Now Reading: Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings and Expressions

Kabeer, Naila, ed., 2005. Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings and Expressions. London: Zed Books.

Chap. 12. Ansley, Fran, "Constructing citizenship without a license: the struggle of undocumented immigrants in the USA for livelihoods and recognition," pp. 199-215.

narrative with commentary on a "campaign fought successfully for access to a state-issued driver's license for people who could not produce proof of lawful presence in the USA" conducted by undocumented migrants and their allies in Tennessee from spring of 2001 up to 2003

"Far from focusing overtly on the 'meanings and expressions of citizenship', this effort was initiated by and designed to benefit a population of non-citizens. Moreover, at least in its public aspect and public rhetorical strategies, it seldom mentioned anything remotely like 'rights'." (p. 199)

abolition of slavery was about citizenship
* so also, the legal struggle against racial discriminaton in immigration law "from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through to the national quota systems that were not finally abolished until 1965" (p. 201) (See also: Joppke, Christian. 200. "Are 'Non-Dicriminatory' Migration Policies Reversible? Evidence from the United States and Australia," Comparative Political Studies 38(1):3-25. => non-discrimnation norm, a key human rights norm ("a core principle of the human rights culture" p. 19), has been applied to great effect in the immigration law field! article also cites Risse, Ropp and Sikkink)

no public transportation system in Tennessee outside the small centers of large cities so that having a car was a basic "necessity for even the simplest acts of daily existence" (p. 203); also, since undocumented migrants could not get driver's licenses, they became a proxy for a citizen/legal resident's ID

who were the actors in the campaign (p. 204-206): a huge (legal) immigrant Latino community (that even Republicans wanted to court); "unexpected quarters" like chiefs of police (and businesses)

strategy used (p. 206): "A final reason I believe we won this struggle for the rights of undocumented workers in Tennessee is that we did not frame the campaign as a struggle for rights at all. Instead, at least in its visible, public face [the author is here implying there was a private, inaccessible space as well = the backstage, where the opposite can be observed], the campaign was framed almost entirely around desires, interests and preferences of US citizens." e.g., highway safety

reflections on the strategy (p. 206)? "The choice of a frame that left immigrants themselves so decidedly in the shadows was not uncontroversial within the campaign, but it represented a clear majority of opinion among whose who developed the strategy." (There is a recognition that the strategy kept undocumented migrants in the shadows, i.e., it is consistent with the over-all strategy of the "clandestine" migrants.) "The decision to frame the issue as one of highway safety grew out of the organizers' conviction that putting immigrants' rights or their welfare at the centre of the campaign (or even out towards its margins, if openly expressed) would be a kiss of death." (At this point, I cannot resist the comparison/contrast with LGBT activism. The "clandestine" migrants are in a kind of closet, and the rights they obtain in this campaign are in effect rights to remain hidden. A confrontational strategy would have required "clandestine" migrants to come out and identify themselves, as did LGBT activists. But even LGBT activists recognize that coming out is a personal decision.)

the human rights activists who led this "non-rights" campaign were performing as middle-men or translators (here you can cite Saugestad's article and footnotes): they decide "how much to highlight the rights and needs of the weak, and how much to appeal to the self-interest of the strong" (p. 207) hence they do not merely act as conveyor belts transporting global norms to local sites, but more like ?

"So my question is not whether rights-based approaches associated with citizenship can be useful ..., but rather when, how, and under what circumstances they are most likely to be useful - or not." (p. 209)

Chap. 3. Stammers, Neil, "The emergence of human rights in the North: Towards historical re-evaluation," 50-68.

cites Hampster-Monk(1992)'s retake on Locke's Two Treatises as having been written not to "justify the successful revolution of 1688...but to incite a future one" looking at Locke's relationship with the radical Diggers' and Levellers' movements
defies liberal and Marxist consensus that "natural rights" (the progenitor of "human rights") was developed to justify "bourgeois" hegemony
"... [A]lternative accounts identify social movements as important agents of transformation [in the English, American and French revolutions]. It was movement activists that generated discourses of natural rights, and that they did so as a way of challenging absolutist power. This is particularly clear in the English and American cases, perhaps less so in the French case. Seen in this terms, claims to natural rights are not simply reducible to an ideological defence of bourgeois property rights. Indeed, these alternative historical accounts suggest (again, particularly in the English and American cases) that it was the most radical currents of activism that developed and deployed the idea of natural rigths. Far from relying on them, the newly emerging propertied classes saw such talk as dangerous and revolutionary - anarchical fallacies, as Bentham neatly summed it up at the time (Waldron 1987)." (p. 59)

"[I]t is in the exclusionary potential of ... the institutionalization of human rights as citizenship rights that the key difficulties are located. In contrast, what may be most positive about the history of struggles for human rights in the North is to be found in claims to universality..." (64-65)

Chap. 2.

"rights are shaped through actual struggles informed by people's own understandings of what they are justly entitled to" (31)