In all the noisy rhetoric currently surrounding immigration, one important question is rarely asked: What ethical responsibilities do immigrants and citizens have to each other? In this book Tisha Rajendra reframes the confused and often heated debate over immigration around the world, proposes a new definition of justice based on responsibility to relationships, and develops a Christian ethic to address this vexing social problem.

A proposal that immigrants in the United States should be offered a path to legalized status.

Borderline Citizens explores the intersection of U.S. colonial power and Puerto Rican migration. Robert C. McGreevey examines a series of confrontations in the early decades of the twentieth century between colonial migrants seeking work and citizenship in the metropole and various groups—employers, colonial officials, court officers, and labor leaders—policing the borders of the U.S. economy and polity. Borderline Citizens deftly shows the dynamic and contested meaning of American citizenship. At a time when colonial officials sought to limit citizenship through the definition of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans tested the boundaries of colonial law when they migrated to California, Arizona, New York, and other states on the mainland. The conflicts and legal challenges created when Puerto Ricans migrated to the U.S. mainland thus serve, McGreevey argues, as essential, if overlooked, evidence crucial to understanding U.S. empire and citizenship. McGreevey demonstrates the value of an imperial approach to the history of migration. Drawing attention to the legal claims migrants made on the mainland, he highlights the agency of Puerto Rican migrants and the efficacy of their efforts to find an economic, political, and legal home in the United States. At the same time, Borderline Citizens demonstrates how colonial institutions shaped migration streams through a series of changing colonial legal categories that tracked alongside corporate and government demands for labor mobility. McGreevey describes a history shaped as much by the force of U.S. power overseas as by the claims of colonial migrants within the United States.

This edited collection goes beyond the limited definition of borders as simply dividing lines across states, to uncover another, yet related, type of division: one that separates policies and institutions from public debate and contestation. Bringing together expertise from established and emerging academics, it examines the fluid and varied borderscape across policy and the public domains. The chapters encompass a wide range of analyses that covers local, national and transnational frameworks, policies and private actors. In doing so, Migration, Borders and Citizenship reveals the tensions between border control and state economic interests; legal frameworks designed to contain criminality and solidarity movements; international conventions, national constitutions and local migration governance; and democratic and exclusive constructions of citizenship. This novel approach to the politics of borders will appeal to sociologists, political scientists and geographers working in the fields of migration, citizenship, urban geography and human rights; in addition to students and scholars of security studies and international relations.

From the 1920s to the eve of the Pacific War in 1941, more than 50,000 young second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) embarked on transpacific journeys to the Japanese Empire, putting an ocean between themselves and pervasive anti-Asian racism in the American West. Born U.S. citizens but treated as unwelcome aliens, this contingent of Japanese Americans--one in four U.S.-born Nisei--came in search of better lives but instead encountered a world shaped by increasingly volatile relations between the U.S. and Japan. Based on transnational and bilingual research in the United States and Japan, Michael R. Jin recuperates the stories of this unique group of American emigrants at the crossroads of U.S. and Japanese empire. From the Jim Crow American West to the Japanese colonial frontiers in Asia, and from internment camps in America to Hiroshima on the eve of the atomic bombing, these individuals redefined ideas about home, identity, citizenship, and belonging as they encountered multiple social realities on both sides of the Pacific. Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless examines the deeply intertwined histories of Asian exclusion in the United States, Japanese colonialism in Asia, and volatile geopolitical changes in the Pacific world that converged in the lives of Japanese American migrants.

More than 35 million Chinese people live outside China, but this population is far from homogenous, and its multifaceted national affiliations require careful theorization. This book unravels the multiple, shifting paths of global migration in Chinese society today, challenging a unilinear view of migration by presenting emigration, immigration, and re-migration trajectories that are occurring continually and simultaneously. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations conducted in China, Canada, Singapore, and the China–Myanmar border, Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho takes the geographical space of China as the starting point from which to consider complex patterns of migration that shape nation-building and citizenship, both in origin and destination countries. She uniquely brings together various migration experiences and national contexts under the same analytical framework to create a rich portrait of the diversity of contemporary Chinese migration processes. By examining the convergence of multiple migration pathways across one geographical region over time, Ho offers alternative approaches to studying migration, migrant experience, and citizenship, thus setting the stage for future scholarship.

The Berlin Wall falls as thousands of East Germans move to the West; after the Iron Curtain lifts, West Europeans brace for mass migrations from Eastern Europe; millions of refugees flee Iraq, Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, and other strife-torn nations. The shifting tides of international migration have had a profound effect on our world, from the transformation of nationality laws and European cooperation on border control to NATO intervention in Kosovo. In Migrants and Citizens, Rey Koslowski examines the impact of migration on international politics. He focuses on two related avenues of inquiry: the immediate political problems faced by the European Union, and the general issues that confront us as we try to understand the modern international system. Migration has become politically salient so quickly, Koslowski argues, because the nation-state and the political institutions associated with it developed in the centuries during which Western Europe was a net exporter of people. With the reversal of that trend less than a generation ago, many of these institutions have been ill-suited to deal with the political and policy demands brought on by the arrival of large numbers of foreigners. Koslowski discusses how restrictive citizenship laws exclude migrants and their children from political participation in some West European states, leading observers to question the legitimacy of those states as democracies. Yet when these states try to increase immigrant participation with local voting rights, European Union citizenship, and dual nationality, the principle of a singular nationality underlying the nation-state is challenged. In this way, the practical policy responses to migration gradually transform the political institutions of states as well as the international system they collectively constitute.