Doing and undoing borders: The multiplication of citizenship,citizenship performances,and migration as social movement

Doing bordering: The multiplication of citizenship

As scholars who have focused extensively on the complex dynamics associated with the social construction of difference (Jones and Prior, 2018a, 2018b; Wonders, 2018a), it is evident to us that contemporary debates about citizenship exhibit many parallels to the historic production of race, class, gender, and other social inequalities. The social construction of difference typically involves the creation of a binary in which one side of the binary is privileged and the other is marginalized; criminalization of the “other” is one of the most powerful tactics of marginalization (Wonders, 2018a). Over the last decade many western nations have revised their approach to immigration, moving away from policies that regulate border flows to those that criminalize many border crossers, especially those viewed as “undesirable”, typically based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, and/or post-colonial histories. This trend has created an “illegalized global underclass” (Aas, 2011: 337, emphasis in original) that is increasingly regulated by an immigration–criminal justice assemblage that many scholars now refer to as “crimmigration” (Stumpf, 2006, 2014). A growing body of research documents the history and global reach of this shift, as well as the significant harm associated with it, particularly for border crossers and their loved ones (Dreby, 2015; Weber and Pickering, 2011). An important aspect of this work is its emphasis on the way that illegality is produced, as is the vulnerability that accompanies legislative and everyday efforts to turn unauthorized border crossers into criminals (Barker, 2017; Macías-Rojas, 2016).

Throughout human history, mobility has been at the very heart of the search for human betterment and, indeed, for survival (Castles, 2016). At the same time, mobility has also long been subject to contestation; as Mezzadra (2011: 124) emphasizes, “struggles over mobility criss-cross the whole history of capitalism”. The contemporary criminalization of border crossing in the West reveals a profound social struggle between those who seek freedom of movement and those who have a deep stake in the creation of semi-permeable borders and citizenship regimes that socially sort people into those deemed worthy of mobility and rights and those who are not (Wonders, 2006, 2008). The goal of western border regimes is not complete social exclusion but rather “processes of differential inclusion” (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 159); in these regimes, “irregularity emerges both as a produced condition and as a political stake in the politics of mobility” (Mezzadra, 2011: 131). As Squire (2011: 8, emphasis in original) elaborates, “if irregularity is a produced condition, it is produced both through the movements and activities of national, international and/or transnational agencies as well as through the movements and activities of migrants and citizens”—a dynamic that she calls “the contested politics of mobility”. It is this struggle over the meaning of mobility, citizenship, and irregularity that is our focus here.

Scholarly attention to what has come to be called “the criminology of mobility” is relatively recent and remains largely at the margin of the discipline, despite the very substantial impact of global migration on contemporary criminal justice policies and practices (Aas and Bosworth, 2013). Much of the contemporary criminological research on borders and mobility has focused on what De Genova (2010) calls the “spectacle” of the external border, including the increased use of border enforcement, militarization, deportation, and detention. While this work has been crucially important for detailing the increased use of formal social control to discipline human mobility and the substantial social harm associated with criminalizing border crossers, some of this research tends to exhibit important limitations, not the least of which is its tendency to be nation-state centric, to reify citizenship, and to frame border crossers as vulnerable victims who have little power to affect larger social structures. In response, a promising body of work within the criminology of mobility is developing that reveals the complex strategies for constructing and performing internal borders that are developing within nation-states (e.g. Barker, 2012, 2017; Brandariz and Fernández Bessa, 2010; Pickering and Weber, 2006; Weber, 2006, 2013; Weber and Pickering, 2011; Wonders, 2006, 2008).

