Privatizing Citizenship: Strategies and Discourses of Dual Nationality in Serbia and Mexico

• In Event: 156 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. Education, Citizenship, and Rights

Abstract

For most of the 20th century, dual citizenship was widely prohibited. Since the 1990’s, however, many countries changed their laws to permit dual and multiple nationality. The rise of dual citizenship created new opportunities for individuals outside the West who discovered that their migration history, family roots or ethnic identity made them eligible for a second citizenship from a European Union country or the United States. Millions of people in Eastern Europe and Latin America acquired such dual citizenship without necessarily intending to emigrate. In this paper, I compare two cases of dual citizenship: Hungarian (EU) citizenship in Serbia which is acquired on the basis of ethnic origin, and U.S. citizenship in Mexico which is acquired through birth in U.S. territory. Many applicants use opportunistic strategies and manipulate their ethnicity or birthplace in order to gain citizenship: Serbs study the Hungarian language, while Mexicans travel to the U.S. to give birth (“birth tourism”). Drawing on material from interviews conducted in 2014-2015, the paper focuses on “opportunistic” applicants in each case and compares their citizenship acquisition strategies, the moral risks involved and the destigmatizing discourses that emerge in response. Applicants in Serbia, who were concerned about being seen as “sellouts,” justified their decision to seek dual citizenship by arguing that Serbia could not provide them with a European quality of life. Meanwhile, middle-class Mexicans who practiced birth tourism feared being seen as “parasites” and justified their bid for dual citizenship by pointing to the money they had spent in the U.S.

Author

• Yossi Harpaz, Princeton University