Citizenship Without Magic 111 for various reasons, and have now largely been resolved through statutory amendment (a rule change). In making their case to Parliament, the courts and the media, their primary, and highly successful, strategy, was to denigrate the rule-boundedness of ‘mean-minded bureaucrats’ and advance the merits of their claims through appeals to lineage and blood-based belonging.4 Despite being born in the UK, residing in Canada for five years as a small child, and having subsequently lived in the UK for six decades, one such lost Canadian insisted, ‘I, sir, am a Canadian. To the roots of me, to the spirit of me, to the soul of me, I’m Canadian’. 5 This impassioned claim to Canada – not exactly your ‘go to’ example of an ethnic nation – nonetheless succeeds as a rhetorical strategy because it re-enchants the nation,6 underscoring the country’s desirability to the Canadian public, and insisting that this connection is an essential feature of her identity. This is a logic that only works in a world of birthright citizenship. And it is a strategy that eventually succeeded in securing legislative amendments, because the birth-based claims of the lost Canadians (and not necessarily residency or connection) carried an overwhelming political potency. To the extent that birthright citizenship enables progressive people to cordon off a substantial portion of membership determination from a potentially nasty political debate, one can certainly understand its attractions. But the occlusion of politics with an unsupportable appeal to nature is ethically dubious. If we are committed to democratic equality, we need principles to manage how we live together that refuse the privilege of birth over naturalisation, and that require us to come to terms with our mortality.7 Political membership should be a lively, on-going process of negotiation in which everyone has a stake. Some critics might argue that abandoning birthright citizenship and its intergenerational character will create the conditions for decision making in which we are no longer future-oriented, or indeed, that we will neglect the lessons and obligations of our past. If our children do not 4 5 6 7 Canada, 26 February 2007, House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration 39th Parliament 1st Session no. 38. (at 11:50). Canada, 26 February 2007, House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration 39th Parliament 1st Session no. 38. (at 11:45). Honig, B. (2001), Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 74. For a full elaboration on the dangers of intergenerational citizenship, see Stevens (2010), at n.2 above.