This book makes a distinctive contribution to an important topic in legal and political theory: what Linda Bosniak calls the “citizenship of aliens.” What rights, she asks, do and should aliens who reside within the territory of liberal democracies like the United States enjoy, even though they are not full political citizens of that territory?

While she does not answer this question with a list of judicially enforceable rights, Bosniak makes a good case for taking rights of this sort seriously and explains why they have not been taken seriously enough heretofore. She does this through an eclectic discourse analysis of the dominant metaphors, distinctions, and commitments of liberal democratic theory and its nationalist practices. She argues that this combination of theory and practice has oversimplified and obscured the actual ambiguities and dilemmas that immigrants face in the United States. Her purpose is to spell out these ambiguities and dilemmas, not eliminate or resolve them.

Bosniak admits that “citizenship of aliens” is a paradoxical term, but she claims that it can help us move beyond the commonplace distinction between (“hard”) external borders that keep strangers out and (“soft”) internal boundaries that connect persons with one another within a nation-state. The hard/soft metaphor is an artifact of anachronistic liberal nationalism and not of much use in a world in which hard borders are porous and soft boundaries can harden: “The point is, there is no firm separation possible between the domains of citizenship at the border and citizenship within. Instead, the two domains are overlapping and interpenetrated in various respects” (p. 9).

Bosniak turns back to Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice (1983) to explore this dynamic frontier. In the most acute and sustained argument in the book, in which she carefully analyzes several U.S. Supreme Court cases in this area, she reviews Walzer's communitarian endorsement of a broad range of citizenship rights for resident aliens in order to introduce her own concern: “What is the legitimate scope, or jurisdiction, of what Walzer has called the membership sphere? When do membership principles appropriately shape the status of noncitizen residents within the nation and when are they insulated from membership's reach?” (p. 49).

Many writers on citizenship, most notably Aihwa Ong (Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, The New America, 2005), stress the need to think of citizenship as more than a formal legal status. To become a citizen is to go through a profound socialization and to be a citizen is to have a specific set of attitudes, beliefs, and even virtues. Just getting in and passing a test does not make one a citizen. Citizenship, according to Ong and others, is a discursive social practice. Bosniak seems to accept this at one level as when she says, “Citizenship, in this respect, is not a unified condition but a set of different institutions and practices that converge in some respects, but are relatively autonomous in others” (p. 35). Because legal institutions and practices are part of this formative social structure of liberal democratic society, legal status certainly has an impact on the capacity of individuals to act and think like citizens.

For example, an immigrant who has entered the United States legally and has applied for full legal citizenship still may avoid sending her children to child-care programs out of fear that she may be detained and separated from them. She will be wary of participating in civil society in general for the same reason, and it will become more difficult for her and her children to become citizens in a social sense because of her ambiguous legal status. The “spectre of deportability” (p. 69) compromises other legal rights of noncitizens as it obstructs their ability to develop the character traits and knowledge that political participation requires. With the help of Kenneth Karst's interpretation of equal opportunity rights, Bosniak argues that this kind of “second class citizenship” is a product of the interaction between formal legal citizenship and social forms of discrimination. Not all aliens are stopped at the border, but once inside, both documented and undocumented aliens encounter a confusing array of social, economic, and legal rights and barriers that reproduce the external border as a new matrix of internal boundaries. Sometimes citizenship status is a prerequisite for these rights, and sometimes citizenship rights can exist without citizenship status (p. 89).

While Bosniak is primarily concerned with these internal boundaries, she recognizes that liberal democratic theories that presuppose an insular or self-sufficient nation-state cannot provide the resources for the kind of immigration reform that she appears to favor. She must say more about the changing hard but porous external borders. She introduces this subject in a suggestive chapter on the rights of immigrant women who work as household laborers to provide service for other women and free them up for a public life outside the home. Generalizing from this in the final chapter, the author makes explicit her concern about the “nationalist commitments” of liberal democratic theory, but has a very difficult time seeing beyond national borders herself. A more careful reading of the cosmopolitan literature on global citizenship and open borders, including feminist theories of international care (e.g., Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations, 1999, and Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics, 1998) seems like a natural way of responding to the challenge of “national privilege” that she poses herself (p. 134).

Bosniak's rudimentary account of the rights of noncitizen aliens suffers from a more general weakness of rights theories. Despite a nod in the direction of responsibility (p. 12), this concept does not surface again until literally the second to last sentence of the book. She neglects the question, posed most powerfully by Onora O'Neill: Who or what should be responsible for respecting and guaranteeing the rights of noncitizen aliens? Left to the receiving countries, the rights of immigrant workers, for example, too often have been cruelly neglected. As of June 23, 2007, The United Nations International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which entered into force in 2003, has been ratified by only 36 African and Latin American countries and one European country, Albania (see http://www.migrantsrights.org/). It is not just a matter of the spectre of deportation; the substantive social and economic rights of alien noncitizens are not likely to be redeemed without a more effective regional or global means for assigning responsibility and ensuring accountability.