Uncertain citizenship: Life in the waiting room

By Anne-Marie Fortier

Uncertainty is central to the governance of citizenship, but in ways that erase, even deny, this uncertainty. This book investigates uncertain citizenship from the unique vantage point of ‘citizenisation’: twenty-first-century integration and naturalisation measures that make and unmake citizens and migrants, while indefinitely holding many applicants for citizenship in what Fortier calls the ‘waiting room of citizenship’. Fortier’s distinctive theory of citizenisation foregrounds how the full achievement of citizenship is a promise that is always deferred: if migrants and citizens are continuously citizenised, so too are they migratised. Citizenisation and migratisation are intimately linked within the structures of racial governmentality that enables the citizenship of racially minoritised citizens to be questioned and that casts them as perpetual migrants.

Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork with migrants applying for citizenship or settlement and with intermediaries of the state tasked with implementing citizenisation measures and policies, Fortier brings life to the waiting room of citizenship, giving rich empirical backing to her original theoretical claims. Scrutinising life in the waiting room enables Fortier to analyse how citizenship takes place, takes time and takes hold in ways that conform, exceed, and confound frames of reference laid out in both citizenisation policies and taken-for-granted understandings of ‘the citizen’ and ‘the migrant’. Uncertain Citizenship’s nuanced account of the social and institutional function of citizenisation and migratisation offers its readers a grasp of the array of racial inequalities that citizenisation produces and reproduces, while providing theoretical and empirical tools to address these inequalities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526139108

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Uncertain citizenship

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Uncertain citizenship

Life in the waiting room

Anne-Marie Fortier

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Anne-Marie Fortier 2021

The right of Anne-Marie Fortier to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3908 5 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit:

© Melanie Friend, from Border Country. ‘The Domestic Visits,’ Harmondsworth IRC (Heathrow), July 2006

Cover design:

Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

For migrant men and women living in precarious conditions, who wait and persist in the waiting room of uncertain citizenships. Their life in the waiting room is telling of the potentialities of a world of full inclusion.

And for Monique Salvas Fortier

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction – Uncertain citizenship

Scene 1 – Researching citizenisation

1 The world of citizenisation: life in the waiting room

2 Citizenising Britain

Scene 2 – Documents, stories, pictures

3 The documented citizen

Scene 3 – Conversing with Anglophones

4 The speaking citizen

Scene 4 – Becoming citizen

5 The becoming citizen

Conclusion – Lessons from the waiting room: citizenisation and migratisation

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgements

It seems ages since I attended the citizenship ceremony where I became a British citizen in 2011. The process leading up to that piqued my curiosity and led me down the long journey to this monograph. So much has changed since then. Yet what remains unchanged is the generosity and kindness of strangers and the love and dependability of my family and friends.

In the course of researching for this book, I had the pleasure of meeting several migrants living in the North West and other parts of England, all of whom took the time to speak to me and tell me their stories. I am immensely grateful for their openness and willingness to meet with me and share their stories. They were not all in the same position, with some forced to persist and hope against hope in the face of perpetual uncertainty and precarity. They are a reminder of the uneven distribution of ‘the good life’, within and across national borders. But their life in the waiting room is also telling of what a world of full inclusion could look like.

I am also full of gratitude for the language teachers, registrars, dignitaries and other institutional actors I met for their time, for inviting me into their workspaces and into ceremony rooms, and for sharing their own stories. These individuals are variously conscripted in the dispersed governance of citizenisation. Their compassion and care at times defied the punitive state that they variously represented, mediated or served. They confirm the extent to which the state is not a unified entity that operates uniformly. Rather, they are the living proof that these intermediaries of the state have a fuller personhood and more agency than they are often granted when they are viewed solely as ‘agents of the state’.

I only hope that this volume does justice to the accounts of these various inhabitants of the waiting room of citizenship.

In the intervening years between 2011 and now, my thinking was enriched by the proliferation of research on what I call citizenisation, as well as by the conversations, engagements with and support from colleagues and students across institutions. I am indebted to my students from my undergraduate modules at Lancaster University – especially Nations and Migrations – whose inquisitiveness and occasional scepticism challenged me in the most productive and engaging ways. I am also grateful to my colleagues Nicola Spurling and Francesca Coin who invited me to contribute lectures in the core module Sociological Thought for our Time. They and the students in that module helped me hone the argument developed in Chapter 4. My PhD students, for their part, have been and remain a constant source of learning and inspiration.

