Undoing one-dimensionality: reforming German citizenship through the postmigrant framework

Abstract This paper critically examines Germany’s 2024 citizenship reform, designed to promote integration and pluralism through legal and societal transformations. We argue that the prevailing migration discourse in Germany reinforces a one-dimensional political framework, reducing migrants to single-issue subjects—either threats or victims, economic assets or social burdens. This approach to migration falls short of capturing Germany’s evolving socio-political landscape and its changing actors, including queer, feminist, and anti-racist migrant initiatives and cross-generational and multi-ethnic migrant organizations. Adopting an intersectional and postmigrant framework, we explore the dual narrative of increasing structural integration and simultaneously decreasing affective belonging. Here, we are interested in exploring the overlapping contexts of migration and racism in Germany with a perspective that accounts for the experiences of noncitizen migrants, citizen migrants, and nonmigrant racialized citizens. We center our work on the figure of the migrant, not to oversimplify the legal, social, and categorical complexities of this term, but rather to address the social and political conditions of exclusion and marginalization that intersect with race, belonging, and access to rights in Germany. This approach calls for a shift in policy discourse, one that recognizes the intricate interplay of factors shaping migration debates and embraces a postmigrant perspective, viewing migration as a dynamic, multilinear process that drives broader societal transformation.