A central theme that has emerged from the theoretical and empirical work on internal bordering is the increasingly important role played by restrictions on membership and citizenship for heightening global inequality and limiting access to democratic forms of justice. Aas (2014: 520) contends that “the absence of formal membership is the essential factor contributing towards shifting the nature of penal intervention from reintegration into the society towards deportation and territorial exclusion”. Similarly, Bosworth et al. (2018: 35) argue that “the progressive destabilization of citizenship and the precarity of membership and belonging are inimically linked to increasingly potent exhortations of penal power that affect us all”. We build upon these theoretical insights and respond to the challenge set forth in recent scholarship to “think more expansively about citizenship, globalization and justice” (Bosworth and Guild, 2008: 704) and to develop “alternative conceptions of membership” that acknowledge “the openness of the social and the complexity of lived realities, identities, and belongings” (Aas, 2014: 535–536). In doing so, we contribute to the analytic shift away from the “spectacle at the border” and toward the impact of border politics on the social construction of difference, citizenship, and human subjectivities, including ways that border crossers and their allies collectively work to contest processes of bordering and transform them from below. As Squire (2011: 8) writes,

an emphasis on the way in which irregularity is produced through technologies of control risks overlooking both the struggles inherent to such productions, as well as the different ways in which irregularity is contested, resisted, appropriated and/or re-appropriated—often by those who are constituted or categorized as such.

It is precisely for this reason that we prefer the term “border crosser” to the term “migrant”; as we will examine, border crossers cross many borders—geographical, legal, cultural—and, in doing so, frequently challenge the socially constructed divides between citizenship and irregularity.

An important interdisciplinary body of theoretical work is challenging understandings of borders, citizenship, and subjectivity. One of the most analytically rich contributions to this body of scholarship has been made by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) who argue that a key purpose of bordering today is the way that it serves to multiply labor by creating subjectivities that discipline labor for the neoliberal economy. Extending their analysis, we argue that citizenship is also being partitioned to serve the needs of neoliberalism, a process we refer to as the multiplication of citizenship.

As a consequence of neoliberal globalization and the challenges it poses to nation-states, western nations have proliferated distinct packages of citizenship rights and limitations, from guest worker programs to the treatment of terrorist suspects to felony disenfranchisement. ¹ The multiplication of citizenship is a nuanced strategy nation-states are employing to socially construct new difference regimes—it is a contemporary way of “doing difference” (West and Fenstermaker, 1995) by developing a hierarchy of mobility and citizenship privileges. Contemporary migration regimes prioritize what Oliveri (2016: 267) calls “neoliberal citizenship” because access to legal entry typically hinges on employment; thus, employers become “the main gatekeepers in the access of migrant workers to legal status, to human rights and thus, more generally, to full social existence”. Neoliberal citizenship puts into sharp relief the transitory nature of citizenship and irregularity since the link between rights and employment contracts means that people can “come and go into the condition of irregularity” (Nyers, 2011: 189). Under neoliberalism, the proliferation of categories of “liminal legality” (Menjivar, 2006) creates a “temporally and socially uncertain transitional state of partial belonging that arises out of marginal legal status” (Chacón, 2015: 710).

Additionally, the use of risk management tools and biometrics at the border and within nations, combined with diminishing social protections, has increasingly blurred the boundary between citizens and noncitizens (Rygiel, 2011). Throughout the West, where global economic imperatives dominate and the social welfare state is in sharp decline, citizenship has become unsettled and destabilized (Wonders, 2015, 2016). As Nyers (2011: 185) points out some “citizens, too, may have to struggle for the right to have rights”; indeed, “some citizens are experiencing their citizenship in highly irregular ways” including “where it has been rendered inoperable, or irregularized”, what he calls “irregular citizenship”. Nyers’ discussion of the treatment of citizens who are terrorist suspects provides a stark example of how tenuous citizenship rights can be. Similarly, Dauvergne (2016: 188) describes the emerging practice of “citizenship stripping” which occurs when “the removal of citizenship for criminal activity renders citizens deportable”, a legal maneuver that has been used in both Canada and the United Kingdom.

