Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

This poster reveals the truth about citizenship laws that migrants are not usually aware of and that are not usually well explained by laws of naturalisation or immigration. Nowadays, migrants and refugees often receive rejections of their applications and may even face deportation because of this. The truth behind the denial of applications could be, however, because the migrant’s conceptualization of citizenship is not the same as the state usually shapes it. This study reports on early stages of a PhD project on the inclusion and exclusion of forced migrants through citizenship. In modern states, citizenship defines the legal and the normative status of individuals. The legal status shows the relation between the state and the individual and it shows their legal, social and civil rights including the right to education, healthcare, employment, housing, voting, freedom of movement, etc. The community of value as Anderson (2013) would call it, on the other hand, refers to the normative value of citizenship and shows the relation of the individual with the local community, which manifests their sense of belonging, sharing culture and history. The community of values shows the state’s power to include and exclude immigrants into their state framework and values. In this poster, I provide a background and explain how the normative value of citizenship can be a practice of both inclusion and exclusion for not only migrants before becoming citizens but even after becoming citizens through naturalisation.