Characterizing Consent: Race,Citizenship,and the New Restrictionists

Abstract

Birthright citizenship provides a key to more racially equalitarian policy. This article explores the use of consensual citizenship to challenge the tradition of birthright citizenship in the United States. Tracing the central narratives of race, immigration and citizenship in the immigration restrictionist movement in the 1990s shows the move away from birthright citizenship is racially exclusionary regardless of shifting conceptions of consensual citizenship. In the early and mid 1990s, a republican version of consensual citizenship is used in conjunction with a raced image of the problem immigrant. In the late 1990s, the same racialized image undergirds the use of a liberal conception of consent to argue for limiting birthright citizenship. Both periods of contemporary restrictionism show that the move to restrict birthright citizenship is not colorblind; race is used as a lens through which citizenship and consent are understood.

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