Terrorism Is Stripping Citizenship Away
International terrorism is no longer something that comes from abroad, a force external to Western democracies that you can fight by tightening immigration. Today it is much closer to home and much more complex. Increasingly, it is born and diffused within Western civil society. So-called foreign fighters, i.e Western citizens that decide to join jihadist groups in the Middle East, are the most striking manifestation of this transformation.
Western democracies have thus abandoned earlier strategies aiming at protecting the domestic political community by isolating the non-citizen. They are shelving the distinction between "citizen" and "foreigner, in a race to the bottom when it comes to fundamental rights.
So in the United States, as well as in other Western countries, not even citizenship is enough to offer legal protection in terrorism cases. There are at least three circumstances where legal status has been unable to provide protection from arbitrary prosecution: US citizens whose passports have been taken away, because they are suspected of terrorism and temporarily reside abroad; basically they cannot go back to their home country (a similar measure is contained in Italy's Legislative Decree 7/2015 recently converted into law); the placing of citizens that are allegedly terrorists on no-flight lists; the employment of drones for the targeted killing of US citizens, who are international terrorism suspects, reside abroad, and live in areas where capture is impractical. The first two circumstances negate two kinds of rights typically linked to citizenship: the right to enter the territory of one's own state, and freedom of circulation and expatriation. The third instead constitutes a suspension of the basic right to live, a human right constitutionally and internationally recognized.
The sequestration of passports and the use of no-flight lists are typically executive orders temporarily adopted by governments for emergency reasons. More problematic is the choice of targeting your own citizens for drone killings. The choice of using such military tactics, pursued by Bush first, and then by Obama with increasing frequency, has been recently defended by the American administration with a White Paper drafted by the Department of Justice. According to DoJ, there are three criteria on the basis of which the targeted homicide of a US citizen can be ordered: the existence of an official statement by the US government concerning the threat posed by the individual being targeted; the impracticability of apprehension; the necessity for the operation to meet the standards of international law concerning armed conflicts.
Ultimately, citizenship status only requires the targeted killing to be subjected to closer political scrutiny; it does not exclude that a military operation will take place. In fact, targeted killings of US citizens still maintain a crucial role in US anti-terror strategy. To conclude, we are living in an age where citizen and foreigner no longer represent the fundamental categories defining the boundaries of a political community.