Ideas from the CBC: Citizenship: A Right or a Privilege?

Under international law, each person has the right to a nationality including not being arbitrarily deprived of it. Yet citizenship stripping — literally or effectively — is on the rise, sometimes even leading to statelessness. Citizenship was once treated as sacred. But western democracies are increasingly willing to declare that citizenship is not inviolable. The shift away from the language of citizenship as a right to citizenship as a privilege has some asking if we are seeing the return of exile as punishment.