I have had the privilege of conversing with colleagues and students at Lancaster and beyond, some of whom read draft articles or other writings related to this project, and all of whose insights undoubtedly made this a better book: Les Back, Leah Bassell, Bridget Byrne, Katrien De Graeve, Sabine Gatt, Shona Hunter, Engin Isin, Danielle Juteau, Kamran Khan, Lidia Kuzemska, Gail Lewis, Katariina Mäkinen, Maureen McNeil, Kate Nash, Loredana Polezzi, Ben Rogaly, Riita Rossi, Sarah Scuzzarello, Tasneem Sharkawi, Divya Tolia-Kelly, Imogen Tyler, Neil Washbourne, Claire Waterton, Elke Winter, Joanne Wood. I shall forever cherish the ‘salon-sessions’ with Darcey Leigh, Melanie Richter-Montpetit and Cynthia Weber, where we'd write and talk in ‘retreat conditions’, and I look forward to repeat sessions if and when the world opens up again. Special thanks to my ‘critical friends’ who closely read draft chapters of the book: Bridget Anderson, Anne Cronin, Jonathan Darling, Breda Gray, Djordje Sredanovic, Ruth Wodak.

Anonymous reviewers of articles published in Citizenship Studies, Collegium, Critical Social Policy and Sociology were all very helpful in refining my arguments. While these articles are not reproduced here – except for some empirical material from the Sociology article in Chapter 4 – writing them helped me work out the framing of this monograph, which begins where I left off in those articles. This is especially the case for the Collegium piece, ‘The social life of citizenisation and naturalisation: outlining an analytical framework’. This monograph is also an extension of my work on affective citizenship, which I explored in connection to citizenisation policies in ‘What's the big deal? Naturalisation and the politics of desire’ (Citizenship Studies) and in ‘The psychic life of policy: desire, anxiety and citizenisation in Britain’ (Critical Social Policy). I also thank anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and manuscript, whose supportive and critical comments provided useful guidance. A big thank you to Tom Dark from Manchester University Press for believing in this project from the start. His understanding of the broader disciplinary debates made him an astute editor, and his guidance and patience throughout were invaluable. I am also very grateful to Humairaa Dudhwala for her impeccable management of the final production process, which made it as painless and smooth as can be.

This book would not have materialised without the funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, or without sabbatical leaves provided by the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. In the very early stages of this research, I had the great fortune of spending time as visiting fellow at the Gender Institute (GI) at the LSE, where I was so warmly welcomed by Clare Hemmings, then Head of the GI, and by Hazel Johnstone, the Department manager. I have fond memories of lively exchanges in seminars but also around coffee and tea in the GI offices. One highlight of my stay at the GI was enjoying gelato and conversations in equal measure with Wendy Sigle as we wandered the London streets on hot summer days.

I also had the great pleasure of being hosted as a visiting fellow by the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR), at the University of Sussex. Special thanks go to Paul Statham for his hospitality and for giving me the opportunity to present my work. The SCMR weekly seminars provided me with a welcome outing from my bolthole, and refuelled me with the pleasures of academic dialogue, questioning and exchange. I am also thankful for the invitations to present this research and to test ideas as I developed them. I was deeply touched by the warm welcome I received on all occasions and deeply appreciative of the conversations that ensued. Thank you to colleagues at the following universities: Birkbeck, Birmingham, Cambridge, Cardiff, City (London), Copenhagen, Durham, Edge Hill, Helsinki, Lancaster, Leeds, LSE, Manchester, Oslo, Ottawa, Salzburg, SOAS, Sorbonne, Vienna, Warwick.

Beyond academic circles, I am grateful to Autograph ABP, a London-based arts gallery, for inviting me to take part in their ‘Exit series’ of public lectures. I am also very grateful to the wonderful artist Laura Malacart and fellow academic Bridget Byrne for inviting me to collaborate with them on an exhibition about the citizenship test at the Manchester Central Library.

