Citizenship Within Boundaries: The Conditionality of Human Rights for “Migrant Origin” Citizens in Germany

With migration movements, especially after World War II, citizenship has become a condition that varies with circumstances; moreover, the terms used to define this legal status vary. As a distinctive sign of a nation-state, citizenship describes a legal status that ties a person to a state and a nation. Migration movements altered this description. Among these, transnational citizenship, multi-layered citizenship, and differentiated citizenship are the concepts most frequently used to describe individuals of migrant origin as citizens. In fact, notwithstanding how policymakers perceive these concepts and the notion of citizenship, the equality principle applies to all individuals with the same legal status, which is also the foundation of the rule of law. This study examines the citizenship experiences of Turkish-origin German citizens from a socio-legal perspective, focusing on their access to and enjoyment of fundamental human rights. I contend that invisible boundaries embedded in institutions and society, arising from the categorisation of migrants, affect "migrant origin" citizens' access to fundamental rights at varying levels depending on the intersections of social markers. Based on this assumption, my research aims to reveal that citizenship is not defined solely by its legal meaning and to disclose what it means to be a "migrant origin" citizen in Germany through the experiences of Turkish-origin Germans. I argue that migrant-origin citizens' legal status and social facts differ across various intersections because of intentional yet implicit governance and securitisation practices, and the consequent invisible internal boundaries established in society through institutions, driven by categorisations in migration management. Though Islamophobia is highly discussed and favoured in the literature as a focal point of "othering" and discrimination, it is not the only categorisation and labelling apparatus considering "migrant-origin" citizens. Race, class, postcolonial hierarchies, gender, age, appearance, and ability are other implicit factors employed across various intersections to structure boundaries between "us" and "the others". From a purely legal perspective, citizenship is a definitive legal status that indicates membership in the state and entitles both parties to rights and duties. However, invisible institutional and social boundaries affect the ideals of legal statuses. Reflecting on the impacts of these boundaries on "migrant origin" citizens, I argue that being entitled to certain rights does not necessarily mean thoroughly enjoying them. The focus is primarily on the right to respect for private and family life, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression, prohibition of discrimination, and the right to education, since these generally constitute the main crisis points that reflect "migrant-origin" communities being "unintegrated". These rights have been the focus of controversy, even in the migration literature, yet not from a rights-based perspective but from a one-sided integration angle. My research aims to break this pattern and provide a bottom-up, rights-based perspective to investigate the hidden disparity between legal status and institutional and social facts regarding access to and enjoyment of the aforementioned fundamental human rights, and the projections in society as to who is acceptable and who is not as a member.