Re-Imagining Citizenship: Cultural Citizenship as a Conceptual Frame for Practice with Immigrants

Abstract

Background and Purpose:

Citizenship, as the Western legal and social framework for individual autonomy and political democracy (Shafir, 1998), has also been an important means for distributing and restricting access to rights and resources in the U.S. However, the literature on cultural citizenship (e.g., Rosaldo, 1997; Ong, 1996) have argued that traditional and normative definitions of citizenship (such as legal definitions) ignore various forms of participation and belonging and failed to capture the experiences of immigrants and transnational people in a globalized world (Getrich, 2008). Scholars of cultural citizenship call for more nuanced and multiple meanings of citizenship and creation of social, cultural and political space for immigrants. Applying poststructural and postcolonial theories, this paper excavates the discourses of exclusion and inequity that produced the idea of U.S. citizenship through a discourse analysis of key U.S. immigration and naturalization-related policies and proposes immigrant cultural citizenship as a conceptual frame for re-imagining social work theorizing and practice with immigrants.

Methods:

This paper uses Discourse Analysis as the analytic method. Discourse analysis is a method for “studying how language gets recruited “on site” to enact social activities and social identities (Gee, 2005, p. 1)”. In this process, discourse analysis examines how language produces specific social realities as well as the political consequences of such language productions (Gee, 2005). The data for this study is a sample of U.S. immigration and naturalization-related policies and legal cases from 1790 to 2005. The data were collected from publically available data archives such as the U.S. Homeland Security archives and published U.S. Supreme Court cases.

Results:

The discourse analysis of the historical data reveals that the notion of citizenship produced by the legal and policy discourses not only reflects the social, political and economic dynamics of the nation but also serves as a mechanism to meet and control its labor and population needs. The production of legal citizenship seems to operate on a system of binary oppositions (citizen/immigrant; legal/illegal; desirable/undesirable) that suppresses and consolidates all interstitial experiences and states. These binaries also intersected with other binary systems of social construction such as race (white/non-white) and gender (male/female), resulting in dire inequities. However, data also evidence that immigrant subjects did not always acquiesced but often attempted to resist, contest and negotiate the very discourses that produced them as non-citizens.

Conclusion and Implications:

As agents of civil society, social workers have much power in constructing and maintaining (or resisting and contesting) normative meanings of citizenship, and our participation in this process has material consequences for those with whom we work. This paper proposes cultural citizenship as a conceptual framework for social work practice to resist the inequitable discourse of citizenship and to generate interventions that help create space for multiple meanings and narratives. The paper concludes by illustrating this practice implication through a short case study where a social worker works with a “depressed” immigrant mother whose mixed-status family is produced as a legal/illegal binary by the legal discourse of citizenship.