Given these gradations of citizenship status, it is important to move away from reified conceptions of citizenship that view “the citizen” as the opposite of the “irregular migrant”. As Bickham Mendez and Naples (2015: 18) note, “the binary of ‘citizen’ and ‘noncitizen’ fails to capture the multitude of categories and forms of membership that exist in a context of global integration”. Instead, there is a need for a more dynamic view that understands the juxtaposition of citizens to noncitizens relationally and contextually. ² Conceptually and in lived experiences, the citizen and noncitizen are not two binary categories; instead, they are categories that exist along a continuum that is socially constructed within broader contexts and scales of power, including those that define and give durability to categories and gradations of legality and illegality, as is roughly illustrated in Figure 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A relational view of citizenship.

Neither citizenship nor irregularity are fixed, real categories; instead, following from emerging trends in citizenship studies and theoretical work on border performativity (Wonders, 2016), we might conceive of citizenship as a performance. The rights and responsibilities we associate with citizenship are socially constructed and relationally attained in a complex dance between ordinary people and various state and non-state actors within local, national, and global contexts. While this dance is constrained by the legal choreography established by the nation-state and, increasingly, by global imperatives, it is important to emphasize that the juridical and normative choreography shaping citizenship has changed over time and continues to transform in the contemporary period, in part because of citizenship performances of border crossers and their allies, a point we examine below.

A relational and performative view of citizenship foregrounds the nation-state and law creation as sites of struggle (Wonders, 2016), as well as the growing disconnect between formal rights and substantive rights (Bloemraad and Sheares, 2017). Formal citizenship does not guarantee the protection of rights, nor does a lack of citizenship or the condition of irregularity necessarily block access to either juridical or substantive rights. Given the multiplication of citizenship categories as a strategy to fragment and restrict rights, it is essential to examine whether and how migrants and their allies might “produce migrant subjectivities that refuse to be disciplined and that are based on the use of irregularity as a resource” (Rygiel, 2011: 159).

Another important theoretical turn relevant to our examination of citizenship and irregularity concerns the multiscalar character of bordering as a consequence of globalization (Aas, 2013; Wonders, 2017). As Bickham Mendez and Naples (2015: 11) explain, “analysis of border politics must be situated within intersecting power relations across global, local, and national sites of mobilization and struggle.” Globalization has facilitated new architectures for global governance that often involve transformations at the national level in service to the global imperatives, what (Sassen, 2015) calls “embedded bordering capacities.” As Aas (2013: 322) notes, “National and local no longer appear as fixed categories but are shot through with transnational elements and marked by hybridity and movement.” In countries where local and regional power remain durable, as is true, for example in the U.S. and Spain, scalar analysis is especially important, although also much more complicated (see Wonders, 2017). For example, in the USA “each of the fifty states and many municipalities have considered, and sometimes adopted, legislation directed at immigrants” (Provine, 2013: 116), while many nations in Europe are increasingly constrained by European Union mandates (Wonders, 2017). Scalar analysis is important for detailing how, when, and where rights have been lost—and can be gained. Attention to scale reveals how national policies aimed at regulating global migration flows and labor markets shape local policing practices and experiences of rights and, we would add, local strategies of resistance. In recognition of the multiscalar character of contemporary power, we agree with Dauvergne (2016: 207) who argues that “organizing and advocating in ways that decenter the state is vital to shifting migration politics. Efforts at the civil society level, as well as at the international level, are important to pursue.” It is to this level that we now turn.

Undoing borders: Citizenship performances as political struggle

If the borders between citizens and irregular migrants are socially constructed difference projects, it is then important to ask: how can increasingly fragmented and restrictive legal framings of citizenship by nation-states be undone or challenged by ordinary people? History informs us that rights are rarely given; they are demanded and achieved through political struggle. Much of the work of contemporary bordering seeks to produce the subjectivity of the “illegal”—the non-person who is unworthy of rights—as well as to valorize the shrinking rights held by those still privileged enough to access citizenship. Bordering also operates to demobilize people from supporting rights struggles through the politics of fear and stigma (Stumpf, 2014). Research confirms that this strategy is often very effective and suggests that:

an exclusive focus on the struggles of irregular migrants’ risks producing a binary that obscures the fact “regular” migrants also live and struggle in conditions that are produced by the same regime of control that produces both a system of stratified and often racialized citizenship and “irregularity”.

