A Review of David Jacobson, Rights Across
Borders: Immigration and the
Decline of Citizenship
David Jacobson, Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of
Citizenship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Pp. x, 181 [Hardcover U.S. $33.50].
Reviewed by Amyn B. Sajoo”
Incubated in both national and international law, the universe of human rights has
been potent in recasting the boundaries of statehood and.the citizen’s locus therein.
Privileging personhood above citizenship as the repository of rights was always a
radical proposition. Now, the legitimacy of the sovereign state is seen in David Jacob-
son’s Rights Across Borders as “shifting from an entity that embodies the people’s
will (national self-determination) to an entity that advances transnational rights”‘ –
with negative consequences for citizenship.
It is not only the post-World War II normative regime, stemming from the Uni-
versal Declaration of Human Rights and the ensuing International Covenants,2 that
accord primacy to the person vis–vis society and state. The French Declaration of
the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ and the American Declaration of Independence –
blazed the trail in their universal aspi-
along with the constitutions of both nations –
* DCL (McGill, 1987); LL.B (London, 1979); Policy Advisor, Canadian Human Rights Commis-
sion, 1989-92; Canada-ASEAN Fellow, 1993-94. Presently an independent scholar & consultant,
Vancouver.
McGill Law Journal 1998
Revue de droit de McGill
To be cited as: (1998) 43 McGill L.J. 213
Mode de rf&ence: (1998) 43 R.D. McGill 213
‘Rights Across Borders: imigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996) at 11.
2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, GA Res. 217 (III), UN GAOR, 3d Sess., Supp. No. 13,
UN Doc. A/810 (1948) 71; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 19 December 1966,
Can. T.S. 1976 No. 47, 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force 23 March 1976) [hereinafter Universal
Declaration]; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 19 December 1966,
Can. T.S. 1976 No. 46, 993 U.N.T.S. 3 (entered into force 3 January 1976). See generally L. Henkin,
TheAge of Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
3 (1789).
4 (1776).
214
MCGILL LAW JOURNAL / REVUE DE DROIT DE MCGILL
[Vol. 43
rations even as they recognized the state as the enabling framework.! Those aspira-
tions were echoed and advanced during eighteenth-century romanticism, with Kant as
a pivotal figure in altering the mechanistic premises of the Enlightenment into a vi-
sion of human liberty and individuality.6 The nationalism of the age was civic, inclu-
sive and universalist, seeking the autonomy of the individual and society alike.
But the Westphalian order of nation-states was also pervaded by more mundane
concerns. Mercantilism and the rule of law were the norm, with state sovereignty built
on the principle cuius regio, eius religio (religion determined by the sovereign). The
Industrial Revolution and mass trans-Atlantic migration began to change that in the
nineteenth century; by the early twentieth, states were becoming more centralized –
and tightening the regulation of citizenship. Indeed, the passion for boundaries ex-
tended to colonial empires, where they were drawn with an arbitrariness whose legacy
unfolds today from Central Africa to Central Asia. Jacobson’s preoccupation, how-
ever, is with the “Euro-Atlantic core”, including the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) of which Canada is a member.7
Jacobson’s argument in Rights Across Borders is twofold. First, he holds that a
new “international and constitutional order based on human rights”8 is reducing the
state to an administrative bureaucracy for that order. Second, he contends that the
cardinal force behind this change is transnational migration, which has thwarted the
“citizen-alien distinction” and ergo, the idea of citizenship.9 A mosaic of transnational
societies rather than a global society is the outcome, engendering a Euro-Atlantic
community. Although the trend has many congenial aspects from a human-rights per-
spective, Jacobson casts it as subversive of a host of societal relations that center on
sovereignty, most notably, the bonds of citizenship.
