Christian Joppke

How immigration is changing citizenship: a comparative view

This article compares the impact of post-war immigration on citizenship in three Western states: the United States, Germany and Great Britain. While focusing on national variations in the immigration-citizenship relationship, this comparison suggests some general implications for the institution of citizenship in liberal states: citizenship remains indispensable for integrating immigrants; the content of citizenship may change, in deviation from nationhood traditions; and citizenship is becoming increasingly multicultural.

Controlling a new migration world

Part I: Reforming Migration Control Part II: Linking Migration and Security Part III: New Migration World

Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization

Citizenship is one of the most ambivalent though busily utilized and expanded entries in the contemporary social science lexicon. Its ambivalence consists of its dual, and most often overlapping, function as analytical-normative concept to order multiple realities and empirical object of study itself, with a certain tendency of the first to eclipse the second. If a recent Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Isin and Turner, 2002) identified a good number of hyphenated citizenships, from “cultural,” “sexual,” and “ecological” to “cosmopolitan,” such “citizenship” is less a distinct and clearly demarcated object of study than a conceptual metaphor for a bewildering variety of rights-based claims in contemporary societies, particularly if raised by marginal groups.

The Legal-Domestic Sources of Immigrant Rights - the United States, Germany, and the European Union

This article traces the evolution of two types of immigrant rights—alien rights and the right to citizenship—across three polities (the United States, Germany, and the European Union). It argues that the sources of rights expansion are mostly legal and domestic: Rights expansion originates in independent and activist courts, which mobilize domestic law (especially constitutional law) and domestic legitimatory discourses, often against restriction-minded, democratically accountable governments. The legal-domestic hypothesis is qualified and differentiated according to polity, migrant group, and type of immigrant right.

Immigration and the identity of citizenship: the paradox of universalism

Among other things, modern citizenship denotes an identity that unites and integrates the members of a state into a collectivity. This paper investigates what kind of citizenship identities contemporary European states display and further in their citizenship and integration campaigns toward immigrants and ethnic minorities. It is argued that citizenship identities are increasingly universalistic, resembling the precepts of ‘political liberalism’ (Rawls) and ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Habermas). This is paradoxical because what states have in common can impossibly lend a distinct identity to them, binding people to this and not any state. However, especially in confrontation with Muslim immigrants, liberalism tends to transmute from procedural framework for toleration into a substantive way of life, with strong exclusionary and identity-forging implications.

Limits of Integration Policy: Britain and Her Muslims

This essay examines a paradox: while the British state has done more than other European states to accommodate the claims of Muslim minorities, recent polls have shown British Muslims to be more disaffected and alienated than other Muslims in Europe. This raises the question of the limits of integration policy, which is obvious but rarely posed. I argue that, more than reflecting an adverse reality, the neologism ‘Islamophobia’ has functioned as a symbolic device of the British state to recognise the Muslim minority. However, the policy focus on Islamophobia had two negative consequences: first, it deflected from the real causes of disadvantage; secondly, it fuelled the quest for ‘respect and recognition’ that stands to be disappointed in a liberal state. I take the latter to be the main limit of integration policy as revealed by the British case.

Exclusion in the Liberal State The Case of Immigration and Citizenship Policy

Recent literature on the ‘exclusions’ of the modern nation-state has missed a major transformation in the legitimate mode of excluding, from group to individual-based. This transformation is explored in a discussion of universalistic trends in contemporary Western states’ immigration and citizenship policies. Conflicting with the notion of a ‘nation-state’ owned by a particular ethnic group or nation, these trends are better captured in terms of a ‘liberal state’ that has self-limited its sovereign prerogatives by constitutional principles of equality and individual rights.

The Inevitable Lightening of Citizenship

This paper scrutinizes the paradox of the increasing objective yet diminishing subjective value of citizenship in Western states. The decreasing subjective value points to an inevitable lightening of citizenship, which persists despite states’ recent efforts to upgrade and re-nationalize citizenship by ceremony, civic integration tests, and more exclusive rights. I discuss some features of citizenship light, most notably instrumentalism and a dissociation of citizenship from nationhood. The recently court-empowered European Union citizenship serves as an illustration.

Legal integration of Islam : a transatlantic comparison

The status of Islam in Western societies remains deeply contentious. Countering strident claims on both the right and left, Legal Integration of Islam offers an empirically informed analysis of how four liberal democracies--France, Germany, Canada, and the United States--have responded to the challenge of integrating Islam and Muslim populations. Demonstrating the centrality of the legal system to this process, Christian Joppke and John Torpey reject the widely held notion that Europe is incapable of accommodating Islam and argue that institutional barriers to Muslim integration are no greater on one side of the Atlantic than the other. While Muslims have achieved a substantial degree of equality working through the courts, political dynamics increasingly push back against these gains, particularly in Europe. From a classical liberal viewpoint, religion can either be driven out of public space, as in France, or included without sectarian preference, as in Germany. But both policies come at a price--religious liberty in France and full equality in Germany. Often seen as the flagship of multiculturalism, Canada has found itself responding to nativist and liberal pressures as Muslims become more assertive. And although there have been outbursts of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, the legal and political recognition of Islam is well established and largely uncontested. Legal Integration of Islam brings to light the successes and the shortcomings of integrating Islam through law without denying the challenges that this religion presents for liberal societies.

Contesting ethnic immigration: Germany and Israel compared

After World War II, Israel and Germany adopted curiously similar policies of ethnic immigration, accepting as immigrants only putative co-ethnics. The objective of this article is to account for the main variation between the two cases, the resilience of Jewish immigration in Israel, and the demise of ethnic-German immigration in Germany. The very fact of divergent outcomes casts doubt on conventional accounts of ethnic immigration, which see the latter as deriving from an ethnic (as against civic) definition of nationhood. We point instead to the possibility of ‘liberal’ and ‘restrictive’ contention surrounding ethnic immigration, and argue that for historical and geopolitical reasons the political space for such contention has been more constricted in Israel than in Germany.