Abstract: The literature on immigrant cultural citizenship (Ong, 1996; Rosaldo, 1997)
has argued that traditional and normative definitions of citizenship ignore various forms
of civic participation and belonging and fails to capture the experiences of immigrants in
an increasingly globalized world (Getrich, 2008), calling for more nuanced and multiple
meanings of citizenship. As agents of civil society, social workers have much power in
constructing and maintaining (or resisting) normative discourses of citizenship, and how
we participate in this process has material consequences for those we serve. Applying
poststructural and postcolonial theories, this paper excavates discourses of exclusion and
inequity that produce the idea of U.S. citizenship through a critical historical analysis of
key U.S. immigration and naturalization-related policies and proposes immigrant
cultural citizenship as a conceptual frame for re-imagining social work practice with
immigrants.
Keywords: Cultural citizenship, immigration policies, postcolonial theories, social
work practice with immigrants.