The acquisition of citizenship, the bureaucratic process of changing the legal status of residency in an institutionally defined territory termed a nation, is usually perceived in legal, societal and personal terms as a major repositioning of the individual. Research in response to the changing realities and experiences of migration in the age of globalization has focused on the definition of transnational citizenship and posits as a basic premise that all citizenship questions rest on the interaction between legal rights and personal membership (Fox 2005; Stokes 2004). In the above quotation, from the then British Home Secretary David Blunkett, the repositioning of the self in relation to the nation is presented as a ‘significant life event’ which should be ‘meaningful and celebratory’ and should lead to a ‘a sense of belonging to a wider community’.