State citizenship is an outdated concept

The argument

What is a citizen? Legally, there is usually no requirement to live in, participate in, or adhere to the values of a country to be its recognised subject. In fact, it is often very difficult, if not outright unthinkable, for a country to challenge, let alone revoke an individual’s citizenship. Most native citizens will be have been born on their nation’s soil, but it is often possible to be a citizen without either being born there (immigrants), or perhaps without ever having lived there (2nd generation citizens). Regardless of their understanding of law, many vocally embrace their status as a ‘citizen’. This is because our idea of citizenship encompasses the tangible, social aspects: pride, community, contribution, national values. Still, worrying is the reality of citizenship as a purely a government ordinated mechanism that assigns legal and illegal labels onto people based on their ability to adhere to arbitrary bureaucratic procedures. At it's worst, it abstracts the rights of the individual on grounds of a nationalistic 'state identity.' It’s easy to see the necessity of these rules for the sake of national security, if nothing else, but recent examples of these mechanisms backfiring, or at worst, being applied maliciously, have troubling implications. Still topical is the UK’s Windrush Scandal. Under an imperative to create a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented migrants, the Home Office inadvertently detained and stripped the rights from many black Britons who had been living in the country for decades, on the false pretence that they- legal immigrants of the Windrush generation- were illegitimate. The operation was riddled with admin errors and mismanagement but even when the system is functioning properly it is prone to exploiting people based on ethnicity and race; the ‘Hostile Environment’ policy has yet to be challenged, and visa checking algorithms have unfairly targeted minorities. If this is what citizenship means, it needs to be rethought; better still, reclaimed.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the Windrush scandal and administrative abuses are arguments for reforming how states administer citizenship, not for abolishing it or making residence an unconditional universal right. Citizenship, they argue, is what secures rights — the vote, welfare, legal protection, diplomatic assistance — and grounds the reciprocal obligations, from taxation to jury service, that make a functioning polity possible; a world without bounded membership would have no clear body to guarantee those very rights. The critique also slides from 'citizenship is sometimes mismanaged' to 'citizenship is illegitimate,' which does not follow. And an unconditional right to settle anywhere raises unresolved problems of public services, security and democratic self-government that the argument does not address.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That legal citizenship diverges from the social feeling of belonging shows the two are distinct, not that the legal category is worthless — it is legal citizenship that secures rights and grounds reciprocal civic obligations. [Rejecting P2] Cases like Windrush are arguments for reforming citizenship's administration, not evidence that citizenship itself should be abolished or replaced by an unconditional right of settlement. [Rejecting P3] Concluding that citizenship must be rethought does not establish that choice of citizenship should be an unconditional universal right, which raises unaddressed problems of services, security and self-government.