Immigration Article of the Day: Interstitial Citizenship by Rose Cuison Villazor
Interstitial Citizenship by Rose Cuison Villazor, University of California, Davis April 29, 2016 Fordham Law Review, 2017 Forthcoming
Abstract: We think of American citizenship as a binary concept. There is citizenship, which is acquired at birth or through naturalization, and there is non-citizenship accounting for everyone else. I argue that this understanding is woefully incomplete. Conventional framing of citizenship has overlooked a different type of political membership: American national status. American nationals possess some rights of citizenship, such as the right to enter and reside in the United States without a visa. Similar to non-citizens, however, they cannot vote or serve on the jury. Thus, the status of American nationals reveals that there are individuals who are neither citizens nor nor-citizens or “aliens.” Instead, they have what I have coined “interstitial citizenship.” Disrupting the citizen/alien binary, interstitial citizenship demonstrates that citizenship is far more flexible than previously thought. Indeed, it reveals that citizenship rights may be unbundled and conveyed to non-citizens. In this way, interstitial citizenship offers important legal and policy implications for contemporary debates on comprehensive immigration reform, including the question of whether to provide undocumented immigrants with a path to citizenship.
KJ