Universal Citizenship

When we think of refugees or illegal migrants, several images may come to mind — people from Asia or Africa who pay agents to smuggle them into Europe or America, accepting high risks because they are still willing to make the attempt; or people displaced by war or famine, images often shown on television, such as refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan, Palestinians, or Burmese or Bangladeshi refugees. All of these are people who have been forced to become refugees in their own, or in a neighbouring, country.

We often assume that full membership of a state should be available to anyone who ordinarily lives and works there, as well as to anyone who applies for citizenship. But although many states may in principle support the idea of universal and inclusive citizenship, each of them also fixes its own criteria for granting citizenship — generally written into the country's Constitution and laws — and states use their power to keep unwanted visitors out.

Despite such restrictions, even the building of walls or fences has not stopped considerable migration from taking place across the world. People may be displaced by wars, persecution, famine, or other reasons; if no state is willing to accept them and they cannot return home, they become stateless peoples or refugees. They may be forced to live in camps, or as illegal migrants, often unable to work legally, educate their children, or acquire property. The scale of the problem is so large that the United Nations has appointed a High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to try to help such people.

Deciding how many people can be absorbed as citizens in a country poses a genuinely difficult humanitarian and political problem for many states. Many countries have a policy of accepting people fleeing persecution or war, but they may not want to accept unmanageable numbers of people, or to expose the country to security risks. India prides itself on providing refuge to persecuted peoples, as it did with the Dalai Lama and his followers in 1959. Entry of people from neighbouring countries has taken place along all the borders of the Indian state, and this process continues; many such people remain stateless for years or generations, living in camps or as illegal migrants, and only a relatively small number of them are eventually granted citizenship. …