Much been written (and shouted) in recent weeks about birthright citizenship in the US—the right, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, of every child born in the US to American citizenship.
Offering a wholly different perspective on a debate that has generated more heat than light is Ayelet Shachar’s 2009 book The Birthright Lottery. In it, Shachar argues, provocatively, that assigning citizenship by the sheer arbitrariness of where or to whom one is born is a badly outdated and unfair concept. Such reliance on station at birth is discredited in almost all other fields of public life, she writes, while birthright entitlements still dominate our laws and our imagination when it comes to allotting membership in a state. This adherence bequeaths to some a world replete with opportunity and condemns others to a life with little hope. A fairer solution, Shachar contends, would be to consider citizenship a complex form of inherited property, while expanding the definition of membership boundaries to include those who belong to a given nation based on their real and substantive ties to the polity.
Recommending the book, a reviewer for Tikkun wrote: “OK, you were lucky enough to be born in one of the wealthier countries of the world. But what makes you entitled to enjoy the benefits of this accident of birth while others in poorer countries are starving to death through no fault of their own?...[T]he privileges of hereditary entitlement to citizenship may be legitimate, but so too are the claims to citizenship of those born elsewhere who have developed bonds of community involvement...This book is an important jumping-off point not only for the immigrant rights movement, but also for all of us who would like to see the eventual dismantling of restriction on immigration, or even of all national boundaries.”