(Mezzadra, 2011: 124)

To undo this binary, we must make the relationality between citizenship and irregularity more legible.

Despite the dynamics that operate to create fear and repression, many border crossers and their allies challenge and resist bordering in their everyday lives. One way they do so is by engaging in what Isin (2008: 37) calls “acts of citizenship”—“those acts that produce citizens and their others”. Isin (2012: 151) offers an explicitly relational conception of citizenship that “attempts to capture it as a contested field through which rights and responsibilities are articulated in the constitution of a body politic”; in other words, citizenship is constituted through political struggle. As Isin (2012: 153) provocatively asks, “[w]hat if we think about citizenship first as acts and then its subjects?” From this perspective, it is when citizenship is performed that citizen subjectivities are produced. As Mezzadra (2011: 121, emphases in original) similarly emphasizes, this occurs when “migrants—documented and undocumented—act as citizens and insist that they are already citizens”.

Bloemraad and Shears (2017: 854) use the concept of “performative citizenship” to capture “the claiming and contesting of rights by paying attention to citizenship acts in a bottom–up process”, further contending that “as a performative act, citizenship can apply to noncitizens and citizens”. Like other kinds of difference that have been conceptualized relationally, from this perspective citizenship can be understood as an accomplishment (West and Fenstermaker, 1995; Wonders, 2018a).

Isin (2008: 39) provocatively argues that “for acts of citizenship to be acts at all they must call the law into question and, sometimes, break it”. By challenging laws perceived to be unfair, ordinary people hold the nation-state accountable for ensuring that rules and laws governing citizenship and belonging are just, creating pressure for change. In a related line of thinking, Inda (2011: 75) examines “counterconducts” engaged in by irregular migrants including “labor strikes, hunger strikes for justice, advocacy for legalization and political rights, the occupation of churches as a way of gaining sanctuary, public demonstrations, and fights for legal redress of unpaid wages”. Inda (2011: 84) argues that “such counterconducts seek to call into question the criminalization and marginalization of irregular migrants”; in part, by challenging the “expectation of docility on the part of refugees and the undocumented”. Counterconducts are important moments when “the undocumented are basically acting as citizens. In the process, citizenship is transformed from a strictly juridical condition to a practice in which one can engage regardless of legal status” (Inda, 2011: 86). It is important to note that sometimes such actions are jurisgenerative of formal rights acquisition, as will be explored below, while at other times citizenship acts operate to foster collective identity and to reframe the normative and cultural boundaries of belonging. Further theoretical and empirical engagement with citizenship performances is analytically useful for understanding rights struggles associated with migration and their potential to challenge and alter law, transform rights, and create social change.

Illustrative citizenship performances in the USA and Spain

In this section, we very briefly examine several examples of citizenship performances to ground our theoretical argument in empirical realities. We draw on examples from two different western nations—the USA and Spain—to illustrate the way that collective action at the local level has operated to transform national efforts to restrict citizenship, keeping in mind that such restrictions increasingly challenge dynamics at the global scale (Wonders, 2017). We focus on Spain and the USA for several reasons: in both countries irregular migration has been significant, there has been a shift from more lenient to more punitive responses to migration, the first author has conducted primary research on migration in both countries for over two decades, and, as we describe below, in both countries citizenship and irregularity have been used as resources for transforming the distinction between these categories. These comparative examples serve to demonstrate that citizenship performances reflect and facilitate collective behavior, share repertoires of action across multiple sites and scales, and operate to unsettle the meaning of both irregularity and citizenship from below.

