Immigration and the Worker Citizen

Abstract

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: In Chapter 3, Bridget Anderson argues for the importance of examining immigration controls as constitutive of citizenship as much as they constitute non-citizenship, and suggest that this can help us demythologise formal citizenship and move beyond an approach that takes migrants and marginalised citizens as competitors for privileges of membership. She argues that the myth of ‘full citizenship’ is linked to the moral value of labour, and is consequently a feature of debates on both migration and welfare benefits. Taking the EU citizen as the paradigm of the worker citizen, she emphasises the importance of an analysis that does not assume the differentiation between migrants and citizens.