Migration and the New Human Rights Order
Jacobson observes that, attracted by a confluence of economic, cultural and so-
cial-welfare factors, over two-thirds of foreigners in the European Union (then the
European Community) resided in France or Germany by 1987.1 A “web of ties” to
trade unions, religious institutions, civic and ethnocultural organizations has anchored
5 See Henkin, ibid at 144; Olwen Hufton, ed., Historical Change and Human Rights: The Oxford
Amnesty Lectures (New York: Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1995).
6 As argued elegantly in I. Berlin’s essay, “Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism” in The
Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996) at 232.
7Formerly the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) under the 1975 Hel-
sinki FinalAct, it was renamed at the 1994 Budapest meeting to signify a new East-West relationship.
This was pursuant to the Charter of Paris for a New Europe signed by the then 35 members of the
CSCE (including Canada and the United States) in 1990, which placed human rights at the center of
the Organization: 30 I.L.M. 190 (1991). See generally: T. Buergenthal, ed., Human Rights, Interna-
tional Law and the Helsinki Final Accord (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun, 1977); H.H. Koh,
“Transnational Public Law Litigation” (1991) 100 Yale L.J. 2347.
‘ Supra note 1 at 2.
91bid. at 9.
‘0Ibid. at21.
1998]
A. SAJOo – RIGHTS ACROSS BORDERS
215
a large proportion of guest workers in new homelands – while often legitimizing
workers or visitors overstaying their initial permits.” Yet France and Germany repre-
sent strikingly varied traditions of nationhood: the former a “territorial nation” under
the banner offraterniti, the latter an “ethnic nation” shaped by the Volkgeist.
Although the disparate traditions have resulted in a predictably higher rate of an-
nual naturalization in France than Germany, the latter was quicker in allowing peti-
tionary access to the European Convention on Human Rights 2 –
and to international
law at large. France, like the United States, was reluctant to do so, but like Germany
(and unlike Britain), it has readily accorded primacy to international rather than do-
mestic law. Amidst the growing caseload of the European Court on Human Rights,
there has been a rise in petitions by and relating to aliens throughout the region.
Moreover, Protocol No. 4 of the European Convention has, since 1968, added specific
safeguards for aliens and citizens alike. 3 With the loosening of frontiers in an expand-
ing European Union, and the widening scope of the OSCE, international human rights
law continues to reconfigure and harmonize sovereign norms with regard to the status
of aliens.
Meanwhile in the United States, the same factors that have drawn large scale mi-
gration to Western Europe, coupled with a porous southern border and a robust tradi-
tion of migration, have repeatedly reshaped the demographic landscape. Ethnic and
ideological criteria dominated official policy through much of this century, and even
the repeal of national origins quotas by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act 4
left intact the dubious provisions of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act,” apropos
“communist” migrants and visitors.” Jacobson observes that net migration accounted
for 4.1 per cent of the population between 1900 and 1910 and remained well below
that (dipping to zero in the Depression) until 1980, when it reached 6.2 per cent. 7
Mere numbers cannot explain why immigration has become a major political issue in
the United States since the 1980s.
Manifestly, the change in the ethnic composition of immigrants away from the
predominance of Europeans to that of Asians and Hispanics has had a significant so-
cial impact but it is the issue of illegal aliens that has engaged most attention. Their
numbers were estimated by demographers at between 2.5 and 3.5 million during the
IlbiL at 33-38.
12(1950) Eur. T.S. No. 5, 213 U.N.T.S. 222 [hereinafter European Convention].
‘3 While prohibiting the collective expulsion of aliens, it adds specific protections for nationals and
to that extent, Jacobson duly notes, buttresses the citizen-alien divide. Both France and Germany have
ratified the Protocol.
“Immigration and Nationality Act Anendments of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-236,79 Stat. 911.
‘5 Inhnigration and Nationality Act of 1952, ch. 477, 66 Stat. 163 (codified as amended at 8 U.S.A.
1101-1537 (1994)).
