THE HIGHER LENS : 24

Who Gets to Be “From Here”?

Citizenship is often treated as the definitive expression of national belonging. It establishes a formal relationship between the individual and the state, conferring rights, protections and political membership. In legal terms, its boundaries are relatively clear. Social belonging, however, is governed by a far less precise set of rules.

A passport can determine citizenship. It cannot determine who will be perceived as belonging.

This distinction between formal membership and social recognition is central to understanding contemporary debates surrounding migration, diaspora and national identity. Modern states may define citizenship through law, but nations also exist as imagined social communities, sustained through shared histories, cultural narratives and assumptions about who constitutes the national “we.” Consequently, the legal boundaries of citizenship do not always correspond with the informal boundaries of national acceptance.

The question of who gets to be “from here” is therefore not simply geographical. It is political.

Migration makes this particularly visible. In increasingly diverse societies, individuals can possess citizenship from birth, participate fully in national institutions and identify unequivocally with the country in which they live, while still being perceived as possessing an alternative or antecedent identity. The familiar question “Where are you really from?” illustrates this discrepancy. Although frequently motivated by curiosity rather than hostility, it can reveal an implicit distinction between those whose national belonging is assumed and those whose belonging appears to require explanation.

Nationality, in this sense, operates differently depending on who is claiming it.

This exposes a fundamental limitation in the conventional understanding of integration. Integration is often conceptualised as a process through which migrants progressively enter the social, economic and cultural life of a receiving state. Yet this model assumes that belonging can ultimately be completed. The persistence of questions surrounding the identity of second- and third-generation citizens complicates that assumption. If individuals born and raised within a country remain socially identified through their ancestral origins, integration begins to resemble a threshold that can continually recede.

Diaspora further destabilises the idea that nationality must correspond neatly with territory.

Diasporic communities sustain political, cultural and emotional relationships across borders, demonstrating that migration does not necessarily produce the abandonment of one national attachment in favour of another. Identity can be cumulative. An individual may participate fully in British political and social life while maintaining a profound relationship with Kosovo, India, Nigeria or Poland. These affiliations need not exist competitively.

Yet national identity is frequently discussed through precisely such a zero-sum framework. Multiple attachments can generate suspicion because conventional understandings of nationhood often associate belonging with singular loyalty. The assumption is that greater attachment to one place necessarily implies diminished attachment to another.

Contemporary migration challenges this logic. Global mobility has produced individuals whose identities are constituted across several political and cultural spaces simultaneously. Diasporic identity is therefore not simply an incomplete form of assimilation. It can represent a distinct mode of belonging: one in which citizenship, ancestry, culture and political attachment intersect without perfectly overlapping.

This distinction also reveals the unequal social value assigned to different forms of mobility.

The internationally mobile professional is frequently described as cosmopolitan. The child of migration is more readily described through the language of integration. One form of transnational identity can function as evidence of sophistication; another can become a question of belonging. The difference suggests that mobility itself is not what unsettles national categories. Rather, societies attach different meanings to movement according to class, ethnicity, nationality and the circumstances under which migration occurs.

The politics of belonging consequently extends beyond immigration policy. It concerns the construction of national identity itself.

Nations are not culturally static entities into which newcomers simply enter. They are continuously reconstructed through demographic change, political institutions, historical reinterpretation and cultural exchange. Migration does not occur outside this process; it becomes part of it. Foods considered national, languages spoken within cities, cultural traditions and even collective memories have repeatedly been shaped by movement across borders.

The idea of an entirely fixed national identity is therefore historically difficult to sustain. Borders change. Empires collapse. States emerge and disappear. Populations are displaced, absorbed and reorganised. Citizenship laws themselves evolve according to political priorities. What later appears ancient or natural is often the product of comparatively recent institutional and historical developments.

This does not mean that national identity is meaningless. On the contrary, its political significance is precisely why access to it matters.

Belonging provides more than cultural familiarity. It determines who is understood as legitimately entitled to speak in the name of a society, participate in its institutions and make claims upon its collective future. Exclusion from national belonging can therefore persist even where formal political equality has been achieved.

The distinction is consequential: citizenship determines membership before the state; belonging determines recognition within society.

This is why legal equality, while essential, cannot by itself resolve questions of national inclusion. A state can naturalise an individual, issue a passport or confer political rights. It cannot legislate every social perception through which some citizens are understood as more authentically national than others.

Diaspora makes this contradiction especially difficult to ignore. It occupies the conceptual space between the territorial state and the lived reality of identity. It demonstrates that an individual can belong to several places without belonging incompletely to any of them. At the same time, it reveals how frequently society demands that complex identities be translated into singular categories.

Perhaps the challenge for contemporary states is therefore not to eliminate difference in pursuit of a more coherent national identity, but to reconsider the assumption that coherence requires sameness.

In societies fundamentally shaped by migration, the relevant question is no longer whether national identity can accommodate multiple histories. It already does. The more important issue is whether our social understanding of belonging has developed sufficiently to recognise that reality.

Citizenship answers the institutional question of membership. Migration complicates the geographical question of origin. Diaspora exposes the inadequacy of assuming that either can fully explain identity.

And ultimately, the most revealing question may not be where somebody is from.

It is who we allow to answer without being asked to prove it.

Vlera