One for all, all for one: migration, citizenship and gender in Europe

In the early 1990s, a foreign spouse trying to get a divorce in Germany during the first four years of marriage could face deportation, according to the 1991 Aliens Act. With the risk of losing residency if the marriage was broken, many women were put into situations of domestic violence and sexual exploitation by their husbands, an aspect initially dismissed by German legislators. Citizenship may promise equality and inclusion, but it also builds boundaries and contains inherent exclusions. Although the German example may seem far away in time, the relationship between gender, migration and citizenship is today still a problematic one across Europe.

Citizenship is not a neutral phenomenon, but has been developed throughout history in ways which have carried gender assumptions at its heart. Creating citizens across Europe has generally been linked to the male breadwinner, patriarchal attitudes and the existence of exclusive political structures; in the UK, institutional sexism can be traced back to key documents such as the 1942 Beveridge Report. But the intersection of gender and citizenship is not only found in female nationals’ full enjoyment of political, social, and economic rights but also in (particularly low-skilled and irregular) migrants and asylum seekers’ access to nationality and rights in the destination countries.

Dealing with diversity and difference within the framework of citizenship can be challenging and lead to nasty politics of exclusion: Switzerland's denied citizenship to two Muslim girls after they refused to swim with boys at school, violating the school curriculum, while the Ealing Council in the UK tried to withdraw funding from Southall Black Sisters, a provider of advice to ethnic minority women suffering from domestic violence, for excluding white women. The current rhetorical ‘(re)turn to assimilation’ can prove challenging for migrants, and as seen above especially for women, who do not ‘fit’ with the idea of citizenship pushed by mainstream media and government, which is based on a model of ‘civic integration’ that promotes the adoption of the ‘shared values’ of the host society.

The return to assimilation has been connected with the increasing importance of national citizenship, in which nationality is frequently a prerequisite for the enjoyment of basic human rights and in which, according to Theresa May, citizens of the world ‘do not understand what the very word citizenship means.’ The reliance on national citizenship to enjoy basic human rights has put many female migrant workers at risk, especially those working in the informal economy who may never acquire eligibility for permanent stay or citizenship. A good example is the recent British ‘health tourism’ laws, by which irregular migrant women have had to pay up to £6000 for giving birth in British hospitals.

In the back-breaking path to national citizenship, gendered socioeconomic discrimination frequently intertwines with racial discrimination. As stated by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women in their 2008 Resolution on migrant women workers, ‘women migrant workers often experience intersecting forms of discrimination, suffering not only gender-based discrimination, but also xenophobia and racism.’ Recent research has shown how the employment chances of females with backgrounds of migration from Muslim countries, and especially of those wearing headscarves, are considerably lower than those of native German citizens. Migrant and ethnic minority women are often construed as ‘traditional’ and ‘subservient,’ which tends to build upon gendered notions of appropriate work for these women being in the domestic sphere.

The impact of anti-immigration politics has built on existing racial discrimination and has had gendered effects in both men and women. Male asylum-seekers have been constructed as hypersexualized predators after the events of Cologne, and far right parties such as The Danish Party have gone as far as handing out an ‘anti-migrant’ spray to protect Danish citizens from the ‘danger’ of male asylum-seekers. Similarly, the Hungarian government has framed male asylum-seekers as ‘women harassers’ in the build up to their recent national referendum on whether to accept the EU quota for asylum-seekers. The trope of the sexual savagery of the racialized non-citizen is one deeply embedded in European culture, and that can be traced back to the colonial era.

Hungarian billboard stating: “The number of harassment against women has been dynamically growing in Europe since the immigrant crisis”

Anti-immigration politics has also constructed (especially female) migrants’ citizenship in terms of them using up welfare provisions, but migrants are not only passive recipients of services but active providers of public services, many of which have been recently cut. They not only contribute economically by paying taxes and doing unpaid labour in the home, but also politically and culturally, thus shaping citizenship as much as being shaped by it. Assimilation is inevitably a two-way street, but current anti-immigration policies are only making that street too steep and unequal.

To overcome current anti-immigration, assimilationist approaches around Europe and especially in the UK, it is necessary to put migrant men and women’s life-stories into the debate on citizenship, giving them the agency they deserve and debunking gender and racial based myths. Only when their voices are heard will migrant men and women be able to assert the ways in which they are already becoming citizen, by enshrining them in law.

Creating citizens is not a neutral but a highly gendered phenomenon. The egalitarian and anti-hierarchical potential of citizenship is often trumped by gendered assumptions that tend to intersect with racial and class assumptions as well. Male asylum-seekers are constructed as sexual predators, while female migrants are generally seen as passive recipients of social benefits or victims of oppressive and traditional cultures. In the current anti-immigration, assimilationist agenda, citizenship is build in opposition to highly-gendered images of the non-citizen resident, who in turn reshapes the very idea of citizenship in his/her daily practices. Equality and difference are presented as incompatible, when in fact they are not. Making citizens in Europe in the 21st century requires challenging ideas of belonging and loyalty, and the starting point should look at both our gendered discourses in the media and government, their material consequences, and migrants’ life-stories.

Originally published in The Columnist Magazine