Immigration Article of the Day: The Citizenship of Others by Muneer I. Ahmad
The Citizenship of Others by Muneer I. Ahmad, Yale Law School 2014, Fordham Law Review, Vol. 82, No. 2041, 2014
Abstract: The liberal notion of citizenship provides equality to all citizens, without regard to ascriptive or other differentiating characteristics. In this sense, citizenship promises to be dispositive of the treatment of all individuals who enjoy it; citizenship is uniform, unalloyed, and indivisible. These are the attributes of citizenship within a liberal national system, governing the relationships between citizens and the state, and among citizens within the state. But must these characteristics extend into the international realm, or may states choose to look beyond the mantle of citizenship when evaluating the citizens of others? And if states do choose to differentiate, and thereby discriminate, among the citizens of others, what obligations do those citizens’ states bear?
This Article considers two instances in which the formal equality of citizenship is jeopardized by discrimination on the basis of national origin (the place of one’s birth) and ancestry (the place of one’s ancestors’ birth). The first concerns the recent policy of India to subject U.S. citizens of Pakistani descent to differential treatment when applying for visas to visit India. The second concerns an ongoing political controversy in the United States around whether to grant Israel admission to the visa waiver program — which would waive the need for Israeli and U.S. citizens to apply for visas to the other country — while permitting Israel to continue to subject U.S. citizens of Palestinian or Arab descent to differential treatment. By deploying national origin and ancestry as proxies for national security threat, both cases violate American notions of equal citizenship, thereby implicating questions of U.S. responsibility to ensure the equal treatment of its citizens by foreign governments.
KJ