Abstract
The literature on immigrant cultural citizenship (Ong, 1996; Rosaldo, 1997) has argued that traditional and normative definitions of citizenship ignore various forms of civic participation and belonging and fails to capture the experiences of immigrants in an increasingly globalized world (Getrich, 2008), calling for more nuanced and multiple meanings of citizenship. As agents of civil society, social workers have much power in constructing and maintaining (or resisting) normative discourses of citizenship, and how we participate in this process has material consequences for those we serve. Applying poststructural and postcolonial theories, this paper excavates discourses of exclusion and inequity that produce the idea of U.S. citizenship through a critical historical analysis of key U.S. immigration and naturalization-related policies and proposes immigrant cultural citizenship as a conceptual frame for re-imagining social work practice with immigrants.
Highlights
DISCOURSES OF CITIZENSHIPCitizenship, as the Western legal and social framework for promoting individual autonomy and political democracy (Shafir, 1998), plays a major part in distributing and restricting access to rights and resources in the U.S For example, currently voting rights, visa restrictions, and access to work and public assistance are all tied to U.S citizenship
Through a critical historical analysis of key U.S immigration and naturalizationrelated policies, this paper examines five interacting clusters of binaries that shaped U.S immigration discourses to demonstrate how they construct U.S citizenship as a discourse of exclusion and offers cultural citizenship as a more complex and inclusive conceptualization for understanding citizenship
Immigrant cultural citizenship as a conceptual frame may help social workers to critically evaluate the normative narratives of citizenship and help immigrants resist such discourses and claim their social and cultural space
Summary
Citizenship, as the Western legal and social framework for promoting individual autonomy and political democracy (Shafir, 1998), plays a major part in distributing and restricting access to rights and resources in the U.S For example, currently voting rights, visa restrictions, and access to work and public assistance are all tied to U.S citizenship. Ong (1996) contends that the control of a populace of a modern society is accomplished not by a single dominant force (such as the state power) but by a complex web of relations that regulate how one is constituted as a citizen-subject and that immigrant cultural citizenship is produced through “a dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society” Which the immigrant subject is produced within the constraints of the nation-state and civil society, and the practices through which immigrants create and claim their social, political, and cultural space in the society” Through a critical historical analysis of key U.S immigration and naturalizationrelated policies, this paper examines five interacting clusters of binaries (white/nonwhite; desirable/undesirable; native-born/foreigners; safe/dangerous; deserving/ undeserving) that shaped U.S immigration discourses to demonstrate how they construct U.S citizenship as a discourse of exclusion and offers cultural citizenship as a more complex and inclusive conceptualization for understanding citizenship
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