of Blue Cards issued by the country would be allowed to work only in Bulgaria for the first two years and only for the employer specified in the application for the card. After that, with Employment Agency permission, a card holder may change employers."

I also checked to see how far along France is in implementing. This site says there is progress but no definitive news yet.

That's it for now. If anyone has news from other member states, please post the information in the comments section. I'll be following this closely and will share what I find out.

Pledging Allegiance: U.S. Debate Over The Fourteenth Amendment

There are other citizenship debates going on in the U.S. parallel to the debate on dual nationality in France.  One concerns the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Like France the debate was launched at the initiative of the right-wing party.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1866 after the American Civil War and became law in 1868.  The full text contains no fewer than 5 sections but it is the first sentence in the first section that is causing all the fuss:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. 

That is what is says but the debate is over what it means and how it should be applied.  It has been broadly interpreted and applied by U.S. courts as granting citizenship by jus soli to all persons born in the U.S. even if their mothers were temporary residents of the U.S. or they were living in the U.S. illegally at the time of the birth.   If you consider that there are between 12 and 20 million undocumented residents, millions of legal residents and tens of millions of tourists, students, expatriated businessmen, artists and others passing through the United States every year, and if you assume that roughly half of them are women, that's a lot of potential jus soli citizens.  Let's look at a few of the arguments for and against:

Proponents of changing the law argue that the Fourteenth Amendment was never meant to grant U.S. citizenship to all persons simply because they were born in the U.S. The original intent was to ensure that all African-Americans born in the U.S. under slavery were citizens.   Undocumented and documented residents, tourists and children of ambassadors, have citizenship in and allegiance to another country and cannot be considered to be fully "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.  One website I saw cites Elk versus Wilkins as the basis for this interpretation which is a rather unfortunate example because in this case the court ruled in 1884 that a Native American born on a reservation was not subject to U.S. jurisdiction and was therefore not a citizen.

Supporters of the broad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment point out that in the case US against Wong Kim Ark the U.S. Supreme Court clearly said:

A child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States, by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

Much hinges on the meaning of the words "subject to the jurisdiction." Does this term mean that all persons living in the U.S. owing allegiance and with rights and responsibilities to a foreign state are not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S.? That might imply that the U.S. has no or limited jurisdiction over legal residents, undocumented aliens and perhaps even dual nationals living on U.S. soil. That seems rather silly and I doubt many Americans or the U.S. courts would agree with that interpretation. Or does "subject to the jurisdiction" simply define a category of persons like ambassadors or diplomats or government officials who are in fact clearly not under U.S. jurisdiction and cannot be tried in U.S. courts?  Opinions vary.

In my opinion both sides have good arguments and it's a debate worth having. To those who argue that the entire debate is ridiculous, I think back to the Frenchman I met in the U.S. Embassy who clearly did not wish to be considered an American citizen just because he was born in the U.S.

Which brings up what I personally find interesting about this debate.  All parties are studiously ignoring (or perhaps it would not even occur to them to think about) the whole question of the validity of what I have called on this blog "involuntary citizenship." This is where citizenship is simply granted to an individual through factors completely beyond his or her control and it includes both citizenship through blood (jus sanguinis) as well as citizenship by place of birth (jus soli). Neither requires the consent of the individual concerned - through an accident of birth, the state simply says that you are or are not a citizen and that individual keeps this citizenship all his life unless he or she decides to renounce it. And that seems a bit odd when you really think about it.

My question is this: is it unreasonable to consider that citizenship in a democratic nation-state should be based on explicit consent? That a minor child cannot be said to have pledged allegiance to any state? That regardless of the citizenship of the parents or place of birth, he or she is not a full citizen of any democratic nation until, as an adult, he or she consents to it?

That would really put the cat among the pigeons but it's something worth pondering as nation-states argue the finer points of jus soli and jus sanguinis.