In Pursuing Citizenship in the Enforcement Era, Ming Hsu Chen depicts a shared sense of “citizenship insecurity” among immigrants in the United States regardless of legal status. Chen argues that such insecurity is a result of a climate in which excessive emphasis is placed upon the enforcement aspect of immigration laws “at the expense of membership and integration” (5). The book calls for a change in focus to the protection and promotion of citizenship and seeks a positive role for the federal government in providing institutional support to immigrants based on this “affirmative vision for citizenship and immigration law” (12).
At the outset (Chapter 2), Chen establishes four categories of immigrants according to their status along the two dimensions of formal and substantive citizenship. Chen considers both formal (legal) citizenship and substantive citizenship (social, legal, economic, and political integration) as an integral part of full citizenship.
In the two core chapters (Chapters 4 and 5) of this book, Chen reflects upon numerous participant observations and interviews (mostly conducted in Colorado) with immigrants from each of the four categories above and finds that in each category, immigrants face vulnerability, or “gaps in citizenship.”
First, Chen discusses those who rank high in formal citizenship. Within this group, there are those who also place high in substantive citizenship—long-term permanent residents (LPR) who are eligible for naturalization as well as military service members who have an advantage in the naturalization process; and those who place low in substantive citizenship—refugees.
Chen finds that, even among the privileged group of immigrants who rank high on both formal and substantive citizenship, there is a sense of insecurity due to the hostile climate toward immigrants. Chen finds a trend toward “defensive naturalization” in which naturalization becomes a tool for immigrants to protect themselves from hostility. That the Trump administration contemplated including permanent residents in its travel ban “underscored the tenuousness of anything other than full citizenship” for this previously secure group (69).
As for refugees, Chen finds that although they have access to formal citizenship and enjoy institutional support unavailable to other groups, there was ambivalence about their sense of belonging to the United States. Refugees from Middle Eastern and Muslim countries were fearful of intensified enforcement policy, despite reassurances that they were safe (82).
Chen then turns to the stories of immigrants who are placed low on formal citizenship. This group is subdivided into DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients, who, despite their undocumented legal status, mark high in substantive citizenship; and those with H1B visas (temporary workers) and F1 visas (international students), who mark low in substantive citizenship.
According to Chen, the income, education, and skills of those with H1B visas “would otherwise correlate with positive integration and naturalization indicators” (90)—yet, their temporary status inhibits social belonging and civic engagements, and makes them feel like guests and outsiders. Because of this uncertainty, they tend to have a “transitory outlook” on their future in the United States and a “transactional mindset” when it comes to their desire for citizenship, which “makes choosing to stay or go an economic calculus rather than a decision about membership and belonging” (101).
DACA recipients also suffered from an increased sense of vulnerability after the Trump administration attempted to rescind the program. A heightened sense of “legal liminality” of incompleteness, contingency, and volatility (107) permeates the narratives of interviewees from this group.
In the final chapter, Chen calls for a “national plan for immigrant integration… [that] would extend immigrant access to formal citizenship and thicken the meaning of citizenship to include social, economic, and civic engagement” (113). For green card holders, this would include a streamlined process toward naturalization, including government outreach to permanent residents about their eligibility for naturalization. International students should be allowed to express their intent to remain in the United States and should be provided a broader opportunity to extend their stay in the United States and “to plan their lives accordingly” (122) instead of being inhibited from integration. DACA recipients should be accorded “basic eligibility for citizenship and forgiveness of prior ineligibility” (123). Beyond access to formal citizenship, Chen calls for positive government efforts toward political, social, and economic integration of immigrants. America should thus renew its institutional commitment to immigrants pursuing citizenship (131)—both formal and substantive.
Chen successfully brings together the legal approach to citizenship, which focuses on visa categories, formal rights, and procedures under immigration law; and sociological studies of citizenship, which focuses on the social, economic, and political integration of immigrants. Chen does so with a keen awareness of how legal categories of citizenship interact with the substantive dimensions of citizenship—of how citizenship is “legally defined and socially constructed” (114).
The book is a clear, concise, and compassionate mission statement for an alternative vision of national immigration policy that is inclusive and supportive of immigrants pursuing full citizenship. It takes note of and engages with a range of views across the literature and takes account of the differences in nuance among immigrant voices in the same legal category.
The book invites further analysis along two lines of inquiry. The first is the specific institutional support or practices that would be effective if the federal government was to become geared toward integration. The other would be to bring back the exploration of the lived realities of immigrants and citizenship in this book to a reflection upon theories of citizenship. National citizenship is meant to draw boundaries between nations, so while one of its functions is to include and integrate, the other might be to exclude. Different visa categories and notions of legality and illegality in immigration law are reflections of this function.
To what extent and how this function of citizenship as a gatekeeper should be reconsidered is a conversation that sociolegal scholars across the globe could continue, with the same degree of attention to both law and society that Chen demonstrates in this groundbreaking work.
