turns to immigrant citizenship with a focus on California to carefully assess where the state currently stands with respect to progressive state citizenship and to situate the present moment in a sweep of the state’s history, which saw it pioneer and champion anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant legislation from its founding through the late 1990s and only move toward more pro-immigrant policies in the last two decades. We then explore key milestones in immigrant rights over the past decade and pinpoint 2015 as the year when progressive state citizenship became crystallized. Finally, we trace key factors that incubated and enabled the development of progressive state citizenship in California, including voter backlash against racial propositions, partisan shifts in the state legislature, and the growing strength of social movement actors across various regions, aided by long-term investment strategies by private foundations.

draws attention to comparisons between California and other states in their provision of immigrant citizenship rights. The authors start with the border dividing California and Arizona, two states that lie on opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to progressive and regressive state citizenship, respectively. And yet, Arizona is not the only exclusionary state with respect to immigrant rights today. Indeed, the authors’ analysis reveals that Alabama is about as exclusionary as Arizona and that states like Georgia and Tennessee are close behind in their exclusionary laws on immigrant state citizenship. In this chapter, the authors situate various states along a continuum from the most inclusive to the most exclusionary with respect to each of five dimensions of citizenship rights. They also conduct a fifty-state quantitative analysis to identify the reasons why some states have proceeded farther than others in the development of progressive state citizenship.

This introduction provides an overview of the argument of the book. Although citizenship is often believed to reside exclusively at the national scale, the introduction describes how there is a distinctively local idea of citizenship that exists alongside federal citizenship. Where federal citizenship is distributed based on nationality, local citizenship has generally been made available to all residents regardless of nationality. Although local and federal citizenship have long been complementary, globalization is now causing them to come into conflict. That Donald Trump was elected on a stridently nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and anti-urban political platform at the same time that cities like San Francisco extended local voting rights to noncitizen residents who are ineligible to vote in state and federal elections illustrates how divergent ideas about local and federal citizenship are the sources of a major political crisis.

Chapter 2 details how the distinction between the public and private spheres of citizenship has been implemented through jurisdictional scale, or federalism. Through a mosaic of laws regarding suffrage, immigration, education and public benefits, zoning, civil rights and others, our federal system has designated the national government as the public sphere of identity and civic activity, and local governments as the private sphere of the market and the family. The potential for conflict among the various conceptions of citizenship is muted because their contradictory components are divided into separate spheres and each is then confined to its designated sphere. This chapter also describes, however, how globalization has caused the public/private distinction to break down, and with it, the line between local and national citizenship to become blurred. As that has happened, the contradictions among the three conceptions of citizenship have become more pronounced, resulting in a crisis in the meaning of citizenship and increasing hostility between cities and the state.