From Aliens To Citizens

Citizenship presents two faces. Within a political community it stands for inclusion and universalism, but to outsiders, citizenship means exclusion. Because these aspects of citizenship appear spatially and jurisdictionally separate, they are usually regarded as complementary. In fact, the inclusionary and exclusionary dimensions of citizenship dramatically collide within the territory of the nation-state, creating multiple contradictions when it comes to the class of people the law calls aliens--transnational migrants with a status short of full citizenship. Examining alienage and alienage law in all of its complexities, The Citizen and the Alien explores the dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion inherent in the practices and institutions of citizenship in liberal democratic societies, especially the United States. In doing so, it offers an important new perspective on the changing meaning of citizenship in a world of highly porous borders and increasing transmigration. As a particular form of noncitizenship, alienage represents a powerful lens through which to examine the meaning of citizenship itself, argues Linda Bosniak. She uses alienage to examine the promises and limits of the "equal citizenship" ideal that animates many constitutional democracies. In the process, she shows how core features of globalization serve to shape the structure of legal and social relationships at the very heart of national societies.

This book offers a critical discussion of Joseph Carens’s main works in migration ethics covering themes such as migration, naturalization, citizenship, culture, religion and economic equality. The volume is published on the occasion of the annual Münster Lectures in Philosophy held by Joseph Carens in the fall of 2018. It documents the intellectual exchange with the well-known philosopher Joseph Carens by offering critical contributions on Carens’s work and commentaries of Carens as a reply to these critical contributions. With his various works on migration ethics, Joseph Carens must be seen as one of the leading academics in the political and ethical discourse of migration in the last years. The topic of migration raises questions not only regarding naturalization and citizenship but also cultural, economic and religious differences between aliens, citizens and persons whose status lies in between and calls for further determination. Such questions gain more and more importance in our globalized world as can be seen for example in the context of the refugee crisis in the European Union and the U.S. The book covers different systematic topics of Carens’s work as can be found in his widely read book “The Ethics of Immigration” but also in further publications. It provides papers with critical discussions of Carens’s work as well as his responses to these, thus enabling and documenting the fruitful dialogue between the contributors and Carens himself. The aim of this book is to sharpen and shed light on Carens’s arguments concerning migration by offering new and critical perspectives and fine-grained analyses.

The Rights of Others examines the boundaries of political community by focusing on political membership.

This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

First Published in 2016. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

"I served not in defense of the bourgeois order, but only for a crumb of bread since I was burdened with five small children.""From 1923 to 1925 I worked as a musician but later my earnings weren't steady and I quickly stopped. Without an income to live on, I was drawn to the nonlaboring path.""As a man almost completely illiterate and therefore not prepared for any kind of work, I was forced to return to my craft as a barber.""I am as ignorant as a pipe."Golfo Alexopoulos focuses on the lishentsy ("outcasts") of the interwar USSR to reveal the defining features of alien and citizen identities under Stalin's rule. Although portrayed as "bourgeois elements," lishentsy actually included a wide variety of people, including prostitutes, gamblers, tax evaders, embezzlers, and ethnic minorities, in particular, Jews. The poor, the weak, and the elderly were frequent targets of disenfranchisement, singled out by officials looking to conserve scarce resources or satisfy their superiors with long lists of discovered enemies.Alexopoulos draws heavily on an untapped resource: an archive in western Siberia that contains over 100,000 individual petitions for reinstatement. Her analysis of these and many other documents concerning "class aliens" shows how Bolshevik leaders defined the body politic and how individuals experienced the Soviet state. Personal narratives with which individuals successfully appealed to officials for reinstatement allow an unusual view into the lives of "outcasts." From Kremlin leaders to marked aliens, many participated in identifying insiders and outsiders and challenging the terms of membership in Stalin's new society.