The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality

290 Pages·2009·1.24 MB·English

by  Ayelet Shachar

The Birthright Lottery

THE BIRTHRIGHT
LOTTERY
Citizenship and Global Inequality
AYELET SHACHAR
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2009
Copyright © 2009by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shachar, Ayelet, 1966–
The birthright lottery : citizenship and global inequality / Ayelet Shachar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-03271-2 (alk. paper)
1. Citizenship. 2. Sociological jurisprudence. I. Title.
K3224.S53 2009
342.08'3—dc22 2008038983
Most of the things worth doing in the world have been
declared impossible before they were done.
Louis D.Brandeis (American Supreme Court Justice,1856–1941)

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: The Puzzle of
Birthright Citizenship 1
part one Birthright Citizenship and Global Inequality
1 Reconceptualizing Membership:
Citizenship as Inherited Property 21
2 Abolishing versus Resurrecting Borders:
Moving Beyond the Binary Options 44
3 A New Basis for Global Redistribution:
The Birthright Privilege Levy 70
part two From Global to Local: Overinclusion,
Underinclusion, and Democratic Legitimacy
4 Blood and Soil: Birthright Citizenship in the
Domestic Arena 111
5 Popular Defenses of Birthright Citizenship
and Their Limitations 134
6 Curtailing Inheritance: Toward a Jus Nexi
Membership Allocation Principle 164
Notes 193
References 235
Index 263

Preface
This book was conceived when I was nine months pregnant. Having com-
pleted a fellowship year as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton, I returned to Toronto, where, before rushing off to the deliv-
ery room, I was able to put the final touches to an essay written for
NOMOSentitled “Children of A Lesser State: Sustaining Global Inequal-
ity through Citizenship Laws.” As an immigrant and scholar of citizen-
ship, I could not miss the irony of writing an essay on the birthright
transmission of membership while awaiting the birth of my son, who was
about to be given the gift of automatic and unconditional membership in
our adoptive country, Canada (one of the most prosperous and peaceful
societies in the world) simply by virtue of having been born on its soil.
Benefiting from a particular set of legal norms has not proven a suffi-
cient reason to accept it without scrutiny, however. Nor did it lead me to
abandon the aspiration to reorient the vital academic and political debate
over citizenship by drawing the analogy to inherited property. If anything,
it provided an added impetus—now with origins planted not only in the
world of ideas but rooted in lived experience as well—to explore, compre-
hend, and reveal the manifold ways in which birthright access to citizenship
operates as a distributor (or denier) of opportunity on a global scale. Al-
though the notion of gaining privilege by such arbitrary criteria as one’s
birthplace or bloodline is discredited in virtually all fields of public life, it still
reigns supreme when it comes to the assignment of political membership—