Explore how immigration laws and citizenship policies shape identity, belonging, and social hierarchies in modern societies through a sociological lens.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ I remember sitting in a government office years ago, watching people from dozens of countries wait for their citizenship interviews. The woman next to me had been living in the country for fifteen years, spoke the language fluently, paid her taxes religiously, and yet she was just as nervous as the young man across from us who had only arrived three years prior. That day made me realize something profound: citizenship is not just a legal status or a piece of paper. It is a social construct that governments use to define who belongs and who does not, and migration policy is the tool they wield to enforce those boundaries.

The sociology of citizenship examines how societies create these invisible lines between insiders and outsiders. We think of citizenship as this fixed thing, but really it has always been fluid and contested. Who gets to be a citizen has changed dramatically throughout history, shaped by economics, politics, race, gender, and a whole host of other factors that have nothing to do with an individual’s worth or contribution to society. Migration policy becomes the mechanism through which these social hierarchies get encoded into law.

When I started studying this field, I was struck by how arbitrary so much of it seems. Why can someone born on one side of a border move freely while their cousin born on the other side faces years of paperwork, fees, and uncertainty? The answer lies in what sociologists call the politics of membership. Every nation state needs to define its boundaries, not just geographically but socially. Migration policy does this work by creating categories: legal versus illegal, refugee versus economic migrant, desirable versus undesirable. These categories shape real lives in profound ways.

Consider how migration policies reflect the economic needs of receiving countries. When there is a labor shortage, suddenly borders become more permeable for certain types of workers. Tech companies lobby for more visas for engineers. Agricultural businesses depend on seasonal workers. Healthcare systems recruit nurses from abroad. But here is the thing that bothers me: these workers are often granted only temporary status, enough to fill a job but not enough to build a life or bring their families. This creates what some scholars call “denizenship,” a kind of permanent temporariness where people live in a society, contribute to it, pay taxes, but never fully belong.

The concept of citizenship itself has evolved considerably. Classical citizenship was about participation in political life, think ancient Athens with its assemblies and debates. Modern citizenship added rights and responsibilities, the stuff of constitutions and welfare states. But neoliberal citizenship has introduced something different, the idea that citizenship is something you earn through economic contribution or cultural assimilation. Migration policies increasingly reflect this shift, favoring applicants who are educated, wealthy, or possess skills deemed valuable by the market. What does it say about our values when we measure human worth by economic productivity?

There is also the question of integration and what we expect from migrants. Migration policy does not just control who enters, it shapes what happens after arrival. Some countries embrace multiculturalism, at least in theory, while others demand assimilation. Language tests, citizenship exams, loyalty oaths, these are all social technologies designed to transform migrants into citizens. But the process is never neutral. The questions on those exams, the language requirements, the cultural knowledge deemed essential, they all reflect the dominant group’s vision of what a proper citizen should be.

I think about the children of migrants a lot, those who grow up between worlds. Migration policy creates these strange situations where kids who have lived their entire lives in a country, attended its schools, made friends, rooted themselves in place, can still be considered foreign if their parents lack the right papers. The sociology of citizenship shows us how state policies construct identities that people must then navigate in their daily lives. You are not just who you think you are, you are also who the state says you are.

Enforcement mechanisms reveal a lot about the relationship between citizenship and power. Deportation is the ultimate expression of state sovereignty, the power to expel someone from the territory. But who gets deported and who does not often breaks down along lines of race and class. Wealthy migrants who overstay visas rarely face the same scrutiny as poor migrants who cross borders irregularly.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Reference

Anderson, B. (2013). Us and them? The dangerous politics of immigration control. Oxford University Press.

Bauböck, R. (2006). Migration and citizenship. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(1), 15–32.

Bosniak, L. (2006). The citizen and the alien: Dilemmas of contemporary membership. Princeton University Press.