By treating the automatic and perpetual transmission of citizenship by birth as a weak moral link, resembling the property regimes of old that are now deeply discredited and banned, The Birthright Lottery invites legal innovation. This finds expression in the book’s elaboration of an entirely new category of citizenship transfer—jus nexi–citizenship by connection to the country.Jus nexi would ease the injustice facing individuals who have resided in certain countries for extended periods of time, but do not have a traditional claim to citizenship. Unlike the effects of current legal principles, a genuine connection principle establishes a tie between citizenship and the social fact of membership rather than blind reliance upon the accident of birth. It is a revolutionary new concept that I hope will encourage spirited debate among academics and policy-makers throughout the world.As a conceptual and legal category, jus nexi bears significant importance for today’s charged debates over immigration in the United States: it establishes that the social fact of membership offers a valid foundation for access to political membership. This new framework highlights the significance of developing ties and identification with the country over time as the basis for bestowing citizenship and its benefits on long-term residents.I call this genuine connection principle jus nexi because, like jus soli and jus sanguinis, it conveys the core meaning of the method through which political membership is conveyed: by connection, union, linkage. This offers a powerful precedent for turning newcomers into citizens.In essence, jus nexi relies on property-generated and common-law doctrines emphasizing “rootedness” as the basis of title for those whose lives have become intertwined with the social and economic life of the polity in which they reside. Building further on the analogy to property, I consider the relevance of the generational timeline, as well as the relationship between right and duty, in sketching the main implications of the jus nexi membership criterion for the most significant test-case categories of potential recipients. This is particularly instructive when presented with one of the most difficult dilemmas for liberal democracies: how to deal with noncitizen residents whose initial entry breached the law of the admitting states. We live in a non-ideal world. Without tangible ideas about how we can change our world, change can never occur. The existing system of membership allocation did not fall from the sky. It is the result of human agency. We can alter it, just as we can preserve it. The latter route simply asks us to continue our complicity in preserving an unfair situation. The former clearly requires hard work: breaking old habits of thought and adopting creative reformulations instead.What I propose is not an easy process. But the stakes are high. We now live in a world torn between those who are doomed to an endless night and those promised a sweet delight due to arbitrary circumstances of station of birth. This is morally wrong, politically unstable, and institutionally unsound: the fossil of a bygone era.Counterintuitively, The Birthright Lottery demonstrates that by treating birthright citizenship as a special kind of inherited property, we can generate fresh answers to old questions about how best to mediate the demands of security and mobility, justice and citizenship, and especially those dealing with ownership, selection, and allocation.
To draw the analogy to inherited property and to acknowledge birthright entitlement to citizenship as a human construct not impervious to change is to open up the existing system to critical assessment. Once we categorize certain relationships under the rubric of property and inheritance, the classic questions of distributive justice—that is, of who owns what, and on what basis—cannot but follow. This is precisely what is missing in our blind reliance on blood and soil in the assignment of membership entitlement—a connection that is currently both taken for granted and ignored, and ends up obscuring from view the manifold ways in which citizenship operates as a distributor (or denier) of opportunity on a global scale.