ABSTRACT
The study of naturalization-immigrants becoming a citizens of their new country-has gone through significant change in the past 20 years. The first major change moved from focusing almost exclusively on the USA and other settler countries to a broader array of receiving countries in Europe and Asia. Most early studies were dominated by assimilation and naturalization in the American experience. Since the 1990s, this American focus has given way to the micro-analysis of naturalization processes in advanced industrialized countries, the naturalization of different sending country immigrants in the same receiving country, and the movement from overall assimilation to segmented assimilation. The second major change was toward the more macropolitical and cultural facets of immigration laws in individual sending countries, followed by an emerging literature on the comparison of naturalization regimes in different countries. Along with these two changes are some knotty questions about how to theorize and measure naturalization. The micro-and macro-approaches just mentioned have differing foci and significance. The
micro-examination of immigrants’ willingness to become citizens and their eventual integration into society has important impacts on immigrants/citizens social mobility, self-esteem, political rights and participation, and, more generally, their overall life-chances. This has an especially strong effect on the first generation of immigrants, but also on the second and third generations who may do better. The macro-social study of the nationality policies of a receiving country themselves are
important gauges of how states and societies accept or reject foreigners and long-term residents. Activist groups in countries with high naturalizations react more strongly against anti-foreigner protests, demonstrations, and murders. Their reactions are different because naturalized immigrants can vote, organize, and protest. For instance, French conservative parties and antiimmigrant leader La Pen attacked the jus soli principle and obtained stricter nationality policies. But students and naturalized immigrants worked together through SOS Racisme and other groups to prevent the government from enacting more anti-immigrant demands. When the French socialists regained power, they reversed the jus soli decision (Hargreaves 1995; Feldblum 1999). In many ways, the political and cultural forces that explain these policies and politics can be altered once their significance and social bases are understood. The key difference is that countries with liberal nationality policies lay the base for the political organization of immigrants so that they can protect themselves and pursue their own livelihood, while countries with
difficult nationality policies make it nearly impossible for immigrants to protect themselves in the political arena and they have to rely on the kindnesses of strangers (i.e., citizens) to protect their homes and families. As a result, access to citizenship can make a difference in everyday lives and can actually be a matter of life or death. This chapter will make three main points: (1) naturalization rates vary quite a bit between
receiving countries, and this raises a number of methodological issues about how to measure naturalization, (2) the long tradition of micro-sociological studies of naturalization have sharpened and expanded their focus beyond the USA, and (3) macro-sociological theories are a relatively new area that uncover unexamined forces in cross-national studies.
