The Right to Free Movement in the United States: Rethinking (Non)Citizen Binary

• In Event: Internal Migration Politics

Abstract

The right to free movement is assumed to be essential to citizenship, but it remains underdeveloped or ignored in many conceptual frameworks. This article develops the right to free movement as a distinctive concept and argues that it provides an important rebuke of prominent conceptions of national citizenship that rely on exclusionary binaries between citizen and non-citizen. Building on work in citizenship studies and immigration federalism, I argue that federalist systems structure the provision of citizenship rights across and within national borders, allowing distinctive pathways for the rights of citizens and non-citizens to develop. The article empirically distinguishes two developmental pathways by contrasting how the right to free movement has developed for both United States citizens and for non-citizens, first through a long-durée review of key court rulings from 1868 to 2020, that constitutionally protect this right for U.S. citizens and constitutionally permit state and local governments to both provide or restrict this right to undocumented residents. Turning to the contemporary period, the article draws from an original 50 state dataset of immigration policies passed from 1990 to 2020 to unpack how the right to free movement is essential to undocumented immigrants, but with important limitations and contestations.

Author

• Allan Colbern, Arizona State University