16 Enacted during the Korean War, the legislation incorporated the Internal Security Act of 1950, ch.
1024, 64 Stat. 987 (codified as amended at 50 U.S.C. 831-835 (1994)), citing the Communist
Party and fellow travellers. President Harry Truman’s objection to ethnic quotas in the Act was over-
ridden.
7 Supra note 1 at 53.
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a figure that today stands at about four million. 8 As in Western
1980 census –
Europe, economic forces have prompted hazardous migrations to the country, gener-
ally heavy demand for migrant labor, and opposition to it in some quarters. Again, the
legal culture has often resorted to international norms in eroding a rigid divide be-
tween citizens and aliens.
Despite earlier judicial circumspection, the prevailing trend is reflected in Fer-
nandez v. Wilkinson’9 and The Paquete Habana,’0 affirming the propriety of recourse
to clear international law in assorted contexts.2′ Since the legislative and executive
branches have to attend increasingly to the judiciary, “regime legitimacy has come to
rest on the courts, focusing above all on human rights,” says Jacobson. 22 Individuals
and non-state actors have a tangible role in global affairs at the expense of sover-
eignty.
Rights Across Borders is dismissive of the contribution of states as well as non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) to the prominence of human rights in interna-
tional affairs. These and other transnational factors are acknowledged, but thought to
pale in comparison with the impact of migration. No evidence or analysis is offered in
support of this contention; if it were, it would surely fail to withstand scrutiny. The
Universal Declaration proclaims itself a response to the scourge of war, and its nor-
mative aftermath had much to do with the ideological conflict during the Cold War.
Aliens availed themselves of existing domestic and international norms –
the “other”
seeking to be “just another” –
among a plethora of claimants against state power.
Without the concurrence of national political and judicial institutions in a deepening
of pluralist democracy, along with the remarkable work of NGOs, aliens would fare
no better in the West than, for example, in Eastern Europe or Northeast Asia.
As for traditional sovereignty, it could hardly be sustained against the century’s
exponential growth in state interdependence. This runs the gamut in issue-areas from
commerce and investment to the environment and narcotics control, to terrorism and
transborder pollution. Certainly the statist thrust of international law has been diluted
by human rights, which adds the individual and supranational agencies to the picture.
” Official estimate cited in E. Schmitt, “Milestones and Missteps on Immigration” The New York
imes (26 October 1996) 1.
” 505 F Supp. 787 (1980), affirmed on other grounds in Rodriguez-Fernandez v. Wilkinson, 654 F
2d 1382 (10th Cir. 1981).
=’ 175 U.S. 677 (1900): “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and adminis-
tered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon
it are duly presented for their determination” (at 700, Grey J.).
2 As in the instance of civil liability for war crimes, for which the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan
Karadzic was indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal. A federal appeals court in New York
ruled in favor of jurisdiction under the Alien Tort Claims Act, 28 U.S.C. 1350 (1994); Kadic v.
Karadzic and Doe v. Karadzic, 70 F 3d 232 (2d Cir. 1995). The decision was upheld by the United
States Supreme Court: certiorari denied, 116 U.S. 2524 (1996). See also: N.A. Lewis, “U.S. Backs
War Crimes Lawsuit Against Bosnian Serb Leader” The New York Tnes (27 September 1995) A10;
L. Greenhouse, “War Crimes Jurisdiction” The New York limes (18 June 1996) A14.
‘ Supra note 1 at 105-06.
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A. SAJOO – RIGHTS ACROSS BORDERS
Other transnational factors, however, have also undercut a compact view of sover-
eignty: the International Monetary Fund (1MF), the World Bank and the World Trade
Organization (WTO) –
not to mention the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), especially from the Canadian/Mexican perspective – have an increasingly
direct impact on national life. Moreover, the “Euro-Atlantic core”, which Jacobson
chooses as his focus, is a hotbed of sovereignty when compared with under-resourced
Afro-Asian regions where borders and central authority barely hold.23
The End Of Citizenship?
