One common assumption in all these cases, however, is that it is up to national states to define and regulate citizenship. Even in the United States—allegedly a decentralized, federalist state—it is the central government that controls the levers of citizenship. (It is likely that among Western states, Switzerland is alone in still embracing a significant measure of decentralist naturalization policy.)1
This is no accident of history. Rather, today’s centralized citizenship regimes are a product of several centuries of state building efforts that allowed states to establish control and monopoly power over the granting of citizenship. Indeed, the idea of national, territory-based citizenship is characteristic of our era of strong, centralized states. These modern notions of citizenship have helped the state consolidate and expand state power in ways that were unattainable in a time of more localized and diverse citizenship.
The federal government deciding citizenship has been evolving since the civil war, when the federal state took control of determining citizenship from the states. We are now in a totally centralized decision making process for deciding who is and is not a citizen, which makes the federal government the decision making apparatus. This is why their ICE is detaining and repatriating non-citizens to their own countries. We made this decision, ourselves, through the process of choosing those who promised to deport all non-citizens. We decided to deport them, ourselves!!