Intentional Ambiguity: State (Non)Enforcement of Citizenship Policies

• In Event: Strategic (Non)Enforcement: State Responses to Migration

Abstract

Refugee host states often say one thing in written citizenship policies and do another when enforcing them. Some states offer more in writing than in practice; for instance, Ghana allows Liberian refugees to naturalize by law, but in practice, the government blocks these refugees from gaining citizenship through bureaucratic delays and discrimination. Other states offer more in practice than in writing; for example, Egypt legally restricts Sudanese refugees’ access to jobs, but in practice, the state allows them to work. This variation raises the question: Why would the enforcement of a citizenship policy contradict its written content?

This paper argues that variations in citizenship policy enforcement tend to stem from political motivations for regime survival—not from bureaucratic incapacity, corruption, or poor monitoring. These motivations are rooted in pressures from powerful international and domestic actors, who influence the ruling regime’s survival. Specifically, when the preferences of the strongest international actor in a policy area, like the largest donor, and the strongest domestic actor in that policy area, like the security force leaders, align on the issue, the policy’s content will match its enforcement—a strategy I describe as coherent. However, when these two actors’ preferences diverge, the policy’s enforcement will contradict its content—a strategy I describe as intentional ambiguity—where the formal policy placates the international actor while the enforced policy placates the domestic actor.

This paper leverages Jordan’s within-country variation to flesh out this argument by using process tracing to examine different citizenship policies toward three Palestinian refugee groups, those who arrived in: 1948 (48ers), 1967 from the West Bank (67ers), and 1967 from Gaza (ex-Gazans). I break down these citizenship policies by their de jure and de facto dimensions. The former concerns the legal, written civil, political, social, and economic rights of a resident group, and the latter reflects how these written rights are enforced in practice. I code these policies with data from Jordanian laws, memoranda, and decrees I collected and 170 interviews with ministers, bureaucrats, lawyers, activists, and refugees I conducted during 12 months of fieldwork in Jordan from 2016–17, as well as from 800 British and U.S. archival files I compiled on Jordan’s politics from 1946–73.

Jordan hosts the most refugees per capita, when including Palestinians. In addition, Jordan provides a unique opportunity to study the politics of citizenship and migration because debates about “who” belongs have persisted and varied since Jordan’s founding. These debates also have taken place in public, making it easier to study their de jure and de facto dimensions over time. Further, the citizenship and migration literatures draw numerous insights and findings from advanced industrial democracies, but fewer studies have examined these topics in less developed and less democratic states. This situation yields a fruitful opportunity to leverage insights from non-Western contexts, like Jordan, to inform broader debates about when regimes enforce policies, how states treat noncitizen groups, and how international immigration has influenced how states treat their citizens.

Author

• Lillian Frost, George Washington University