Citizenship Without Magic Lois Harder I share Costica Dumbrava’s critique of ius sanguinis citizenship, and ultimately what is, I think, his rejection of birth as the basis for political membership generally. Of course, there are issues of practicality – of the world as we find it – that might limit whether and how one would advance the abolishment of birthright citizenship in light of specific political dynamics. But it is precisely those practicalities, and the near unthinkability of alternatives to birth-based citizenship that demand our interrogation of birthright in the first instance. As Joseph Carens has argued with respect to his advocacy of open borders, ‘even if we must take deeply rooted social arrangements as givens for purposes of immediate action in a particular context, we should never forget about our assessment of their fundamental character. Otherwise we wind up legitimating what should only be endured’.1 In his contribution to this Forum, Rainer Bauböck defends birthright citizenship and argues that in both of its iterations (ius sanguinis and ius soli) it avoids political division and ‘creates a quasi-natural equality of status’ among citizens who are entitled to claim it. But what about the inequality that divides the entitled from the unentitled? Political communities may be unavoidably bounded, but if a normative commitment to human rights is our guiding frame, it seems incumbent upon us to advance methods or prospects for membership that reduce the barriers to belonging as much as possible. Moreover, as Jacqueline Stevens trenchantly observes, in defining the bounds of equal citizenship, borders also form the boundaries of our non-­emergency expressions of compassion.2 To the extent that birthright entitlement advances a seemingly unassailable claim to exclusionary membership, its advocacy runs counter to a broader commitment to humanitarianism. 1 2 Carens, J. (2013), The Ethics of Immigration. New York: Oxford University Press, 229. Stevens, J. (2010), States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals. New York: Columbia University Press, 9. © The Author(s) 2018 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating Transformations of National Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92719-0_21 109