Immigrant belonging premised on bloodline makes gratitude a catch-22 that can never be repaid.

Evidence

The racial hierarchy evident in Generous Betrayal is naturalized through an appeal to a second underlying idea, one that explains immigration as an encounter between hosts and guests and that constitutes immigrants as foreigners against whom emerges what I have elsewhere called ‘original citizens’ (for the white settler context). Original citizens are those who bear an organic relationship to citizenship and whose claims rest on the basis of their having a natural entitlement (through descent from the ‘original citizens’) to full citizenship. Immigrants are scripted in this story as guests whose first obligation is gratitude to the hosts. The position is a catch-22. To belong, immigrants must indicate their gratitude and praise of the host culture, but since belonging is premised on membership in the bloodline that shares the nation’s history, to be an innvandrer or immigrant, as Marianne Gullestad has pointed out, is always to be non-Norwegian, compliance and good behaviour notwithstanding. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 282

To belong, immigrants must indicate their gratitude and praise of the host culture, but since belonging is premised on membership in the bloodline that shares the nation’s history, to be an innvandrer or immigrant, as Marianne Gullestad has pointed out, is always to be non-Norwegian, compliance and good behaviour notwithstanding. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 282

Categorization

• XREF: The catch-22 of immigrant gratitude echoes Saraceno and Bourdieu’s work on symbolic capital and membership, and ties to the reader’s own interest in how social capital and belonging function as unpayable debts.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘original citizens’ as those claiming natural entitlement through descent, distinct from legal citizenship.
• SEED: Could become an essay on how gratitude functions as an unpayable debt in host-guest narratives across settler societies.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 282