Kamal Sadiq, Paper Citizens: How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries, Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Türkkaya Ataöv*
The recent book by Dr. Kamal Sadiq, who earned his doctorate in Chicago and presently teaching at the University of California (Irvine, CA), treats just about every aspect of illegal immigrants in developing countries such as India, Pakistan and Malaysia, a hitherto little known problem that is fast becoming unmanageable in certain parts of the globe. Proceeding from a Mahatma Gandhi statement, one can assert that one way to judge governments is by the manner in which they treat refugees who come to live or work in a new country. Sadiq‟s well-researched, scholarly-treated and handsomely-expressed work informs the reader of the many facets of this multifarious topic. This new volume is an informative description, based on field work as much as book probing, on how some immigrants found and followed illegal paths in order to gain access to citizenship generally in the developing countries and specifically in three Asian sovereign states, one of which (India) happens to be the author‟s original homeland.
* Türkkaya Ataöv, PhD, is an emeritus professor in the Department of International Relations, Ankara University, Turkey.
“World Refugee Year” was launched in 1959 to focus international attention on the plight of the displaced people during and after the Second World War. More than half a century passed since then, and millions more refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants, legal or illegal, were forced to seek some safety outside their own country. Concentrations of such people have increasingly built up in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Sadiq‟s extensive research reminds one of the changing laws, brings out the evidence of concrete events and ties up solutions with the emergence of some new problems. The acceptance of others is in theory a humanitarian act, but host governments may find it increasingly difficult to provide adequate assistance to them. The immigrants may need protection, but one cannot ignore that they can also make contributions to the new country.
The Ottoman Empire had widely opened its frontiers to the Jews of Spain running away from the notorious Inquisition of 1492, but the newcomers transfered their entrepreneurial competence to the new country. The Jews and the anti-fascists, who had to live Nazi Germany behind, were also welcomed in Turkey, where they greatly contributed, in the early 1930s, to university teaching in that republic. The French Huguenots, who got dispersed into various European countries, reached as far as South Africa. The United States, which is a country of immigrants, was made up by them. Muslim refugees, mostly Turks, from the Balkans (since 1821), Crimea and its vast hinterland, and Caucasia was almost entirely unknown in the Western world, until the comprehensive work of Justin McCarthy. Although many European countries initially invited foreign workers, immigrants and asylum-seekers and relaxed their border controls accordingly, they are more and more unwelcome arrivals for some
governments and the ring-wing political parties. The children, even the grand children, of migrant workers have grown up and joined the labour force or the intelligentsia in the countries where their parents initially started to work. The massive wave of labour to the Gulf states, after the oil price explosion of 1973-74, also posed problems as to their numbers, their way of recruitment, the kind and conditions of work, their savings, their political profiles, and their place in the current so-called „Arab Spring.‟
International agreements and resolutions since the 1951 Geneva Convention represent a widely accepted ethics of human rights, but rights in question are limited even under these conventions. For instance, refugees are guaranteed the right to seek asylum but not to obtain it. The UN body that is expected to deal with this issue (UNHCR) is supposed to be a humanitarian non-political organization, but it is financed by states, some of which may influence it to reflect their specific government policies.
Sadiq sufficiently deals with traditional immigration and citizenship theories that more or less exclude the different category of illegal newcomers, but his book is deeply engrossed in “bridging the divide between a citizen and a foreigner” via the use of certain “documents”. His contribution competently fills this broadening but neglected gap. As necessary background, he gives the history of the citizenship infrastructure in the three selected Asian countries, including the initial principles (seemingly more democratic than the relevant Western ones), later restrictive measures (along with their reasons), and the national identity crises (if any). He demonstrates that while according to traditional scholarship) citizenship status brings citizenship rights (such as the basic civil, political and social rights), the reverse is also true. In some Asian
countries, immigrants engage in some of the citizenship rights first and then utilize the documents gained in the process to gain citizenship status. Illegal immigrants may be gainfully employed, send their children to school and buy land and hence apply for citizenship on the basis of such accumulation.
In the West, in contrast, even the „minority‟ groups like women, natives, blacks, and Jews were recognized as more or less as equal citizens only after decades of political struggle, but in India, Pakistan and Malaysia the minorities were born into constitutional equality, sometimes defied only by social practices at the local level. The author discusses the conventional procedures and the legal framework as well as the proviso of the new globalization. The developing countries now face illegal immigrants, many of whom lead legitimate lives on the basis of citizen-like documents. Unfortunate foreigners who use rivers, deserts, mountains and long borders to cross political frontiers may well evolve into legalized immigrants. Especially when demand is high for cheap labour, citizens and officials of the new country may turn a blind eye to those newcomers who may start working in plantations, industries, bazaars, private homes, brothels, and the like for the benefit of a larger circle. Since their access to medical and educational centers are legitimized through forged passports, other fake papers or real documentation, their presence is not necessarily clandestine.
Utilizing governmental reports, parliamentary debates, census data, newspaper archives, fieldwork, interviews, and multiple trips to Asia, Dr. Kamal Sadiq thoroughly documents an overlooked topic, identifying a number of theoretical misconceptions and introducing a theory of illegal immigrant
citizenship. While there has been a sharp increase in restrictions on immigrants in the West, especially after the post-9/11 world, India, Pakistan and Malaysia seem to welcome and settle illegal immigrants, at the risk of anti-immigrant conflicts, severe security challenges on account of drug smuggling and gun running, and new tensions between neighbouring states.
A last point that needs to be mentioned is the engaging style of writing that the author employs throughout this scholarly text.
