Immigrant authors in the United States write under the shadow of hostile laws that challenge expectations of political equality and belonging. Tales of repudiation and resistance mark the uncertainties of transit and the dangers of arrival. This study of Asian American texts exposes how US immigration laws naturalize race and redefine identities and lineage. Immigration law transformed American narrative forms to create a global and intercultural literature in which Asian migrants refuse to be turned into perpetual outsiders.

This volume, part of the Feminist Judgment Series, shows how feminist legal theory along with critical race theory and intersectional modes of critique might transform immigration law. Here, a diverse collection of scholars and lawyers bring critical feminist, race and intersectional insights to Supreme Court opinions that deal with the source of the power to regulate immigration, state and local regulation of immigration, citizenship law, racial discrimination, employment law, access to public education, the rights of criminal defendants, the detention of noncitizens, and more. Feminist reasoning values the perspectives of outsiders, exposes the deep-rooted bias in the legal opinions of courts, and illuminates the effects of ostensibly neutral policies that create and maintain oppression and hierarchy. One by one, the chapters in this book reimagine the norms that drive immigration policies and practices. In place of discrimination and subordination, the authors here demand welcome and equality. Where current law omits the voice and stories of noncitizens, the authors here center their lives and experiences. Collectively, they reveal how a feminist vision of immigration law could center a commitment to equality and justice and foster a country where diverse newcomers readily flourish with dignity.

The theory of moral perception presented in Chapter 8 presupposes moral realism. Moral realism is controversial. Moral rationalists have defended it by drawing an analogy between mathematical knowledge and moral knowledge. It is commonly thought that mathematical facts, such as theorems, play essential roles in scientific explanations and that this explanatory power supports realism regarding mathematical objects. Do purported moral facts, such as true moral principles, have comparable explanatory power? This chapter explores several kinds of explanatory roles apparently played by both moral facts and mathematical facts. In comparing these roles, the chapter shows how moral realism is supportable in ways that draw on an analogy between the explanatory roles of moral facts and counterpart roles played by both certain mathematical facts and certain facts in the physical realm. The case made for moral realism is compatible with the view that moral properties are “naturalizable” but does not require this.

Chapter 3 investigates the French nationality decrees promulgated in 1930 and 1936, which recognized the claims métis people had been making for decades: they were French and entitled to French legal status. These new legal pathways to French citizenship and demarcations of parameters of belonging were tied to concepts of how race and multiracial identity mapped onto French legal status. The decrees codified multiracial people as a specific category in French colonial thought and society, but within the context of how multiracial people themselves claimed multiracial selfhoods. The claims of métis people who petitioned for citizenship deepened the debates about race and racial identity and changed the very idea of Frenchness. The burden of proof on petitioners hinged on questions of paternity and French cultural competency. However, maternal kin and African communities played an essential role in the legal process. Métis obtainment of French citizenship was consequential for hierarchies of status within African societies. At the same time, it both contested and created hierarchies of social and legal status and privilege based on changing racial thought.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

This chapter offers a political science take on citizenship by investment through a tour d’horizon. Examining transformations over centuries, the analysis integrates investment migration – and especially citizenship for sale – in the classical political science literature.

The success of legal time is to be found in its exterior and standardized character. In this chapter, it argued on the basis of Heidegger and Bergson that such a perspective misses the peculiar characteristics of human time and does not relate well to processes. The first characteristic of human time is that it cannot be stopped. This does not only imply that time is finite, it also means that human time inevitably moves forward from birth to one’s inescapable death. Furthermore, human time cannot be traversed: in a human life, one cannot actually go back to the past or move forward to the future. A third characteristic of human time lies in its irreducible relationship with eternity. If one wants to eternally exclude someone, it is unclear how long this will actually last. Bergson furthermore reminds us that the reference to processes is always inadequate, it is qualitatively different from what it refers. We see this in the discussion of formal and material criteria used to refer to the process of migrants living within a certain territory. Two dominant approaches – jus domicilii and jus nexi – both ultimately fail to grasp such process.

