5. Migrants’ Home as a Political Issue

Stea (1995), cit. in Fox (2002).

However, the recollection and reproduction of home through diasporic practices can apply also to different scales, such as urban spaces (e.g. Blunt & Bonnerjee, 2013) or religious networks (e.g. Riccio, 2002). For a broader reflection on the “changing notions of homeland and home in diaspora studies”, see Cohen (2007).

In fact, another discursive intersection, even in liberal/democratic regimes, is the one between home and citizenship. In a way, this category is a functional equivalent of homeland or nation – a less essentialized but more formalized one – to separate what is home (i.e. the domestic sphere, based on territorial nation-states) from what is not. As an institutional set of legal provisions, national citizenship acts as a boundary between members and non-members, insiders and outsiders or, at least in principle, “those who are ‘at home’ and those who are not” (Sirriyeh, 2010: 214). In practice, though, migrants’ access to fundamental rights is based on legal residency – at least in Western countries – and can be associated with denizenship, rather than full-fledged citizenship. Formal citizenship itself is “only” an institutional mechanism of allocation of rights: no guarantee that naturalized (or indeed, native) citizens do feel at home as a result. Instead, citizenship as a social practice (e.g. Ehrkamp & Leitner, 2003; Staeheli et al., 2012) can be precisely appreciated as a claim to be at home, materially and symbolically, within a given polity, particularly for outsiders such as migrants (Staeheli & Nagel, 2006).

Having said this, international migration invariably affects the overlapping between territory, residence and entitlements – ultimately, the sedentary view of membership and belonging – on which citizenship conventionally relies. This has engendered an extensive debate on non-territorial forms of citizenship (transnational, postnational, external etc.; see, for a synthesis, Bloemraad et al., 2008; Joppke, 2010). How the subjective experience of extra-territorial citizenship interacts with migrants’ sense of home, as negotiated across different locales and countries (and on multiple scales), is an issue that calls for more empirical and comparative research.

See the Counter People Smuggling Communication on https://​www.​border.​gov.​au/​about/​operation-sovereign-borders/​counter-people-smuggling-communication (last consulted: January 31, 2016).

See also Brickell (2012) on the mobilization of home-related emotions and practices in several forms of grassroots protest, such as the “Occupy” movements, aiming to assert “public domesticity” vis-à-vis governments, corporations etc.

There is some overlap between this distinction and the one between essentialized and “light” ways of feeling at home, and of approaching the public sphere accordingly, in Duyvendak (2011).

More broadly, the apparent universality of the home experience, and its emotional power, can be mobilized in the transnational initiatives of NGOs and international organizations, in order to sensibilize public opinions on the worldwide loss of the home as a result of war, famine, environmental crises etc. See, for instance, the Oxfam GROW campaign against land grabbing – “Home iswhere the bulldozers are” – analysed in Brickell (2012).