Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
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Perhaps this accounts for the current salience of monetized versions wherein full membership in the polity is earned by paying one’s dues to the state financially or contributing economically to the national community, through tax paying, employment, or financial investment. Here, as in the case of Cancel groups, membership is something one receives in exchange for paying required fees or making expected financial contributions to a group.
It is not only the obligations side of the contract that increasingly appears in economic terms. The rights side is also subject to monetization. In place of rights, the advantages accruing to national membership are increasingly characterized in terms of material benefits, such as rights to welfare, access to public housing and education, or other social rights and benefits.
While more commonly invoked in the heat of particular political debates, this way of thinking about who belongs to a given polity also appears in the recent literature on citizenship. Parry, for example, proposes an understanding of citizenship whereby society would appear as a social insurance club financed by contributing members (1991: 186–87), while Harrison (1991: 209–13) argues that “privatized forms of social provision” may “amount to an alternative form of ‘modern citizenship.’” However, the fact that Harrison places “modern citizenship” in quotation marks here suggests that he himself recognizes the deviation of his use of the phrase from ordinary usage.
There is actually less of an existing legal basis for such an understanding of citizenship than one might imagine. In reality—with a few socially and economically significant exceptions such as access to public service jobs in some countries—most social rights and economic benefits in the United States and Western Europe do not legally depend on citizenship. In Western Europe, citizenship is rarely an important factor in determining access to social service programs; legal residents qualify for most of the same social benefits as citizens (Soysal 1994: 123–25). In the United States, prior to the contested reforms of the 1990s, even legal residency was not a legal requirement for such valuable social benefits as public education, emergency hospital care, or social security (Schuck and Smith 1985: 108; Soysal 1994: 124).
What is essential here, however, is not the legal relationship between citizenship and social entitlements. Rather, it is the existence, even prevalence, of the belief that only contributing economically to the community qualifies one as a full member, as someone entitled to benefits. This is a belief about moral entitlement and how citizenship or membership in the political community should be understood, not just about what the current rules regulating access to entitlements by those with various juridical statuses in the community actually are. As in the case of the Descent model, historical and legal reality are largely at odds with the idealized vision by which they are supposed to be described, but this conception of citizenship has a life of its own and contributes to shaping public discussion. To understand the current politics of citizenship, it is therefore important to recognize this idea.
Like the Contract model, the Monetized Contract view has state-centered and society-centered variants. The dues paying involved in the state-centered version consists in paying taxes; recognition as a full and legitimate member of the national community or “citizen” (taxpayer) entitles one to social benefits. In the society-centered variant, it is those who contribute to the economy through engagement in productive employment who have a legitimate claim on citizenship.
While many scholars see the American understanding of citizenship and national identity as quintessentially expressive of the Belief model, others have argued that, as Shklar puts it, “earning” was historically “implicit in equal American citizenship” (1991: 100) in the sense that it was essential to being seen as someone worthy of citizenship (63–100). Shklar argues that by the late nineteenth century the economy “was where citizenship and its rewards and duties … rested” (87). It was actually the link between wage earning (as opposed to slave labor) and the personal autonomy it supposedly permitted that was most significant in American thinking about the connection between citizenship and productive employment (63–67, 95–96). However, the idea of earning as an exercise of a civic duty to contribute to national prosperity also played a role in American thinking about who should be counted as a “citizen” (67–68, 87), by which Shklar means someone with full and equal standing in the community (3, 63).
Claims for rights based on a society-centered version of the Monetized Contract view are ultimately difficult to defend, however. The argument is seldom taken to its logical conclusion; if it were, it would give rise to a host of problematic political and theoretical questions. Moreover, grounding political claims in this line of argument is politically risky because public opinion on what contributing to the economy actually means is often changeable and even contradictory.
It is often less than entirely clear just what kind of work immigrants economically contribute to the nation by performing, or whether being gainfully employed counts as an economic contribution to the nation at all. Some use the Monetized Contract view to argue that immigrant workers should be recognized as legitimate members of the polity because they contribute to the national economy; others appeal to the same perspective to argue that they should be excluded because they take jobs from native workers. If unemployment rises and jobs become scarce, popular opinion may switch from one position to the other. And if immigrants can fulfill their economic duty of contributing to the national economy and thus earn entitlement to recognition as citizens by working, what sort of work is the worthy immigrant supposed to perform? Public opinion on this point is also often contradictory. As Honig notes, successful migrants’ accumulation of great wealth and ascension to very desirable positions are often lauded in the American press as evidence of their industriousness and eagerness to contribute to American society (1996: 187–88). Yet, in other cases, immigrants are said to be contributing economically to the nation (not taking scarce jobs from native workers) because they are willing to work for low wages (saving the community money) or to take jobs native workers regard as undesirable. This very willingness is also sometimes blamed for lowering wages and standards for native workers.
Another difficulty with the Monetized Contract model is that it logically points to a much broader extension of citizenship than almost anyone seems ready or willing to accept. If contributing to the national economy entitles those immigrating to perform necessary labor for national companies to political rights, what if the same companies set up export platforms and hire the same workers to perform the same tasks outside the national territory? According to the society-centered Monetized Contract view, their membership status and the rights associated with it should be the same in both cases. Yet one would be hard pressed to find advocates of such a position, even among those relying most heavily on the work-centered view of entitlement to citizenship as a basis for legitimating extension of new rights to immigrant workers.
Moreover, if one were logically to extend the society-centered Monetized Contract argument to employees of national firms who work outside the country, a new series of questions would then need to be answered. What of the peasants who grow the grain to feed the workers who work for the national company abroad? What if a worker changes jobs, leaving an American plant to work for a Japanese one? Should his citizenship change accordingly? What if the company is an international joint venture, or is bought out by a foreign competitor? Some of the same problems may arise regardless where the worker lives, since there need be no correlation between the nationality of a corporation and the territory where it operates, let alone the nationality of its owners.
In an increasingly internationally integrated economy, the society-centered Monetized Contract approach to membership is thus apt to be exceedingly difficult to apply. It is too difficult to determine just which political community is the ultimate beneficiary of any given worker’s labor for it to be at all practical to determine who should count as a member of what nationstate on that basis. Moreover, defining citizenship that way would make changes in national status highly unpredictable for individuals, and for some possibly quite frequent as well. Defining citizenship on such an unstable basis would greatly reduce its value in providing people with a secure legal status on the basis of which to plan and organize their lives. Nonetheless, implicit references to this model of citizenship in political discussion are quite common; it is often seemingly taken for granted that the model itself makes sense.
It is important to note the distinction between the