Two paired questions have risen to near the top of legal and political agendas in the prosperous, immigrant-receiving countries of the North: first, who belongs to the national political and social community of the “we”; and second, what does belonging entail in the way of rights and obligations? Under the impact of unprecedented free mobility for both capital and labor and the crises of the social welfare state, the borders and bonds of citizenship have been changing, mostly weakening. At the same time, there is considerable connection between the intensity or thickness of belonging, of being a citizen of a particular country, and the intensity of the process of incorporating newcomers into that country. Each of the three countries under consideration, the United States, Germany, and Israel, has followed a certain historical path over the past half century, or longer, that has involved both exclusion and integration, boundedness and incorporation.

Very roughly speaking, we may say that there is an inverse relationship between the ease of access to citizenship and what citizenship offers. Thus, of these countries, citizenship is easiest to acquire in the United States, but it is of less social and economic value and offers less of a premium over mere legal residence. “Hyphenated Americanism” has offered a relatively viable integration strategy for most groups and fits into a dominant ideology of a weak state and pluralistic society.Footnote ¹ Germany, in turn, has until very recently had a very restrictive immigration regime, offering permanent admission and prospective citizenship on only a very selective (largely ethnic) basis and has had a difficult time integrating its non-European Union foreign-born residents. Neither multiculturalism nor explicit integrationism has been especially successful. On the other hand, entrance into Germany's social-market society offers a panoply of social and economic rights not contemplated in the free-market liberal-individualist society of the United States. Finally, Israel, one of the few remaining explicitly ethnic-democratic states, once boasted an extraordinarily thick and egalitarian model of citizenship coupled with intense transformation of newcomers into natives. In recent years, however, Israel has become far more liberal and less republican, with much more citizen diversity and extreme inequality beyond even American levels. Within its Jewish population (and, during a brief post-Zionist moment, beyond it), Israel has become a considerably more multicultural and more capitalist country.

Liberal democracies today are based on and offer three kinds of rights: civil, political, and social. “Toleration” creates civil rights that limit the sovereign's power and reduce fear of the ruler while, on the other hand, sparking anxieties about what one's fellows may be up to. This is the problematic of liberalism. To move onward from civil to political rights requires the establishment of “trust,” namely the confidence that one's fellow citizens will not use their rights to promote ignorance or evil. This is the problematic of democracy. Finally, social rights demand social “solidarity,” the willingness to engage with and assume duties on behalf of others, fellow citizens who may or may not contribute as much or need as much as they draw out of the system. This is the problematic of the welfare state or of social democracy.Footnote ²

Toleration, trust, and solidarity are not simply institutional and not simply a matter between ruler and ruled. A political culture that creates a nation of compatriots is also needed to construct a “we.” Shared and overarching identities are more difficult to construct or maintain in a world of multiplied identities. Liberal philosophical efforts like those of John Rawls to establish “overarching consensus,” or of Jürgen Habermas to propagate a “constitutional patriotism” grounded in ahistorical and largely legal-procedural values, though admirable enough, have proven problematic, particularly in countries with significant ethnic and cultural divides. Creating cultures of solidarity and integrating immigrants into such cultures are two difficult tasks, approached differently by each of these countries.

When it comes to incorporating new immigrants, historic and crowded places like Europe and the Middle East are at a distinct disadvantage compared to the United States. American law is libertarian and values toleration and some trust, but it is no friend to social solidarity and puts little special premium on citizenship. To the extent, then, that democratic citizenship “involves the sovereign self-determination of a people, and the will to act in its name and to make sacrifices,” a demos, a “we” to which members belong and “in whose deliberations they have a voice” and “feel a sense of shared fate and solidarity,”Footnote ³ American citizenship is indeed weak. But to the extent that the American demos is experienced in civic and political, albeit historically embedded, rather than ethno-cultural terms, it is open and egalitarian. The combination of easy entry for newcomers, decentralized labor markets, modest social transfers, and weak democratic self-rule has prevented American citizenship from thickening culturally. Most ascriptive, unchosen, heavily embedded, prepolitical, and exclusionary elements are now marginal compared to other times and places. “Common sympathies” and a “proper patriotism” are not hard for newcomers to come by in the United States. Current “civic identity” myths remain effective.Footnote ⁴

American-style civic nationalism may thus have the potential to create a “level playing field” for free individuals, but it is unsuited for the “solidarity” of social justice. Most American rights are negative liberties, and they are accorded to all persons rather than just to citizens.Footnote ⁵ Human-rights liberalism in its current form makes few social demands and so works well as an adjunct to the American way.

Some thicker sense of affinity, similarity, shared identity, or social cohesion may be necessary for social-rights citizenship,Footnote ⁶ and over the years Germany has stood for that.Footnote ⁷ Acceptance of the multicultural, or at least pluralist, composition of German society has been gaining ground in theory as well as in practice. The period from 1999 to 2005 saw the emergence of the first German Citizenship Laws embodying jus soli principles and the formulation of the first immigrant-attracting immigration law in modern German history (a Zuwanderungsgesetz). Given these two concerns—citizenship and immigration—the Red/Green coalition government focused first on introducing the jus soli principle and easier naturalization requirements.

