JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 3 and ambivalently associated with rights and oppression within nation-state technologies of territorialization. The differential value of citizenship and naturalization Legal citizenship as membership in a nation-state, like any membership, is simul­ taneously an inclusionary and exclusionary institution (Bosniak 2006; Brubaker 1992). Citizenship provides, and restricts, a combination of ‘status, rights and identity’ (Joppke 2007). Legal status and passports supposedly confer secure access to national ter­ ritory, as citizens are defined by their ability ‘to move both within a particular space and across its borders’ (Cresswell 2013, 110). In liberal democracies at least, citizens should also have access to a set of civil, political and social rights, such as freedom of speech, voting and minimum welfare (Marshall 1992). Citizenship is also connected to obli­ gations such as paying taxes, military service or political participation (Bosniak 2006). However, enjoying rights in practice has always been stratified by gender, age, class, phys­ ical and mental ability, and especially race and racism (Bosniak 2006; de Noronha 2022). Moreover, wwhich national citizenship one holds defines social and economic life chances (Shachar 2009). Citizenship also constitutes ‘a significant marker in the inter­ national system of population management’ (Hindess 2000, 1496): Euroamerican citizens can legally travel almost anywhere, whereas most people need hard-to-get visas or resort to irregular mobility to cross borders. At the same time, second-class citizens are var­ iously immobilized within a state territory, such as through police frisking, imprison­ ment or restrictions on homelessness, indicating the ‘blurry boundaries’ of the migrant-citizen binary (Anderson 2024; De Genova 2018). Within this debate, naturalization has mostly been conceived of as a means of inclusion into the benefits of citizenship. The recent ‘instrumental turn’ in citizenship studies explores how both migrants and states make strategic use of the rights and legal status supposedly associated with citizenship (Joppke 2019). For many migrantsturning-citizens, the primary value of naturalization relates to status and associated mobility, that is, to secure their residence on a certain territory and avoid future deporta­ tion (Aptekar 2016; Nunn et al. 2016; Haller and Yanaşmayan 2024), to travel for econ­ omic opportunities (Birkvad 2019; Harpaz 2019), or to lead family lives across borders (Della Puppa and Sredanovic 2017; Godin and Sigona 2022). Other authors emphasize how migrants access social rights, including economic opportunities and welfare benefits (Finotelli, La Barbera, and Echeverría 2018), and equal treatment to other resi­ dents (Birkvad 2019). People with precarious status and refugees are more likely to nat­ uralize, in part because they have nowhere to return to (de Hoon, Vink and Schmeets 2020).1 Critical studies have begun to highlight the complexities in migrant decision-making and interactions with the state. Migrants may decide not to naturalize despite formal eli­ gibility because of past experiences with racism (Godin and Sigona 2022), frustrating interactions with the bureaucracy (Haller and Yanaşmayan 2024), and out of loyalty to the country of origin (Leitner and Ehrkamp 2006; Sayad 2004). Migrants’ decision to nat­ uralize are not only shaped by their relationship to the state of residence but also by their citizenship of origin. Thus, migrants may choose to naturalize only if citizenship "com­ pensates" for a current lack of mobility or economic rights (Harpaz 2019). More