While empirical research on international human mobility has made several advances in recent years, current understandings of how legal, socioeconomic, and physical structures come together and shape patterns of transnational mobility, remain surprisingly ambiguous.

This presentation explores the pervasive influence of citizenship in shaping access to transnational mobility and elucidates how nationality laws interact with both the physical, legal, and socioeconomic structures that, combined, govern transnational human mobility on the global level. Ultimately, the presented paper suggests that citizenship functions as a form of mobility capital: a resource with which individuals are more or less endowed, which impacts people’s transnational social positions and their capacities, strategies, and perceptions of transnational movement.