My friends and family have grounded me with their constant and steadfast support, and I am forever thankful for their patience as I hunkered down when a window of time opened up and ‘disappeared’ for a bit, or for their kindness in hearing me go on and on about the book. But more than anything, I am simply grateful for their friendship and love. My mother, Monique, ‘the mamma’, touched many people's lives with her kindness, compassion and care. She taught me a lot, not least … the delights of freezing things. It was a shock to lose her so suddenly two months before completing this manuscript. I miss our regular phone calls, the singing of old French songs and her unparalleled sense of humour that had us in stitches – she still makes me laugh, even in her absence.

Other family members and dear friends, here and there, variously supported me with conversations, walks, coffee, food, wine, laughter, texts, deliveries, late nights and all that makes up the beautiful fabric of friendship: Lynne Boardman, Anne Cronin, Andrew Clement, Michel de Salaberry, Claude Fortier, Harry Josephine Giles, Breda Gray, Louise Hall, Peter Hall, Hilary Hopwood, Peter Hopwood, Beate Jahn, Anu Koivunen, Anna Marie Labelle, Mark Lacy, Liliane Landor, Darcy Leigh, Gail Lewis, Jane McElhone, Maureen McNeil, Nayanika Mookherjee, Kate Nash, Paul Newnham, Nicole Pagé, Ann Pollack, Justin Rosenberg, Andrew Sayer, Odile Sévigny, Martine Sigouin, Lucy Suchman, Divya Tolia-Kelly, Neil Washbourne, Ruth Wodak. A special thank you to Anne, Paul, Maureen and Odile for the everyday sustenance of kindness and care.

Finally, it is my partner, Cynthia Weber, who more than anyone else ensured that I see this book through. Cindy endured my ups and downs as I went through the travails of producing what at times appeared like an impossible project, supporting me when needed and teasing me as I turned around with a completed piece of work as quickly as I'd panicked about its hopelessness. Cindy's own visionary scholarship provided me with invaluable inspiration. But more than that, Cindy read through endless versions of articles, proposals and chapters, each time providing me with brilliant, acute, insightful commentaries that not only energised me, but that brought intellectual clarity and depth to some arguments. Words fail me to express my thankfulness for you Cindy; my love, my best friend, my certainty in these deeply unsettled and uncertain times.

Abbreviations

Introduction –

Uncertain citizenship

[C]itizenship is, through and through, precarious, recent, threatened, and more artificial than ever. (Derrida 1998: 15)

Citizenship is uncertain. It is volatile, its boundaries, limits and promises are forever revised, amended and deferred. Citizenship can be bought, taught, fragmented, multiple, probationary, precarious, stripped, disposable, impossible, gifted, strategic, disputed, relinquished, achieved, unprotected.¹ It has been deemed postnational, supranational, transnational, multicultural, cosmopolitan, flexible, nested, optional, colonial, postcolonial, as well as gendered, racial, sexual, intimate and affective.²

Despite its uncertainty and flexibility, citizenship is very high on national political agendas, as well as on research agendas, perhaps more in current times than it ever was (Dauvergne 2007; Shachar et al. 2017). At a time of the rising popularity of right and extreme right nationalism, patriotism, protectionism and anti-globalism, governments are tightening their citizenship regimes. Developments in EU member state policies that limit intra-EU freedom of movement and settlement testify to a larger tendency to erode ‘denizenship’ in many countries within and beyond the EU (Hagelund and Reegård 2011).³ State powers to denaturalise and/or deport citizens or to strip individuals of their citizenship are increasing and access to settlement or citizenship for certain categories of immigrants are tightening, while at the same time fast-tracked (partial) citizenship is more readily accessible to migrant entrepreneurs with much capital to invest. As of June 2020, the scale of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on noncitizen residents in different countries remains unknown, but it will surely have raised anxieties and uncertainties about their access to health care and support systems. While uncertain or non-existent access to health care for people with precarious legal statuses long precedes this pandemic, the latter will undoubtedly shed more light on global and national inequalities in the distribution of ‘full’ citizenship and the concurrent growth of precarious statuses that render the racially minoritised poor more disposable. In turn, migrant workers losing their jobs, foreign students having to interrupt their studies, EU citizens living in the UK, and unknowable others who are unable to return ‘home’ live in fear of becoming ‘illegal’.⁴ In short, all this reveals the uncertainty, contingency and unequal distribution of citizenship. In many Western countries today, amendments to citizenship rules and the intensification of hostile environments make citizenship ‘harder to get and easier to lose’, as Elke Winter succinctly puts it (2016: 361; also Kapoor 2015). Such state practices are framed as responding to a perception of citizenship ‘in crisis’; a crisis that governments claim results from a crisis of (too much) immigration, which in turn causes a crisis of national security and identity.

