Citizenship is tied to a person’s residency in a delimited territory. A citizen is ordinarily expected to be residing in a particular location. The migration of people across borders — international or within a country — dislocates this presumed overlap between citizenship and territory, causing a conceptual drift. Neither governments nor political parties are fully equipped to deal with this, and what we see around the world is public angst that is being harnessed for mobilisation against recent immigrants, mass deportations and efforts to clean up voter lists.

In India, the Election Commission of India (ECI) is undertaking a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls. Pushing back against challenges to the move, the ECI told the Supreme Court of India: “Rapid urbanisation and frequent migration of population from one place to another on account of education, livelihood and other reasons have become a regular trend. Some electors obtain registration in one place and then shift their residence and register themselves at another place without getting their names deleted from the electoral roll of the initial place of residence. This has led to an increased possibility of repeated entries in the electoral roll. Thus, the ECI came to the conclusion that the situation warrants the conduct of a pan-India SIR beginning with the State of Bihar.”

Under President Donald Trump, the United States Department of Justice asked all 50 States to hand over their full voter registration databases, arguing that access to complete electoral rolls was necessary to enforce federal election laws. The move triggered resistance from several States. This push coincided with a sweeping executive order signed by Mr. Trump to reshape federal election procedures, including a requirement for documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate — measures supporters say strengthen election integrity, but which critics warn could undermine State autonomy and restrict voter access. Around 22 million-24 million non-citizens are in the U.S. legally; estimates of undocumented residents vary but run into the millions. In India and the U.S., the notion of alien voters influencing politics is strong.

A rise in those moving out

Though the proportion of international migrants in the world’s population has remained broadly stable over the decades, the absolute number of migrants has grown rapidly. Migrants as a proportion of the global population may have increased by only about one percentage point since 1960 according to most estimates. But the number of people living outside their country of birth has expanded dramatically — from about 154 million in 1990 to over 300 million by mid-2024 — nearly doubling in just three decades and rising faster than the overall global population growth.

In western countries, nativist populism is linked to the rise in the proportion of foreign-born residents. In the U.S., about 14%-15% of the population is foreign born, up from roughly 13% in 2010. The United Kingdom has seen a sharper transformation: the share of those foreign-born rose from about 8% in 2001 to roughly 16% by 2021. Canada has one of the highest proportions among large economies, with about 22% of the population foreign-born. Australia stands out, with around 31%-32% of its population born overseas. Immigration is among the top three issues for voters in most developed countries in 2025, though its intensity as a concern has reduced a bit.

Governments want to regulate and manage the flow of people. India wants to ‘export human resources’, a euphemism for sending more people abroad for jobs. Rich countries that need young workers are increasingly not wanting them to stay on and claim citizenship, but to leave after a certain number of years. Returning migrants will bring back new social and political attitudes. In their host countries, they will form a labour class without political rights — as with H-1B workers in the U.S., though they have a distant pathway to citizenship. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Singapore have created a category of workers without any political identity, and developed countries are now looking at temporary workers on similar lines.

There are about 35.4 million Overseas Indians (people of Indian origin); 15.8 million of them are Indian citizens, and 19.6 million are persons of Indian origin. Under the Representation of the People (Amendment) Act, 2010, Indian citizens living abroad can enrol and exercise their franchise in their place of residence in India as mentioned in their passport. A petition before the Supreme Court argues that they should be able to vote remotely. The petitioner contends that the 2010 amendment shortchanges non-resident Indians by granting them the right to vote on the one hand, while requiring them to be physically present in India to actually exercise that right.

Policies and migration

Indian government policies have also encouraged migration from rural to urban areas and to specific regions such as Kashmir. In 2020, the rules for domicile in Jammu and Kashmir were relaxed, allowing non-locals — such as government officials posted for 10 years, residents for 15 years, and students for seven years — to obtain domicile status, with access to jobs and property. While critics argue that these changes are intended to alter the region’s demographic composition, the government maintains that they are meant to facilitate development and integration.

Within national boundaries, there are other borders, and migrations across them have political and governance consequences. Domicile laws restrict access to many streams of education and jobs to natives of a particular State or region. The most significant implication of movement within the country’s borders concerns voting rights. The right to vote is tied to a particular polling booth where a citizen is ordinarily resident. The SIR exercise is a determination of whether one can vote, but also, perhaps more importantly, where one can vote. The same person voting in Maharashtra or Kerala — net migrant-receiving States — as opposed to Bihar, which is a net migrant-sending State, has different political implications for national politics.

Changes in population composition affect politics, and an example is Mumbai, where Marathi speakers now constitute less than 40%, while Hindi speakers are around 30%. The nativist politics of the Shiv Sena has been decimated; parties now routinely field Hindi-speaking candidates in elections. In 2001, 31% of India’s population were migrants and by 2011, this proportion had increased to 38%. Two-thirds of these migrants are women, due to marriage. Men, who make up the remaining third, tend to move farther and largely for economic reasons. Census 2027 will capture the enormity of this movement of people after nearly two decades.

Migrating people carry attitudes, values, stories and belief systems. The White House now celebrates Deepavali — a practice that began in 2003. It was through migration that Vedic practices spread from the Aryavarta region of the epics to its eastern and peninsular frontiers, mixing with pre-existing lore and expanding the cultural universe that would later be called Hinduism. Languages move with migrating people. Historically, it has been a case of more men than women who migrated, and migrating men met native women; the languages we speak today reflect this, Peggy Mohan argues in Father Tongue, Motherland

Birthright citizenship

Moving people is now challenging even the idea of birthright citizenship in countries where it once existed unquestioned. The Trump administration is trying to overturn a long-held interpretation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that all those born in the U.S. are eligible for citizenship. Until recently, an estimated 30,000 people were travelling to the U.S. annually to give birth, and there were tour companies that made this a business model. A 2015 law made it legal for people to seek visas for giving birth in the U.S., but in 2020, with the rise of Trump-era nativism, this was withdrawn. India, through a change in its citizenship law, has barred children born to an illegal immigrant from acquiring citizenship by birth.

Moving people moves the history of humankind. Moving people is remaking the politics of India. These changes will become visible through the Census, the SIR, and then delimitation, which will redistribute Lok Sabha representation across State borders for the first time in half a century.