Ways of Acquiring Nationality According to Paul Weill

Ways of Acquiring Nationality According to Paul Weill

Introduction

            According to Patrick Weill, citizenship has multiple dimensions which include legal terms which associate a person to a state or nation. The second definition is civic where citizens elect their leaders through democracy while foreign residents take part in national activities through other means. The third definition of citizenship is psychological where one has a feeling of belonging to a particular nation and gains emotional attachment, loyalty, and identification of that specific state. Membership, or rather nationality is created through an imagined community that stems from cultural and social belonging. This paper delves into discussing how the definitions of citizenship converge, coincide, and correspond.

There is often no correspondence between the three dimensions. The legal aspect, however, shown by national ID’s, passports, and is the dimension that confers nationality to the majority of the citizens in most states. The legal aspect is not dependent on any degree of participation of an individual in the civil and political activities; neither does it require them to have a sense of belonging. Weill states that the main attributes of citizenship at birth are jus sanguinis and jus soli. For a long time, these two regimes have brought about divergences amongst laws of nationalities as conceptions of nations that can be described as dominant, essential and varying.

Rodgers Brubaker linked jus soli with a national conception which was more open to individuals and gave them a sense of inclusivity. Brubaker contrasted the French jus soli to the jus sanguinis which is a German attribute, bringing out an ethnic concept of the definitions of citizenship which combined jus soli and jus sanguinis, respectively and restrictively reflecting them in the different countries, that is; French and Germany. The result was an embodiment of an expression of national-personal understandings that are more nation-centered, and more ethnocultural in Germany, and assimilationist in France.

Critiques of the Convergence of Nationality Policies

            Scholars such as Dorothy Solinger and Massey have raised reviews on the convergence of nationality policies, such as automatic jus soli. They hold the opinion that citizenship acquired through birth is without the consent of the person. According to the 14^th amendment of the U.S constitution, which was adopted in 1868, everyone who was born or naturalized in the U.S automatically become citizens of the country as well as the state in which they live. They assert that those who drafted the amendment had the intentions of institutionalizing mutual consent from the individual and the nation. In short, the scholars suggest that the clause should not apply to children born of illegal aliens in the United States.

Soysal and Brubaker carried out their historical investigations and argued according to philosophers such as John Locke and Montesquieu who assert that freedom of consent and will are collectively norms that reshape current polities. The philosophers’ argument, however, is contradictory to one of the definitions and dimensions of citizenship, which is the association of an individual and a state, to the legal and participatory one in which the individual actively participates in the political and civic activities of the country.

Brubaker concluded that citizenship and immigrants are balanced by national-self understanding rather than on a state or a group of people. Weill & Porter (104), however, disagree with Brubaker stating that jus sanguinis did not stem from Germany, but instead appears together with the jus soli rule which dominated Europe in the eighteenth century. It was Napoleon Bonaparte’s wish that jus sanguinis becomes the only way a person can acquire citizenship at birth. Human beings were hence associated with the Lord who owned the land in which they were born. Had Napoleon wish been granted, it would have been impossible for migrants to gain nationality in states where they were not born, hence discouraging migration.

Conclusion

Governments have set restrictions and requirements for one to acquire citizenship in their countries in a bid to reduce the number of immigrants. Governments also have the right to strip citizenship from a person who poses harm to their country. Ways of acquiring citizenship as well as revoking it have come up in many ways. Other governments have come up with definitions of who can be deprived of a country’s nationality and what a person can do to have their citizenship revoked. Countries that restrict eligibility for their citizenship do it with the aim of reducing the number of illegal immigrants and their descendants from acquiring citizenship. Another reason for nationality restriction is the fear of international terrorism. Countries like Canada and Australia have laws that allow stripping such terrorist immigrants or suspected terrorists of their nationality with ease. Reducing migration, however, has the potential of reducing immigrant citizens into marginalised groups or minority communities and in other cases, some individuals end up being made stateless.

Works Cited

Weill, P., & Porter, C. (2008). How to be French: Nationality in the Making Since 1789. Duke University Press Books.