The language of crisis fuels conceptions of citizenship as ‘uncertain’ insofar as its boundaries have become blurred in global transnational migration regimes, where citizen-like rights and statuses are afforded to some migrants – EU citizens’ rights within EU countries being a prime example. But rather than seeing state practices to restrict access to citizenship only as responses against a crisis of citizenship and its resulting ‘uncertainty’ in a global world, this book argues that uncertainty is and always has been central to the governance of citizenship. In other words, states are both responding to and using ‘uncertain citizenship’ in their national projects. This forces a reconsideration of how we understand citizenship politically and theoretically. Uncertain citizenship results not only from social and political struggles that contest its stability and certainty (Isin 2009; Clarke et al. 2014), but it results from its embeddedness in the very governmental practices that erase, even deny, the uncertainty of citizenship. Integration and naturalisation measures – the focus of this book – offer a unique vantage point from which to examine how uncertainty is integral to their design, while they also rely on narratives that set up citizenship as certain, stable and guarantor of universal rights and protection. To be sure, it may be argued that it is the prerogative of any state policy to use certainty and coherence as tools to manage the inevitable uncertainty and messiness of people's lives and of the national and international contexts in which they live (see Chapter 3). But I am less interested in state rationales for managing uncertainty than I am in exploring how both certainty and uncertainty are reproduced in state policies and practices of citizenship (e.g., playing down the uncertainty of acquiring citizenship against playing up the ‘reward’ of achieving it), how they have different effects on different subjects, and in turn, how different subjects navigate the process.

The uncertainty of citizenship is not new. While this book focuses on contemporary politics and practices of citizenship attribution, it takes the long view in acknowledging the role of imperial and anti-colonial histories in shaping what citizenship has become today. Jacques Derrida (1998) reminds us of how, under colonial rule, citizenship was always uncertain. In the epigraph above, he draws on his Franco-Maghrebian status and goes on to explain how he both lost and regained his citizenship in the course of his lifetime. For Derrida, the uncertainty of citizenship is not only about the deprivation of citizenship of targeted individuals; it is about how this can also happen to

a ‘community’ group (a ‘mass’ assembling together tens or hundreds of thousands of persons), a supposedly ‘ethnic’ or ‘religious’ group that finds itself one day deprived, as a group, of its citizenship by a state that, with the brutality of a unilateral decision, withdraws it without asking for their opinion, and without the said group gaining back any other citizenship. No other. (1998: 15, emphasis original)

This bears disturbing resonance with the Windrush scandal in Britain in the spring of 2018.⁵ It is worth pausing on this event, for it reveals a lot about contemporary practices and trends in citizenship regimes in the Anglo-European world (if not beyond).

In her review of the scandal, Wendy Williams (2020: 24) reports that the Home Office acknowledges that 164 individuals who had arrived in Britain before 1973 have been detained or deported since 2002. The Home Office admits that it most likely ‘acted wrongfully in 18 of these cases by not recognising their right to be in the UK’ (Williams 2020: 24). However, Williams adds that all of these 164 individuals ‘were born in former British colonies in the Caribbean and had settled status. The majority (92) were from Jamaica, and most came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Just over half (52%) were male’ (2020: 24). But the scandal affected hundreds, if not thousands of others, directly or indirectly – including individuals from other Commonwealth countries – with some losing their jobs, access to national health services and having their lives turned upside down.

