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Should people be able to choose what country to live in?
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State citizenship is an outdated concept

To live in and contribute to a country is to be a citizen. The bureaucratic element of citizenship is a relic of a bygone era, not fit purpose in the 21st century.
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The Argument

What is a citizen? Legally, there is usually no requirement to live in, participate in, or adhere to the values of a country to be its recognised subject. In fact, it is often very difficult, if not outright unthinkable, for a country to challenge, let alone revoke an individual’s citizenship. Most native citizens will be have been born on their nation’s soil, but it is often possible to be a citizen without either being born there (immigrants), or perhaps without ever having lived there (2nd generation citizens). Regardless of their understanding of law, many vocally embrace their status as a ‘citizen’. This is because our idea of citizenship encompasses the tangible, social aspects: pride, community, contribution, national values. Still, worrying is the reality of citizenship as a purely a government ordinated mechanism that assigns legal and illegal labels onto people based on their ability to adhere to arbitrary bureaucratic procedures. At it's worst, it abstracts the rights of the individual on grounds of a nationalistic 'state identity.' It’s easy to see the necessity of these rules for the sake of national security, if nothing else, but recent examples of these mechanisms backfiring, or at worst, being applied maliciously, have troubling implications. Still topical is the UK’s Windrush Scandal. Under an imperative to create a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented migrants, the Home Office inadvertently detained and stripped the rights from many black Britons who had been living in the country for decades, on the false pretence that they- legal immigrants of the Windrush generation- were illegitimate.[1] The operation was riddled with admin errors and mismanagement but even when the system is functioning properly it is prone to exploiting people based on ethnicity and race; the ‘Hostile Environment’ policy has yet to be challenged, and visa checking algorithms have unfairly targeted minorities. If this is what citizenship means, it needs to be rethought; better still, reclaimed.

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Premises

Rejecting the premises

References

  1. https://www.jcwi.org.uk/windrush-scandal-explained
This page was last edited on Tuesday, 16 Mar 2021 at 12:03 UTC

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