Migration as social movement

Consideration of the transformative power of citizenship performances leads us to the theoretical insight that much contemporary migration currently framed by western nations as “irregular” might usefully and accurately be reframed within criminology as a social movement. Social movements have historically been understood as sustained collective action with some degree of organization, political or cultural change-oriented goals, and involving some extra-institutional actions (Snow et al., 2004). Recent scholarship emphasizes that social movements are “forms of contentious politics with transformative potential” that are not necessarily highly unified and are often reflective of localized political struggles in pursuit of broader aims (Atac et al., 2016: 530, see also Della Porta, 2015). Our work joins a developing body of scholarship that argues that much “irregular” migration reflects collective action and contentious politics that are consistent with contemporary social movement dynamics (Atac et al., 2016; Mezzadra, 2011; Varela, 2015). As part of our consideration of migration as a social movement, we first draw on the social movement literature to examine processes of collective identity formation among border crossers that create the potential for political mobilization. We then argue that the criminalization and social exclusion associated with the current framing of “irregular” migration facilitates the development of micromobilization contexts, repertoires of action, and contentious politics that have the potential to transform borders from below. As we have discussed, citizenship performances are an especially important repertoire of action for reframing and challenging contemporary border regimes.

Social movement scholars have established the importance of collective identity formation as central to the tactical and strategic actions of social movements and their actors since the development of collective identity forges connections between individuals and a broader community (Polletta and Jasper, 2001). Collective identity processes for social movements are structurally situated and emerge from informal networks that provide the space and discursive elements necessary for interpretation of broader shifts in political, economic, or environmental variables and for the development of political mobilization (McAdam et al., 1996).

Because of globalization, there has been a recalibration of social movement concepts to include the transnational dynamics that shape social movements and the targets of their challenges. For instance, Keck and Sikkink (1998) describe the growth of transnational advocacy networks which establish ties beyond borders, and importantly aid in the communication needed for social movement micromobilization. The spread of informal networks across borders has impacts for the social movement context since, via these networks, opportunities for political participation become available to ordinary people (Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005). Creating ties across borders allows border crossers to “mobilize information strategically to help create new issues and categories, and to persuade, pressurize, and gain leverage over much more powerful organizations and governments” (Keck and Sikkink, 1998: 2). Contemporary communication networks provide an important mobilizing context in which local experience becomes linked to global struggles and to the construction of social movement identities and action (Rovira, 2016). Thus, it is not surprising that sanctuary cities in the USA and welcoming cities in Spain share many commonalities; the diffusion of movement ideas, practices, and frames thrive in networks that operate across transnational spaces (Bauder, 2016). Tactical decisions and meaning making occur in these mobilizing structures and networks, as individuals come together collectively to define themselves, their goals, and to develop repertoires of action to achieve them.

Social movements rely on tactical repertoires as a means of building collective identity among activists (Taylor and Van Dyke, 2007). While a movement’s repertoire of action may be aimed at the state or its laws, it is also important to see such collective action as “attempts to transform everyday practices in order to build alternatives on the local level” (Groves and Ofer, 2016: 4). So, while movement activities can be directed toward a specific outcome or change, such as a policy or legal change, movement activities also serve the purpose of creating meanings or making sense of experiences—in this case, of migration, bordering, citizenship, and irregularity (Gaby and Caren, 2016). In this way, the lived and shared experiences of border crossers become important elements in the mobilization structures and cultural diffusion of migration as a social movement.

Through the lens of social movement theory, we can see more clearly the ways that those designated by the nation-state as “irregular” are engaged in wider networks of contested meaning about borders and citizenship, including everyday activities at the local level that have the potential to challenge and alter national and global frames that define many border crossers as criminals in order to justify social marginalization and the utilization of social control mechanisms (Atac et al., 2016; Groves and Ofer, 2016). Citizenship performances are the very behavior performed by border crossers and their allies that challenge, protest, and expand the borders of belonging and rights. The illustrative citizenship performances we described in the previous section reveal the borders of citizenship as a site of significant political contention and resistance. By acting as if they are citizens, citizenship performances by border crossers operate to reborder subjectivities and to transform the meaning of belonging and rights from below.

