Citizenship acts: Legality, power and the limits of political action

Abstract

In the spring of 2006, between 3.7 and 5 million people took to the streets to rally for immigrant rights in the United States. They protested the House of Representatives’ passage of legislation that targeted undocumented residents and they called for a path to citizenship to bring an estimated 10 to 12 million unauthorized residents ‘out of the shadows’. The legislative bill, H.R. 4437, was defeated, a victory for the power and political voice of these immigrants and their allies. Yet comprehensive immigration reform remains elusive, and the millions of undocumented U.S. residents remain in the shadows of the law as deportations have climbed since 2006. What do these events teach us about citizenship, power and political action? This chapter draws on in-depth interviews with 43 Mexican-origin adults living in the San Francisco Bay area who were interviewed during the immigration protests of 2006 and in follow-up interviews conducted with a subset of respondents in 2008. These conversations show the power of protest-based ‘citizenship acts’ to energize and give agency to individuals often fearful of political action or insecure about their own political e?cacy. Such acts push the meaning of citizenship to include non-citizens and even undocumented residents. But the interviews and subsequent events also reveal the hard limits of such emancipatory moments. Protest fizzled after May 2006 and deportations rose. Asked to de?ne what it means to be a citizen, many respondents articulated a bureaucratic and defensive notion of citizenship in line with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service’s legal requirements, such as not breaking the law and showing good moral character. They also express the belief that good citizens do not cause problems. Put di?erently, the notions of formal citizenship articulated by those who live in communities where illegality is common rarely revolve around civic and political participation, despite the mobilization of 2006. We tie these beliefs to the disciplining force of legal rules for adjustment of status and naturalization and to fear over deportation. We also underscore that since legislative change must come from Congress - and only U.S. citizens can vote - the power of non-citizens’ disruptive citizenship acts can only go so far.