Among the laudatory effects of a new human rights order, Jacobson acknowl-
edges, would be “the increasing ability of groups to be recognized outside territorial
frameworks,” allowing them to partake in history and to exercise their right to self-
determination to a degree hitherto impossible.24 Conflict resolution may be enhanced
by the recourse of groups to redress from supranational law and institutions.
As well, humanitarian intervention will become easier in an order that de-
emphasizes sovereignty. Yet, with rights now predicated on residency rather than citi-
zen status, he sees transnational migration as ineluctably undermining the distinction
between citizen and alien. Citizenship is therefore “devalued”.
This phenomenon is illustrated by a 1985 survey which indicated that of the 70
per cent of foreign residents eligible for naturalization in Germany, only 6.2 per cent
wished to do so.2 The trend was common across Western Europe. Only 16 per cent of
the 600,000 legal Mexican arrivals in the United States between 1970 and 1979 had
naturalized by 1992, reflecting a trend among migrants since 1965.26 The attitude to-
wards citizenship (and voting) seemed to be characterized by indifference. Why
bother to acquire citizenship, the argument goes, when the courts will confer virtually
the same package of rights, short of voting, to aliens? In Plyler v. Doe,27 for example,
the United States Supreme Court obliged state authorities to provide free public edu-
cation to the children of undocumented aliens on the basis of the Constitution’s equal-
protection clause with its open-ended embrace of personhood. Jacobson’s reading of
Plyler is doleful: “Constitutionally, accepting, and reinforcing, the erosion of the dis-
tinction between alien and citizen has its own destructive dialectic; what does the
Constitution represent, if not a political and national community?” 28
For harrowing evidence of these frailties from Sierra Leone to Uzbekistan, see R.D. Kaplan, The
Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty First Century (New York: Random House,
1996). Indeed, the vast majority of the world’s more than 13-16 million refugees live in makeshift
sites on frontiers in the Near East, Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
” Supra note 1 at 135.
IbidL at 40.
26 Ibid at 65.
27 457 U.S. 202 (1982) [hereinafter Plyer]. The court was not persuaded that a right to free educa-
tion can be grounded in customary international law as evidenced in major human rights instruments.
2 Supra note 1 at 103,
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As it happens, the prospect of being deprived of such rights under new state and
federal laws has prompted a drastic reversal of the foregoing trends among migrants
in the United States. Over 2.3 million naturalizations were recorded between 1992
and 1996, the highest figure for new citizens in any four-year cycle since 1924.29 On
election day, 6 November 1996, amidst the worst overall voter turnout in recent
American political history, Hispanic voters recorded a thirty per cent increase na-
tionwide having previously lagged behind most of the population in participation.”
No doubt a primary impetus for those trends was the impending federal legislation to
curtail benefits to legal migrants, while effectively diminishing assorted legal protec-
tions for migrant workers and asylum applicants.3
Developments here in Canada also demonstrate a lack of enthusiasm towards
immigration. In the autumn of 1997, the government announced a one-third shortfall
in the migrant intake program for the year compared with its original target. This in-
voked a negative public opinion that was expressly stated to be wrong by the immi-
gration minister.3 2 Then, a draft regulation in The Canada Gazette33 proposed what is
effectively an annual quota for refugees applying from outside our borders –
includ-
ing those in the privately sponsored class, which Ottawa hitherto sought to encour-
age.M Yet “official” Canada commonly perceives itself as more generous than Western
Europe and the United States in this regard. In reality, Canadian elites have tended to
circle the wagons on an assortment of issues that entail greater cultural and demo-
graphic diversity despite the increasingly permeable nature of political frontiers. 5
2’ See S.A. Holmes, “Influx of Immigrants Is Changing Electorate” The New York Times (30 Octo-
30 See B. Drummond Ayres Jr., “The Expanding Hispanic Vote Shakes Republican Strongholds”
ber 1996) A16.