As the ‘hostile environment’⁶ set up by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary (2010–2016) came crashing down on them, these citizens were pushed into what I call the precarious ‘waiting room’ of citizenship. This is a legal space (and social space; more in Chapter 2) where they suddenly became ‘noncitizens’ illegally residing in Britain until they could prove to the British state that they met all current requirements for citizenship: their legal entry into the country, their legal residency, their law-abiding lives, their right to work and so on. Having arrived on British soil at a time when they were Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKC) and held full citizenship rights under the British Nationality Act 1948 (see endnote 5 and more in Chapter 2), these long-standing legal resident-citizens who repeatedly declared how they felt British and nothing else now had to formally obtain British citizenship to ‘regularise’ their status. At the time of Williams's report, ‘8,124 people have been granted citizenship or had their settled status documented through the Windrush Taskforce’ (2020: 24).⁷

It is noteworthy for our purposes here that the resolution came with ‘regularising’ the status of these residents and granting them British citizenship. While citizenship today privileges duties and obligations rather than rights, and it operates through sanctions rather than support (Wacquant 2010), citizenship remains widely regarded as an unqualified good and guarantor of protection, rights, safety. This is manifest in the offer from the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd to grant British citizenship to the affected Commonwealth residents and to waive the language and citizenship tests as well as the fees for naturalisation⁸ (Crerar, Perkins and Gentleman 2018; Gentleman 2019a). In effect, Rudd was renaturalising those wrongly accused of residing illegally in Britain, in a form of ‘defensive naturalisation’ usually attributed to immigrants. Authors have written about ‘defensive naturalisation’, where migrants seek citizenship to protect their rights in an anti-immigration climate (Ong 2011/2012; Aptekar 2015). In the case of the Windrush scandal, the government was naturalising subjects to protect their rights against an anti-immigration climate of its own making. Citizens of the Windrush generation applied for citizenship out of necessity in response to being persecuted by the British government. British citizenship, here, is about seeking protection from Britain and the British state (El-Enany 2020: 224).

The Windrush story brings together two seemingly opposing forces within citizenship: it spotlights the fabricated, contingent nature of citizenship – its uncertainty – while it also shores up the certainty of citizenship as the only desirable outcome. Despite its increasingly notable fragility and the widely recognised gap between citizenship ideals and citizenship practices, the idea of citizenship as a stabilising status endures (Bosniak 2006: 1). The Windrush scandal was widely reported as an extra-ordinary situation that could not be conceived of within the traditional framework of citizenship; it was inconceivable that these citizens could become noncitizens overnight. Thus, while the scandal made it clear that states have the power to strip their subjects of citizenship, the gifting of citizenship reifies citizenship – particularly Anglo-European citizenships – as a valued stable object to ‘own’, therefore concealing its uncertainty.

Moreover, the Windrush scandal is also living evidence of racial citizenship and the legacies of imperial Britain and anti-colonial struggles; the expulsion (actual or virtual) of Windrush citizens was not merely the product of mistakes, mismanagement or abuse of power. Rather, it resulted from the very racist state structures and governing practices that brought them here in the first place and that today, cast them outside of state protection. I return to the long view of British citizenship in the next chapter. The point to emphasise here is that those racially minoritised (post)colonial citizens were subjected to firmly institutionalised structures of racial governmentality (Goldberg 2002) that enabled their citizenship to be questioned by Home Office officials seeking to reach their deportation targets (Goodfellow 2019; El-Enany 2020). What we learn from the Windrush scandal, then, is not only that citizenship is uncertain: that it changes, is unstable and subject to the conjuncture of political, economic and social events and interests. The Windrush scandal also gave us a glimpse of how uncertainty constitutes a mode of governing while being concealed within the reified promise of the security of citizenship. But more than that: it reveals how uncertainty disproportionately affects racially minoritised people, and that the racialised uncertainty of citizenship is historically embedded, rather than contingent on national institutional and political ‘cultures’ (path-dependency) or international trends (cross-national convergence). This is not to say that history repeats itself in an exact replica. Rather, it is to recognise the historical legacies of structures and imaginaries – such as the racial state and ‘racial thinking’ – and to ask how they manifest themselves in specific contexts and at specific times.

That said, what distinguishes the present conjuncture is the large-scale normalisation of uncertainty – that is, what was once lived, understood, experienced by colonial and minoritised subjects, as Derrida reminds us, is now established and widely understood as the normal state of things (Bhattacharyya 2015). Uncertain citizenship approaches regimes of citizenship integration and naturalisation – what I call ‘citizenisation’ measures (more in Chapter 1) – as exemplary of the ways in which precarisation and uncertainty constitute instruments of neoliberal governing, rather than being threats to the social order that past welfare states would protect its citizens from (Lorey 2015; also Anderson 2013; Bhattacharyya 2015; Jessop 2019). In a world where uncertainty is normalised, then, certainties like ‘citizenship’ are also normalised as uncertain.