Importantly, as a form of political contention, citizenship performances can further amplify collective identity processes and dynamics. The rhetoric surrounding the securitization of the border and migrants as threat has generated the very counter-movement or target against which framing processes and meaning making among migrants and their allies are positioned, facilitating the development of a group-level interest, as evidenced by the examples described previously. Collective attention to the adverse impact of socially constructed subjectivities and rights restrictions can raise consciousness and motivate further mobilization and commitment (Guenther and Mulligan, 2013). For instance, efforts to criminalize migrants via the label “illegal” have been frequently contested by border crossers (Coutin, 2005), and efforts to reclaim the meaning of their collective identity and subjectivity have further amplified solidarity. Collective identity formation processes can reflect and produce “shared motivation and can even constitute the group as such” (Zaloznaya and Gerber, 2012: 261). Atac et al. (2016: 530) suggest that attention to the politics of contention surrounding migration allows for a clearer understanding of both the experiences of border crossers and of allies who mobilize in solidarity with them in the struggle for “the creation of new relationships, political subjectivities, and communities and ways of thinking about citizenship”. It is evident from the illustrative examples provided in the previous section that such shared understandings are leading to a diffusion of repertoires of action across scales, from local to global, and across national borders (Staggenborg, 2016).

Reframing migration as a social movement places the human agency and lived experiences of border crossers at the very center of analysis. For many of the border crossers to the West, the collective action of migrating facilitates an oppositional consciousness to law and calls into question the construction of legal and substantive rights as the sole prerogative of nation-states (Bloemraad and Sheares, 2017; Coutin, 2005). The experience of mobility contests legal restrictions on both voluntary and compelled migration and, thus, “is itself productive of new forms of citizenship and of being political” (Nyers and Rygiel, 2012: 1). Even as migrants are denied rights or legal protections, they may be able to use their “im/mobility as a resource to renegotiate their status, belonging and subjectivity” (Nyers and Rygiel, 2012: 4). In fact, this may be their greatest power within this movement (Tarrow, 2011).

Thus, both irregular migration and citizenship performances can be theoretically conceptualized as instrumental resources for creating pressure for legal and social change. For migrants who have no legal standing, the choice to engage in citizenship performances that focus on rights acquisition provides “a vital symbolic language, legitimating grievances, serving as a focal point around which collective identities can develop and flourish” (Barclay et al., 2011: 3). In our view, it is both accurate and crucial to view much contemporary irregular migration as a social movement that challenges the social construction of citizenship and that has the potential to facilitate new subjectivities and rights, as well as broader social transformation.

Transforming borders from below

The contention that migration is a social movement and that citizen performances constitute a repertoire of action employed by border crossers to achieve change from below contrasts sharply with the securitization frame that currently dominates much criminological thinking and criminal justice practice. As social movement scholars McAdam et al. (1996: 6, emphasis in original) noted long ago, framing refers to “conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action”. Our call for a new frame is a call to action for criminology. Migration is clearly one of the most important justice issues of our time and the question of who can access justice and the right to rights is at the heart of border struggles. The theoretical frame we propose shifts analytic focus away from irregular border crossing as a form of criminal behavior and toward the construction of borders and citizenship as a contested political terrain situated within multiscalar contexts. Rather than analyzing border crossers as criminal, criminologists might more productively focus attention on the power relations, global inequalities, and political processes that lead nations to construct some persons as unworthy of rights in the first place.

We strongly agree with other scholars within the criminology of mobility that theoretical and empirical research on migration must draw more heavily on related work in other disciplines (McCulloch and True, 2015; Pickering et al., 2015). It is our view that social movement theories, combined with insights from critical citizenship studies and work on the social construction of difference, provide useful theoretical and conceptual tools for analyzing the relationality between citizenship and irregularity and the politics that are embedded in border regimes and framings of “irregular” migration.