The central goal of the reformers was to ease access to German society for all those born in Germany. Legally, that meant introducing birthright citizenship to the children of long-term resident aliens and easing the naturalization process for those residents not born in Germany. By thus distancing, if not divorcing, citizenship and membership from ethnicity, the reformers sought to facilitate integration into a more capacious German identity and society. Immigrants would more easily and more willingly become German, while “German” itself would come to mean something broader. Naturalization provisions and citizenship criteria were symbolically moved from the Aliens Act (now renamed the Residence Act) to the Citizenship and Nationality Act. The chief object of the new legislation was to institute jus soli, naturalization as a matter of right, and a language-centered constitution affirming integration commitment. Herewith Germany legislated a civic national identity open to all, including the ten percent of the population classified as foreigners (and of whom one-fifth were German-born).

Even civic national identities are culturally inherited artifacts, developing as they pass from generation to generation. National belonging is more than rational attachment; it encompasses “the contingent inheritance of distinctive experiences and cultural memories that is an inseparable part” of every national identity. It assumes some measure of shared prepolitical community arching over any agreement on legal procedural rules and making a nation more than a political community organized around voluntary association. Perhaps it demands integration, not just mutual respect. German administrators may have been naively optimistic when they wrote in 2000 that “the acquisition of nationality marks the beginning of social integration.”Footnote ⁸

And here Germany has had problems, reflected in the continued poor educational and socioeconomic performance of immigrants and increased tensions between “secular” liberalism and Muslim self-assertion. Inadequate integration, in turn, threatens Germany's high collective social wage and solidarity principles.Footnote ⁹ Social policies in the welfare state operationalized citizenship and provided a domain where it was constituted—albeit not equally for everyone—through a political economy. A much more individualized, neoliberal, “thinner” society would perhaps be in a better position to pursue integration around civic-constitutional and cultural principles.

Law Number One on the Israeli books is the Law of Return, and it lies at the core of Zionist ideology, namely that a diaspora is being “ingathered.” This ideology—of which there was also a trace in Germany—guided immigrant absorption for years. Combining a levée en masse, a shared new language, new names, an intense Schmittian view of the “other,” traces of secular messianism, a culture of Spartan self-abnegation and militarism, and a kind of Greek-polis sense of agency and equality, an extreme melting-pot model of incorporation featuring “absorption centers” was until the 1980s under the aegis of a secular enlightened Labor party. As a common Israeli joke has it, Labor was the crime, Shas is the punishment.Footnote ¹⁰ A party of religious, poor, subaltern, “Oriental” Jews has combined with illiberal Russian immigrants to create a world of “Jewish multiculturalism” while the enlightened elites have abandoned their state-building Fabianism in favor of global capitalism and mobility. Emigration even came to be valued as much as immigration; expats, once seen as deserters, are now seen as assets deployed in a transnational world.

As Israel's elites ventured out into the world, most of them had “lost interest in maintaining the primacy of republican citizenship.”Footnote ¹¹ For both old timers and the newly incorporated, the introduction of judicial review and a quasiconstitutional “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty” weakened citizenship in the same way that they have done elsewhere. Soft group rights for different “sectors” of the citizenry and immigrant populations have become more widely acknowledged and valorized than ever before: Ethiopians, Russians, Moroccans, the religious, and others are all free to be their authentic selves and resist melting down. The “rollback of Israel's settler-society welfare state and the triumph of meritocractic individualism” have deprivileged immigrants while introducing previously unknown guest and even illegal foreign workers.

A weakened sense of citizenship entitlements and diminished social solidarity need not, apparently, facilitate empathy for “others.” State and collective ownership of land, of jobs, and of capital have in Israel been part of a solidaristic citizenship but an exclusionary ethnocratic regime. More recently, liberal individualism and weaker citizenship have functioned to the same ends. The liberalization of Israeli society and the thinning out of citizenship rights has, alas, not disturbed the ethnocratic foundation of Israeli society. Despite the hopes of many Israelis of many stripes that post-Zionist liberalization, even neoliberalization, would open the door to Israel's becoming “a state of all of its citizens,” albeit neoliberalized citizens, this has not come to pass, and Arab Israelis enjoy at best individual rights but not collective or even full citizenship rights.

Immigrant incorporation, in the meantime, has become more pluralistic, with diversity itself becoming a mode of integration rather than an impediment to it. Immigrant group identities that would previously have been repressed are now recognized, and the integration of those groups seems to take place now through their preexisting community leaders and structures rather than over their heads or in spite of them. Recent immigrant groups, such as Ethiopians and Russians, enjoy a level of collective recognition, politically and culturally, that would have been anathema to the previous incorporation regime.

Whether neoliberalism and the politics of recognition contribute to a greater measure of social justice or individual freedom in the three countries examined here remains a highly contingent and uncertain matter. Both natives and immigrants have much at stake.

We are impelled toward a rather unattractive conclusion. The United States is more successful in integrating immigrants, and most immigrants are more successful in the United States, precisely because the country is marked by low levels of solidarity and a weak welfare state. Immigrants are on their own—along with everyone else. In social democratic Europe, where social bonds and the welfare state are thicker, more thoroughgoing integration is and will remain necessary to preserve social solidarity and maintain the welfare state with immigrants as functioning participants in it. The “sink or swim” mentality of America may, perversely, be good for immigrants while impoverishing us all.