As an inevitable tool for grasping the complexity and impasses of contemporary democratic citizenship, Bosniak presents a typology of discourses on citizenship, emphasizing the multiplicity of meanings of citizenship and the juridical interpretations of alien status. Even if her analysis draws almost entirely on the American constitutional experience, her practical, legal, political-theoretical, and ethical insights into and concerns with the citizen-alien pairing are readily transferable to the general debate on citizenship in other liberal democracies and the global community generally.
On the other hand, the boundary-focused narrative justifies the securing of external boundaries so that communities can preserve their privileged democratic principles and the generated welfare of community members. An important component of this discourse is the emphasis on immigration policy, which sets criteria that those who seek entry must pass. The nationalistic bent of such narratives is mostly legitimized through practical arguments. According to Bosniak, discussion of citizenship and alienage can be divided between these two narrative extremes, but unfortunately, this narrative divide separates those who study the subject into two insular worlds, in neither of which is proper attention devoted to the increasing presence of aliens crossing ever more porous borders.
bosniak the citizen and the alien dilemmas of contemporary membership
One powerful example involves the achievement of the feminist movement in ensuring the right of gainful employment for women, an advance that was partly achieved thanks to the availability of alien women to handle childcare and other traditional domestic jobs. Such analytical cases illustrate how the subject-substance citizenship divide can obscure the incongruity and hypocrisy between how contemporary Western countries celebrate themselves as superior democratic polities, while nevertheless allowing sometimes gross forms of inequality to go unchallenged.
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.
Despite its extraordinary currency in scholarly thought and popular discourse, "citizenship" is an elusive concept. The term is used to designate a wide range of social institutions and practices and experiences, not all of which are compatible or in alignment. This book is concerned with examining the complex interplay occurring among these various understandings of citizenship. The book's central focus is the relationship between two broad thematic strands in contemporary citizenship discourse: one having to do with relations among already-presumed members of a political community, and the other with the constitution and maintenance of the community as a community in the first instance. The relationship between these strands is uneasy, in large part because they maintain contrasting normative orientations. From an inward-looking perspective, citizenship stands for universalism - for the inclusion and recognition of "everyone." This is the commitment expressed through the ideas of "equal citizenship" and "democratic citizenship" and "social citizenship" which are ubiquitous in contemporary legal and political theory. From a boundary-conscious perspective, in contrast, citizenship requires and sanctions the drawing of exclusive national membership boundaries. This is the citizenship of nationality and passports and border guards (and, as a matter of intellectual sociology, is usually the preserve of a specialized group of scholars in the immigration field). Citizenship is thus divided, not only analytically but normatively. The book considers how these twin commitments, to universalism and closure, are accommodated - sometimes more and sometimes less successfully - within the context of the liberal democratic nation-state (with a particular focus on the United States). As a mechanism for examining these divisions, this book focuses on a particular kind of noncitizenship which the law calls "alienage." Aliens are (usually) transnational migrants who have come from the territorial outside into the liberal democratic community and occupy a status short of full status citizenship in that community. Their status is uniquely ambiguous in liberal democratic states in that they are constituted as community members and outsiders simultaneously. Yet the condition of alienage is usually disregarded by much inward-looking citizenship theory. Much citizenship scholarship avoids the subject of citizenship's outer boundaries altogether by treating the national political community as the total universe of analytic and normative concern; it begins with a presumption of societal closure and brackets out any issues which demand acknowledgment of the community's location in a wider world. Where the realities of citizenship's exclusionary dimension are recognized, it is often assumed that exclusion is only operative at, and relevant to, the political community's territorial threshold. Citizenship is conceived, in effect, as "hard on the outside and soft on the inside." The category of alienage challenges this model of jurisdictionally split citizenship, for by its nature, alienage entails the introjection of the citizenship's hard outer boundaries into the territorial inside. Through alienage, inclusionary and exclusive citizenship commitments meet and compete in the same (internal) terrain. Attending to alienage requires citizenship theory to acknowledge and interrogate the limits to citizenship's claimed (often romanticized) universality. The category of alienage also confronts citizenship theory with the task of attending to the complex interplay between the global and the domestic. Through examining the condition of noncitizen immigrants in liberal democratic states, we see that the processes of globalization never merely occur "out there" but substantially structure legal and social relationships at the very heart of national societies.
Studies is an important, interdisciplinary thread which runs through contemporary debates on globalization, citizenship, community studies, political geography and identity. It has always represented a significant component of ethnic, multicultural and racial studies but the last few years have seen a steady increase in separate / autonomous courses and modules as students, lecturers and researchers engage with the field. This proposal looks to pull together the central themes of the field; its approach is logical and the three main themes the authors identify are a useful hook upon which to hang the text. International relevance and marketability is obviously important; the inclusion of a US and a UK author with such sympathetic expertise will help to maximise the appeal of the project. The authors are aware of the need to balance the needs of different markets and their willingness to develop the proposal in response to the reviewers' comments is encouraging.
Definition: The terms alien and foreigner refer to a person who is a member of some other society, a non-citizen, someone who is a stranger or outsider, e.g. by virtue of having been born in another country.
[Page 12]Referring to an immigrant as a foreigner or alien implies (in the case of alien, quite strongly) that that person is not in fact a member of their new society. Foreignness is not an inherent quality of a person; instead it is a relation, defined by particular contexts: I am only a foreigner there, not here (Saunders 2003). The concepts thus lead us to consider the basis for membership and belonging: who belongs, who does not belong, and how do we reach such determinations? Given that national ...
The universalist model was aggressively targeted at the end of the1980s as the moral and cultural pluralism of contemporary liberalsocieties elicited increasing theoretical attention. Scepticismtowards the universalist model was spurred by concerns that theextension of citizenship rights to groups previously excluded had nottranslated into equality and full integration, notably in the case ofAfro-Americans and women (Young 1989; Williams 1998). A questioning ofthe causal relation assumed between citizenship as a uniform legalstatus and civic integration followed.
Addressing such demands through a simple reaffirmation of the ideal ofcommon citizenship is not a serious option. It may only aggravate thealienation felt by members of these groups and feed into more radicalpolitical projects, including secession. Further, to say thatrecognition of self-government rights may weaken the bonds of thelarger community is to suppose that these bonds exist in the firstplace and that a significant proportion of national minoritiesidentify with the larger society. Yet such assumptions are oftenoverly optimistic. If these bonds do not exist, or remain quite weak,what is needed is the construction of a genuine dialogue between themajority society and minorities over what constitutes just relations,through which difference can be recognized. The hope is that suchdialogue would strengthen, rather than weaken, their relationship byputting it on firmer moral and political grounds (Carens 2000,197).
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