Our work also overlaps in important ways with other criminologists who have focused attention on the role of resistance in challenging abuses of state power toward marginalized groups (e.g. Grewcock, 2013; Stanley and McCulloch, 2013), as well as the work of numerous feminist and critical race scholars dedicated to interrogating how the legal and social construction of difference creates, maintains, and enforces profound inequalities and injustices. Throughout history law has too frequently been used as a weapon against categories of people to “other” them and exclude them from rights (Barclay et al., 2011; Jones and Prior, 2018a, 2018b; Wonders, 2018a). Viewing migration through the lens of difference and social movement theory illuminates the linkage between the current contestation over migrant rights and older and ongoing civil rights movements, such as for women, marginalized racial and ethnic groups, and those identifying as LGBTQ. It is crucial to point out that mobility privileges tend to intersect with other socially constructed differences in powerful and enduring ways; this is an important global dynamic that would benefit from additional theoretical and empirical engagement.

By foregrounding citizenship and irregularity as socially constructed difference projects that are both reflective of and productive of social and legal inequalities, we seek to emphasize that it is ordinary people who can change these processes. We share the view of Piven (2008: 1) that “the question of how power can be exerted from the lower reaches has never been more important. It will ultimately determine whether another world is indeed possible.” When considering strategies for social change, it is important to center migrants’ agency—their capacity to act and transform borders as they cross them. Even as migrants face legal exclusion, through citizenship performances and activism they can play a powerful role in positively reconstructing their own subjectivities as rights worthy. Further, like other social movements, the repertoires of action engaged in by migrants and their allies can create political pressure for greater normative and cultural acceptance of border crossers, which can bridge the gap to legal and policy change over time. Indeed, “the great movements of the past century have been won by taking issues that were unpopular and changing the boundaries of the politically acceptable, so that advances which previously seemed impossible were made inevitable” (Engler and Engler, 2016: 278).

Framing irregular migration as a social movement is not without limitations. Encouraging collective action in pursuit of rights and inclusion that involves resistance to national laws or policies can result in countermobilization by the nation-state and greater repression against those without rights, providing a justification for ever more draconian actions by the nation-state (Stanley and McCulloch, 2013). Repertoires of action designed to achieve change can also create conflicts between social groups, as we are witnessing within the USA between those who seek comprehensive immigration reform and those who seek unique protections for Dreamers. We are also aware that citizenship is not always the most important objective for border crossers; family reunification, work, and other objectives also motivate border crossing (Meyer and Fine, 2017). At the same time, framing much irregular migration as a social movement acknowledges that many migrants do seek the right to rights and belonging and acknowledges the potential of all people to shape the meaning of citizenship and belonging in their everyday lives—regardless of the borders they have crossed.

Most of the central dynamics facilitating global migration, including economic restructuring, urbanization, war and conflict, and environmental degradation, are likely to increase rather than to diminish in the foreseeable future (Miller, 2017). The recent rise of nationalist and isolationist politics in the West foreshadows a widening and deepening of criminalization and border tightening policies and practices by nation-states, as well as further fragmentation and multiplication of citizenship statuses in service to national and global neoliberal economic priorities. There will be a continuing need for criminologists to document the significant harm that results from restrictive bordering and to press for formal citizenship rights and social protections for border crossers from above, including via policy and law. However, it is also essential to focus attention on ways that actors other than the nation-state can work to create safe spaces and to extend meaningful rights and protections from below. Our goal is not to deny the power of nation-states and rights restrictions to harm life chances, but rather to draw attention to this reality and the many ways that rights, belonging, and justice are ultimately guaranteed in social relationships at the local level. Reframing citizenship as a performance that reflects political struggle and migration as a social movement for belonging are important steps toward creating a new criminological frame about migration that acknowledges the power—and responsibility—of ordinary people to create change from below if we are to ensure justice for all.