Paper citizens? Mobility and multiple citizenship in Euro-Latin Americans

The expansion of multiple citizenship (MC) is introducing complex spatialities of national state membership and challenging traditional conceptions of citizenship. Scholarly attention has mainly focused on the naturalisation route to MC, and its implications for political transnationalism and social integration. However, access to MC through ancestry/ethnicity, as well as MC implications for mobility, have been largely overlooked. Based on a review of key datasets and qualitative semi-structured interviews this paper seeks to gain the 'view from below' of how multiple citizens themselves construct life strategies within what Bauböck (2010) terms a 'citizenship constellation', a joint opportunity structure created by intervening States. We focus on the Latin American community in London, a growing collective showing flexible citizenship and migration trajectories beyond the traditional origin-destination-settlement-naturalisation route to integration and MC. We found that because of European Union (EU) unequal hierarchies of access to citizenship, most migrants seek an alternative passport not necessarily to expand their political or social rights but in order to gain much stronger mobility and security status. An EU passport becomes a life asset that leads to personal freedom as well as social mobility.