We argue about who should get a passport without agreeing what a passport is. Decide whether citizenship is a membership or a service, and most of the other questions answer themselves.
Crossbencher · 19 July 2026
The case for automatic citizenship is stronger than its critics allow. A clean rule - born here, belong here - avoids the cruelty of a permanent underclass: people who live, work and raise children in a country that never quite lets them in. It prevents statelessness. It spares the state the ugly job of ranking human beings by desert. And it reflects a real truth. Belonging is usually a fact on the ground long before it's a fact in law, and a country that refuses to recognise the people already woven into it is storing up a grievance it will one day pay for. None of that is sentimental. It's the practical wisdom behind why most settled countries don't, in the end, run a purely earned model.
Grant all of it, and the question the argument keeps dodging is still sitting underneath. What is citizenship actually for? Two pictures compete, mostly without either being said out loud. In the first, citizenship is a membership - mutual, with obligations attached, something you are inducted into and owe something to. Closer to joining a body than qualifying for a benefit. In the second, it's a status you become entitled to by meeting conditions - residence, time, a test. More like a service you qualify for than a club you join. Almost every fight about who should get it, and how, and what should be asked of them first, is really a disagreement about which of those two things the passport is - conducted as if it were a disagreement about the rules.
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