ABSTRACT
This chapter raises the question of whether the acquisition of citizenship of the country of residence has salience for mobile lifestyles, and if so why. The literature on the determinants of naturalization behaviour suggests focusing on the individual perceptions of the migrants about the benefits, and the costs of naturalization, in order to shed light on this individually negotiated and sensitive process. Focusing on the benefits, this chapter argues that alongside the conventional benefits of national citizenship, such as accessing social and political rights, new rights come to the front line, such as the ‘right to mobility’. Citizenship acquisition is perceived as the very asset that permits further mobility, even if once again it remains as an imaginative alternative. The mobility/citizenship nexus destabilizes the conventional understandings of citizenship as settlement and identity, since it does not necessarily symbolize stability or automatically flow from a settlement decision. This picture is only reinforced by the EU legal context, which grants the right to mobility to EU nationals, and thereby makes naturalization more attractive to this group of highly educated migrants whose lives are very much characterized by mobility.
