Theorising the constitution of subjects and the state through governmental citizenship : immigration regulation and the 2004 Irish citizenship referendum

This is an empirical investigation of the processes whereby the boundaries and meaning of citizenship are re-constituted through state-driven practices of regulating migrants and migrants’ responses to such practices. The focal point of this study is an instance of constitutional and legislative citizenship reform which occurred in the Republic of Ireland in 2004, resulting in the alteration of jus soli citizenship. This thesis explicates the forms of power-knowledge, the discursive and enumerative practices, through which migrant mothers were constituted as risky, irresponsible subjects. The politics of the referendum produced judicial decisions, deportations, legislative change, and the suspension and re-establishment of an administrative residency programme pertaining to immigrant parents. I conceptualise this series of legislative and administrative developments in terms of ‘technologies of citizenship’ and ‘anti-citizenship technologies’ which have cumulatively expanded the capacity of the State to biopolitically and ethopolitically regulate the non-EEA resident immigrant population. I argue that the technical and programmatic aspects of immigration governance through which migrants are channelled into various governmental categories, are constitutive of subject-positions and structuring of immigrants’ agency. Practices such as detention and deportation, direct provision and expedited asylum determination procedures operate as anti-citizenship technologies intended to discipline and deter immigrants. Conditional and temporary residency statuses act as technologies of citizenship, provisionally including immigrants on the basis that they adhere to prescribed criteria. I investigate the subject-effects these technologies on migrant mothers through the prism of eighteen participants’ experiential narratives. The analysis examines how citizenship/immigration technologies act upon migrants’ bodies and mobilities, presuppose particular raced and gendered forms of subjectivity, and endeavour to cultivate forms of subjectivity compatible with the needs of neoliberal governance. However, participants’ narrations of their negotiations of governmental processes and procedures reveal their capacity for political agency, albeit constrained. Moreover, in narrating their local, everyday practices of forming families, participating in communities, engaging in education and employment, the migrant mothers who participated in this study expound alternative articulations of legitimacy and belonging. This thesis theorises the constitutive relationship between the state and migrant subjects in re-shaping the boundaries and meaning of citizenship in the context of transnational migration.