Just like racial difference, whiteness is a social construct. The paradox of race and of whiteness is that white or nonwhite skin color means nothing in itself; rather, what matters is the social meaning that is ascribed to these differences in color. This essay examines the way whiteness has historically been constructed in both law and literature. Exploring the parallel between legal and literary histories, it refers to the literature of naturalism – Frank Norris’s The Octopus and Stephen Crane’s Maggie – as well as to the racial prerequisite cases, in which immigrants had to prove they were white and hence eligible for naturalization. In law as much as in literature, whiteness is far from homogenous, but instead seems to be eclipsed into infinite shades of whiteness. At the same time, in both literature and law, whiteness is not only linked to skin color, but to culture as well. In Crane’s novella, the cultural compatibility of the Irish is seen as dubious at best. Similarly, the Chinese cook in Norris’s novel is portrayed as culturally alien and hence as unassimilable. This essay proposes that the potential whiteness of immigrant groups is being contested in both the court of law and that of literature.

Reconstruction legislators faced the uncomfortable yet broadly acknowledged fact that the U.S. Constitution had countenanced slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment set out to guarantee and secure civil freedom through the reassertion of the U.S. Constitution, yet its expansive possibilities proved short-lived. Anti-Chinese ideologues and nativists challenged birthright citizenship and advanced new legislation restricting legal entry into the United States. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the nation’s first raced immigration and naturalization ban, helped stabilize the meaning and value of citizenship as the federal judiciary began narrowing the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. By the end of the century, the Chinese Exclusion Acts and federal rulings on Chinese immigration cases completed the redefinition of the Asiatic as the categorically excluded. Among the earliest Asian American writers to publish in English, Wong Chin Foo and Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) produced a wide-ranging body of journalism and short fiction that addressed public anxieties over “contraband Chinese.” The criminalized “illegal immigrant” remains a ready foil for the citizen, shoring up fantasies of national belonging as our civil liberties face increasing erosion. The writers discussed in this chapter offer us a unique vantage on this conflicted and evolving history of U.S. citizenship.

Religious believers organized a strong peace movement in the 1920s and 1930s prior to the rise of fascism in Europe. They challenged state programs requiring university students to participate in the Reserve Officers Training, and attempted to obtain citizenship in the face of a statutory requirement that cprospective citizens indicate their willingness to serve in the armed forces. In contrast to its decisions dealing with political dissent, the Hughes Court did little to accommodate this form of religious dissent.

Chapter 3 gathers a variety of restrictive trends in the acquisition and loss of citizenship under the umbrella of “earned citizenship”, which is not a “right”, as in the liberal past, but “privilege”. “More difficult to get” and “easier to lose” are complementary sides of the same neoliberal-cum-nationalist logic of making citizenship more exclusive and conditional on the immigrant`s individual behavior and desert. Being neoliberal and nationalist in tandem, earned citizenship is the clearest expression of a neoliberal nationalism. Earned citizenship`s third element, to be “less in value”, seems to contradict the fact that a rich society`s “citizenship premium” (Milanovic 2016) has never been bigger than today. However, the same citizenship that re-nationalizing states have claimed to strengthen by making it more selective, has become internally devalued through its infiltration by immigration law and a neoliberal welfare-to-workfare devolution.

Chapter 9 deals specifically with the way in which the war affected the notions and practices of citizenship. It does so by switching the attention from enemy aliens to citizens of enemy origins. The chapter concentrates firstly on an analysis and discussion of the naturalization policies adopted by the various belligerent countries during the First World War. It then examines the spread of denaturalization statutes across Europe and the emergence of statelessness, concentrating both on state attitudes and public opinion and on the impact of naturalization and denaturalization policies on people of enemy origin. It also looks past the end of the war at the impact of those policies on interwar developments in inclusion and exclusion. The war played a crucial role in stabilizing differences between citizens and aliens and making them starker. It also imposed markers of identity (nationality, language, religion, ethnicity, “race”) on people, often regardless of their will or choice. In the name of military necessity and national security, authorities were willing to investigate origins and parentage or kinship, religion, language and all the markers that could indicate disloyalty to the nation in arms, thus implementing rigid notions of citizenship/subjecthood.

