Constellations and Transitions: Combining Macro and Micro Perspectives on Migration and Citizenship

Abstract

International migration not only involves a crossing of territorial borders but also creates populations of foreign residents inside and expatriate citizens outside state territories. Post-migration settlement raises then the question of whether citizenship status will be reallocated in response to this process. In order to understand how citizenship regimes structure migration flows and, conversely, how migration impacts on citizenship regimes we need to go beyond comparative approaches that take independent states as units of observation and consider them in isolation from each other. In this chapter, I propose two epistemological moves. The first one is to broaden the context within which we study the citizenship traditions, laws and policies of states by examining intertwined citizenship constellations. The second move is to complement the dominant macro level perspective on laws and policies that control migration and access to citizenship with a micro level perspective on individual citizenship transitions and migration opportunities.