The United States has a liberal citizenship tradition. With the important exception of racial qualifications, which were not fully eliminated from the nationality law until 1952, barriers to citizenship have been low. Since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1868, the United States has maintained a near-absolute rule of territorial birthright citizenship. Naturalisation requirements have been and continue to be satisfied by permanent residents in most cases upon satisfaction of durational residency requirements. Citizenship law has remained stable in recent decades, for the most part insulated from highly charged debates over immigration policy. Restrictionist successes with respect to immigration policy have not translated into tightened access to citizenship. The parameters of citizenship acquisition have been largely uncontested for more than a century and a half.

As a historical matter, citizenship’s low profile is attributable to the country’s immigration roots. Immigration to the United States was open until towards the end of the nineteenth century. Those who came to the United States were assumed to stay. The legal assimilation of immigrants was facilitated by easy access to citizenship. To speed the process, distinctions in legal rights between citizens and non-citizens were minimised. Race aside, the most heated citizenship controversies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the expatriation of citizens who returned to their homelands. With the imposition of immigration controls, the United States moved to more of a Walzerian paradigm in which barriers to territorial entry were raised but barriers to citizenship remained low. This paradigm served American notions of equality and self-governance until porousness at the border destabilised the model. A nascent debate over the citizenship eligibility of immigration law violators may fuse the issues on the question of whether or not those whose status was to be regularised would be put on a ‘path to citizenship.’ That could recentre citizenship on the political landscape by linking it more visibly to immigration reform. Otherwise, although some marginal aspects of citizenship have been the subject of recent controversies, citizenship is likely to remain a low intensity issue for the foreseeable future.

Read the full report at the EUDO Citizenship Observatory