The chapter explores how the activities of Spanish officials and men-at-arms impacted identity-making processes against the background of debates over the significance of the movement toward defining the benemérito category and the hierarchy of the meritorious. The chapter argues that, beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, imperial agents faced the challenge of fashioning notions of a deserving self or undeserving other while balancing two opposing metrics of merit: rootedness and mobility. It first examines the unwillingness of conquistadores and first settlers, and their descendants, to serve in the Philippines and the ways such unwillingness reinforced development of negative stereotypes associated with these privileged social categories. Subsequently, it explores the efforts of Melchor López de Legazpi, Pedro de Robles, Diego García de Palacio, and Rodrigo de Vivero to use their Pacific service as a basis for fashioning themselves as meritorious subjects. Finally, it considers how debates over the hierarchy of the meritorious shaped ideas about New Spain’s transpacific connections and the region’s position between Europe and Asia.

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.

The jus temporis that is argued for in this chapter aims to explicate the value of human time that is to be found in the finite, irreversible, and unstoppable character of human time. To make the value of human time explicit, "rootedness" and "integration" are conceptually distinguished. The latter signifying qualified time, the former mere lapse of human time. Rootedness simply signifies the entanglement of presence on a territory with the lapse of finite and irreversible human time. This conception of rootedness is at the heart of jus temporis and its implications are not limited to questions of citizenship acquisition. It is argued that the value of rootedness equally applies to waiting time in procedures, endless forms of temporariness, and unlawful residence. Concretely, it is argued that this jus temporis implies two elements. The first is a certain openness to the future, the possibility that a certain situation will not last forever. The second element is that there should be end-terms at work in law: procedures may not last forever, temporariness may not continue eternally, and there should be a moment when long-term unlawful residences can become lawful.

Chapter 5 indicates that migration to and from Liberia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries profoundly modified the meaning and practice of citizenship by creating categories of Liberians that have defied the legal definition of citizen. In 1847, Liberia was a country of relative immigration yet citizenship norms were biased against those considered ‘rooted’—primarily the 16 ethnic groups already occupying the territory were formally excluded from the institution of citizenship. In 2019, however, while Liberia exemplified a country of relative emigration citizenship norms were biased against those deemed ‘rootless’—essentially jus soli Liberians who naturalised abroad and jus sanguinis Liberians who maintained their birthplace citizenship remained excluded from formal Liberian citizenship. This chapter moves beyond the rhetoric of politicians and policy makers to underscore that ordinary Liberians’ contemporary notions of rootedness and rootlessness represent a continuum of sedentarist and nomadic metaphysical thinking thereby simultaneously challenging and strengthening claims for dual citizenship. While motivations for not naturalising abroad—largely based on sedentarist metaphysics—have challenged core assumptions about the necessity of dual citizenship for Liberia, motivations for naturalising—largely based on nomadic metaphysics—have galvanised proponents of such a policy prescription and development intervention.