The New York Times (10 November 1996) 1.
3 Ibid; see also Schmitt, supra note 18. Some one million immigrants face losing welfare benefits
under the law: R. Pear, “Legal Immigrants to Get Letters on Welfare Cut” The New York Times (6
February 1997) A16.
32 See P Peirol, “Immigrant levels reflect backlash” The Globe and Mail (30 October 1996) Al.
Against an election promise to admit 300,000 immigrants and refugees for the year, a target figure of
195,000-220,000 was announced, with the actual intake not expected to exceed 200,000. Restrictive
immigration policies also prevail across the Atlantic: see: E. Mortimer, “Hurdles to safety – Central
Africa’s refugee problem has highlighted how reluctant industrialized countries are to grant asylum”
The [London] Financial limes (27 November 1996) 10; C.R. Whitney, “France Blasts European Par-
liament for Attacking Immigration Bill” The New York Times (27 February 1997) A4; A. Freeman,
“Changes in citizenship law derailed by German party” The Globe and Mail (13 November 1997)
All.
33SOR/97-183.
See P. Peirol, “Refugee quota planned” The Globe and Mail (8 March 1997) Al. The Immigra-
tion Department insisted it was imposing a “numerical limitation” rather than a “quota”, a distinction
that most see as semantic. Moreover, Canada’s projected refugee intake for 1998 (including for gov-
ernment-assisted refugees) has been capped at 1997 levels despite escalating global flows, while the
proportion of economic migrants is being increased: S. Feschuk, “Federal liberals keeping the lid on
1998 immigration” The Globe andMail (24 October 1997) A4.
” See A.B. Sajoo, “New Dances With Diversity” (1994) 15 Policy Options (Montreal) 14.
1998]
A. SAJOO – RIGHTS ACROSS BORDERS
219
Jacobson fails to recognize that migrant attitudes toward a traditional concept of
citizenship are broadly integral to the change in the citizen-state nexus as a whole.
General voter apathy in liberal democracies, most notably the United States, is one
symptom of that change. Again, as regional convergence across the spectrum of pub-
lic policy occurs within an expanding European Union, easily the world’s most ad-
vanced effort at such harmonization, 70 per cent of those polled in every member-
state in 1995 did not think of themselves as European first.36
Rights Across Borders evokes a patchwork of “imagined communities ’37 that
span the continents rather than being confined to national boundaries. Jacobson per-
suasively argues that this concept, rather than the much heralded unitary global soci-
ety, is likely to be dominant in the coming decades. However, these communities are
not merely ethno-cultural diasporas: they are also professional, class-based, cause-
driven, or even information technology-sharing associations. More often than not,
they straddle the divides of culture, ethnicity and nationality – which does not neces-
sarily mean that they wish to dispense with the local terrafirma of law and society.
The principal contribution of this scholarly volume is to sketch the intertwining
themes of migration and human rights in trans-Atlantic contexts past and present.
Certainly, the flow of people differs from other cross-border diffusions, given the
implications for national and international order. But the deep change wrought by
human rights, not least within the variegated domain of law, is integral to this cen-
tury’s vistas as they shift from sovereign to global and then to local. Migrants have
drawn upon and reinforced those trends, including the redefinition of citizenship, with
the support of key national institutions. Rather than being devalued, citizenship may
be renewed in a fresh ethos: that of pluralist civil society, resistant to homogenized
identity. 8 Skeptics need hardly look further than the contemporary Canadian landscape.
‘6 See “Cultural Explanations” 7he Economist (9 November 1996) 23. The survey was conducted
for the European Commission. Even the President of the Commission has rejected the vision of “a
united states of Europe”: V. Smart, “Superstate is not our target – Santer” The European (13-19 Feb-
mary 1997) 1.
7 After Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Na-
tionalism, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
” For an especially engaging reflection in this regard, see W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship:
A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