This chapter opens the third section of the book on the aftermath of the war. It addresses the end of the war and its many legacies. It starts with the armistice, and then considers the discussion about enemy aliens during the peace conference; it also explores the treaties that ended the war and their consequences for aliens, citizenship and property rights. It continues with the signing of all the final treaties, the emptying of the concentration camps and the lifting of the provisions on foreign movements, the agreement that regulated restitution or liquidation of assets, and the final exchange of populations. The chapter covers the period up to the late 1920s and deals with the transition from the state of emergency to peace, the resumption of naturalization procedures, new rules on borders and migration, new citizenship regimes that emerged from the war in both victorious and defeated countries as well as in the new successor states, and mass denaturalization and statelessness as a consequence of the emergence of new political regimes (such as the Soviet Union) or population exchange. It investigates the impact of special legislation on alien and enemy aliens on policies of migration control and explores the debate among jurists about the many violations of the conventions and human rights and the failed attempts at writing a new convention on enemy aliens.

This chapter examines official attitudes toward aliens in peacetime during the nineteenth century by focusing first of all on their rights in a period characterized by sovereignty, nation-building, solidification of borders and the issue and reform of citizenship laws on the one hand, and on the emergence of globalization, migration and the construction of an international society on the other. The chapter delves into the debates on the right of asylum, expulsion, expatriation, and examines early policies of migration control and the dilemma of reconciling rights and freedom of movement with emerging anti-alienism that precipitated into violence. The second part of the chapter concentrates on citizenship as a legal device, exploring first of all practices of collective acquisition of citizenship triggered by annexations of territories, creation of new nation-states, plebiscites and option regimes incorporated in international treaties. It then deals with individual acquisition and loss of citizenship (naturalization and denaturalization), paying particular attention to the gender dimension of citizenship, conscription, dual citizenship and the ethnic shift in citizenship practices and notions that began to emerge at the turn of the century.

Even as political elites in Europe and North America have increasingly raised doubts about its viability, East Asian democracies have converged in their embrace of the catchword, “multiculturalism,” among policymakers and the public alike to mark the advent of social diversity. This chapter examines the emergence of three distinct frameworks for immigrant incorporation in East Asia based on variants of multiculturalism: “multicultural coexistence” in Japan in which nationality is the basis for categorizing diversity; hierarchical multiculturalism in South Korea whereby visa categories have become the basis for noncitizen hierarchies; and contested multiculturalism in Taiwan notable for the exclusion of migrant workers and the Sinicization of migrant spouses. I argue that, despite their common terminology, the variants of multiculturalism developing in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan continue to reflect their respective civic legacies. This chapter also compares rates of naturalization and permanent residency acquisition among immigrants in the three countries and discusses the growing backlash to specific immigrant groups in each country.

What does immigrant incorporation mean to immigrants themselves? This chapter examines how individual migrants at the micro-level negotiate macro-level policies and meso-level organizations in the process of becoming permanent members of their societies. I discuss intra-national variations at two different levels: (1) between policies and practices (or between policy intent, interpretation, and outcomes) and (2) between subcategories of migrants. Based on focus group interviews with over twenty immigrant communities in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, this chapter constructs a critical account of how state policies and mediating institutions shape choices for immigrant political empowerment. I explore how immigrants define themselves in relation to their receiving societies and to other immigrants, how they negotiate the formal rules and institutions that govern their legal status, and how their interactions with civil-society organizations shape their understandings of their rights and responsibilities.

This first chapter of Part III looks at Rahab’slong and complex afterlife in the history of biblical interpretation. For the rabbis, she represents the prototypical “righteous proselyte” who, despite her Canaanite descent and fame as a fille de joie, becomes a full member of Israel. For the first Christian interpreters, her story illustrates foundational theological principles, such as the relationship between faith and works. These differing approaches reflect an abiding tension between Christian and Jewish approaches to the Bible, both ancient and modern. Because that tension bears directly on our central concern with war and national identity, we compare in what follows a number of early readings of the biblical account. In doing so, we will deepen our appreciation of the ideals, ethos, and concerns that shaped biblical war commemoration as a politico-theological discourse, as well as the competing understandings of “belonging” in early Jewish and Christian communities.

This second chapter of Part III looks at the composition of the Rahab account. Instead of understanding Rahab as the eponymous ancestor of an ancient clan (like Caleb and the Calebites), it demonstrates that we would be better served by interpreting her as a paradigmatic Other. Just as she came to be the prototypical proselyte for the rabbis, she figures in the biblical account as an archetypal outsider who successfully achieves membership among the people of Israel. Inasmuch as she is not associated with any one clan or community, this liminal figure from Canaanite society could serve as a safe proxy for outsiders in various times and places.