This is not to deny that citizenship remains a highly significant and meaningful legal status that should secure rights for individuals. However, this security is not equally distributed in the global landscape (Shachar 2009), and citizenships from countries in the Global North acquire a value and currency that attracts citizens from the Global South. With this in mind, this book unpacks how the promise of the certainty of citizenship still operates even as it is normalised as uncertain. The book asks how uncertainty plays itself out, what forms it takes, and how it is smoothed over (or not) in practices of assessing, granting, learning about and applying for citizenship. Put simply, the study explores the complex dynamics and experiences that arise in a process where achieving citizenship makes all the uncertainties and anxieties to obtain it appear to be worthwhile.

In this respect, the Windrush scandal speaks volumes to and about contemporary citizenship beyond the UK context. Indeed, those who were adversely affected by the Windrush scandal are living evidence of contemporary policies of ‘managed migration’, integration and naturalisation. A striking feature of the treatment of the citizens from the Windrush generation is how the waiver for language and citizenship tests erases their history and positions them as ‘immigrants’ and ‘foreigners’ who would normally be obliged to take these tests. Amber Rudd would not conceive of a solution outside of the terms of what I call contemporary ‘citizenisation’ policies: twenty-first-century integration and naturalisation measures aimed at a range of presumed ‘noncitizen’ populations. She stated in the House of Commons that ‘it is abundantly clear that everyone considers people who came in the Windrush generation to be British, but under the current rules this is not the case’ (Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 23 April 2018: Volume 639, Column 619–620, cited in Giblin 2018, emphasis added). Rudd resorted to the current legislation to decitizenise them in order to citizenise them again. This gesture says a lot about the shifting grounds of citizenship in Europe and elsewhere. It testifies to a historical amnesia within legal and policy frameworks that disregard the historical legal contexts in which migrants arrive and settle in a country. Furthermore, Rudd's decision shows how citizenship is based on short-term policy and processes, rather than any enduring rights-based foundation. As a result, what counts as citizenship is continuously reshaped and redefined, while at the same time, there remain some constants such as the colonial impetus of European imperialism that repeatedly questions the rightful presence of racially minoritised citizens and residents (Tudor 2018; Goodfellow 2019; El-Enany 2020).

A further aspect of citizenship is its intimate connection to migration – both as ‘reality’ and as a legislative terrain. What we can observe from Amber Rudd's resolution is that she not only decitizenised Windrush citizens, but she also migratised them (Tudor 2018). Following the scandal, the Home Office guide to naturalisation was updated to include the ‘Windrush Scheme’ designed for those affected by the mismanagement of their status. It is noteworthy that the introduction explains that ‘[t]he Windrush Scheme is for people who arrived in the UK many years ago and do not have documentation confirming their immigration status’ (Home Office 2019a: 3; emphasis added). By stating that the aim is to redress their immigration status rather than their citizenship status, this language is telling of how racially minoritised subjects – for the assumption is that those affected are predominantly black – are perpetually migratised as noncitizens, which in turn racialises British citizenship as white. Extending this lens further, we can also ask how and to what extent citizenship itself is migratised (Anderson 2013, 2019). Insofar as citizenisation processes are intimately connected to and operate as migration regulations, the idea of citizenship as a fixed and stable ‘identity’ and status needs to be questioned through the autonomy of a migration lens (Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos 2008; de Genova 2010). The Windrush scandal therefore forces three related questions about citizenship: how are migrants citizenised and decitizenised? How are citizens and citizenship migratised? But also, the endurance of ideas of citizenship as a stable status begs the question as to how citizens and migrants are made, unmade and naturalised as necessarily distinct categories and statuses.

As explained in Chapter 1, current integration and naturalisation policies grew in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Europe as means to (further) formalise immigrant integration and access to citizenship or permanent residency. In this context, integration and naturalisation are widely treated as separate moments in the achievement of citizenship, a conception that I challenge by proposing that both are deeply intertwined within what I call ‘citizenisation’. The point I wish to emphasise here is that citizenisation is the institutional and discursive formalisation of two significant moves in how citizenship today is understood in the policy and political spheres. First, at a time when ‘postnational’ forms of citizenship