Contingent Citizens: Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Shifting Boundaries of American Immigration Laws

Kunal Parker and Peter Spiro offer timely examinations of American immigration and citizenship law, expanding the definition of what it has meant to lack citizenship in United States history. Parker's work sheds light on the ways political and legal shifts have allowed the American state to incorporate outsiders, while also rendering insiders foreign. He analyzes how those already inside the United States such as Native Americans, women, African Americans, the poor, and by the nineteenth century, Asian and Latino/a Americans, faced legal challenges and exclusions that likened them to aliens in America. When, by the 1960s, these groups had gained most of the rights conferred by American citizenship, he argues that non-citizenship became a crucial marker for defining outsider status. Spiro's work complicates this argument with an analysis of dual citizenship, which from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century was rejected by an American state that needed total allegiance from its members. This changed in the Cold War Era, when the world split between communism and democracy and single-state allegiance became less crucial to the functioning of American democracy. Soon states across the globe permitted and even encouraged dual citizenship. Thus, while Parker argues that today the "gulf between citizen and alien has never been wider" (p. 217), Spiro brings a third category of dual citizens, or world citizens, demonstrating the growing tension between globalization and hardened national borders in our contemporary world.

Parker and Spiro's work breathe life into literature on citizenship by offering new modes of inquiry that ask how citizenship worked for those to whom it has traditionally been denied. As Parker notes, historians have tended to write about the "changing formal and substantive meanings of citizenship," investigating how shifting ideas about belonging affected particular groups (p. 13). Parker places his work in conversation with Rogers Smith's crucial Civic Ideals, which analyzed the role of citizenship laws in "designating the criteria for membership in a political community and the prerogatives that constitute membership."¹ Both Parker and Spiro, however, seek to understand how the American legal system marked certain individuals as undeserving of membership in the political community encompassed under Smith's definition of citizenship. Parker argues that investigating the role of laws in "rendering insiders foreign" provides a crucial missing piece of the citizenship story (p. 4). Spiro on the other hand, posits that the emergence of accepted dual and even multiple citizenships will make citizenship "more like membership in a club or civic association," turning it into "a class of affiliation that does not necessarily constrain other attachments, a part of our identity but not the sort of trumping presence it once enjoyed" (p. 10). Thus, both works offer a fresh take on how citizenship and belonging worked at the edges of American political society, revealing how the rights revolution of the 1960s raised the stakes for American citizenship, while at the same time, the acceptance of dual citizenship made it less exclusive than ever before.

In Making Foreigners, Parker brings an exciting new dimension to immigration history. He suggests that in order to understand why American laws rejected and expelled certain people, we must also investigate how laws rejected and ostracized those living within the borders of the United States. This angle rethinks Roger Daniel's Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (2005), Aristide Zolberg's A Nation By Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (2006), and Erika Lee's At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (2003), which all focused on how American immigration laws barred or welcomed outsiders hoping to enter America as immigrants. Mae Ngai's seminal work, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making...