For the uninitiated reader, Linda Bosniak's legal-theoretical analysis of the central dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion springing from the established liberal practices and formal institutions of citizenship is a revelation. The Citizen and the Alien explores the wide and—particularly for public policy and democratic theory—the problematic gap between the principle of constitutional equality and the inherently exclusionary dimensions of citizenship. Primarily inspired by the contemporary American experience with mass immigration, it lucidly exposes the contradictions generated by contemporary immigration law and the legal rules that are routinely applied to resident aliens.

Organized into six succinct and well-written chapters, the book offers four powerful, important, and persuasive arguments and insights. First, citizenship is a historically pliable, politically contested, and conceptually and normatively divided concept. Within this context, questions of identity (who are “we”?) and responsibility (to whom do we maintain special commitments?) are inextricably linked and perennially vexing. Second, attempts by scholars and policymakers to erect a wall between “hard” (i.e., illiberal or exclusionary) immigration regimes and “soft” (i.e., liberal or inclusionary) immigrant incorporation regimes are inherently artificial and, thus, doomed to fail. According to Bosniak, this hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside perspective specifically fails to represent accurately contemporary understandings and practices of liberal citizenship “because it presumes a degree of separation and separability between the community's edges and its interior that simply does not exist” (103).

Third, the liberal state's enforcement of exclusionary citizenship norms against aliens settled within the traditional national territory “undermines the inclusionary and egalitarian citizenship values to which liberal democratic societies are at least formally committed” (124). For Bosniak, this state of affairs precipitates both legal and moral tensions transcending the status of aliens whose interests are ultimately put at risk. Finally, although liberal citizenship ostensibly embodies universal values, in practice it falls short of this standard, indeed, often “catastrophically so” (132). As a result, contemporary citizenship regimes have historically tolerated some of the worst forms of social exclusion and injustice. In elaborating upon these arguments, The Citizen and the Alien aspires to deepen and advance the conversation “between inward-looking and boundary-conscious approaches to citizenship, in the interest of illuminating the dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion that are implicated by the concept” (2).

Does the book fulfill this aspiration? On one level it does. The American case law and legal scholarship that inform The Citizen and the Alien generally support Bosniak's central arguments and validate her ambition to bridge the intellectual divide between inward-looking and boundary-conscious citizenship discourses. Particularly with respect to the latter, The Citizen and the Alien clearly succeeds in accomplishing its self-declared goal to “press inward-looking scholars of equal and democratic citizenship to take greater cognizance of the social structures of bounded citizenship, and of alienage in particular” (134).

The book, nevertheless, can be criticized on several scores. First, despite its occasional pretensions to represent the dilemmas of membership within all contemporary liberal states, the case law and other evidence presented in The Citizen and the Alien are drawn almost exclusively from the American experience. This matters because citizenship is often founded on sufficiently different legal and theoretical principles in other advanced industrial democracies. Although perhaps more convergent than some scholars have hitherto assumed, national citizenship laws, family reunification rules, and naturalization regimes have usually followed, in path-dependent fashion, a trajectory that is deeply rooted in peculiarly national histories and legal traditions. Moreover and more significantly, the contradictions between immigration and immigrant incorporation law and policies within these non-American cases are often more acute. For example, the legal barriers to acquiring formal citizenship not only vary across Western Europe, they are typically more onerous for legally residing aliens to overcome in Austria, Germany, Greece, Spain, and several other West European countries than in the United States.

Second, although Bosniak's central insights and arguments may be a revelation to some American legal theorists, they will hardly be perceived as original by the very many comparative social scientists intimately familiar with the dilemmas of citizenship in other postindustrial democracies. This is especially true of her argument that attempts to erect a wall between hard immigration and soft immigrant incorporation regimes are artificial and counterproductive, a thesis that has been previously advanced in different forms by numerous social scientists. To her credit, Bosniak is not entirely unfamiliar with and, thus, she does dutifully cite the scholarship of the more prominent figures within this cohort including Rainer Baubőck, William Rogers Brubaker, Seyla Behabib, Will Kymlicka, Saskia Sassen, and Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal. Nevertheless, the intellectual repackaging of the familiar arguments of these and comparative and European scholars will disappoint readers seeking a fresh perspective.

Finally, at several points in The Citizen and the Alien, the book suggests that Bosniak borders on being ill informed. Nowhere is this more obvious than when Bosniak problematically asserts that “most scholars seem to take for granted that the enjoyment of citizenship rights requires possession of citizenship” (92). In addition to Soysal, who in The Limits of Citizenship (1995) a dozen years ago propagated the thesis that the rights once belonging exclusively to citizens are now routinely exercised by immigrants, there is the even older scholarship of Tomas Hammar, who popularized the concept of “denizenship.” Originally coined by legal scholars—and a concept similar to Bosniak's “alien citizenship” (95)—denizenship describes the unique status of persons who are not formal citizens within a society but, nevertheless, are not quite traditional aliens (e.g., refugees and guest workers). Although the most common right of denizenship is the right to indefinite residence within the host country, denizens also usually enjoy the rights of free speech, association, and political activity and access to social welfare. Indeed, in some countries, denizens can vote in local elections. The point here is that the long standing presence of denizens within the advanced industrial democracies and the privileges that they routinely exercise are certainly not news to established scholars of immigration or immigrant incorporation.

This said, these criticisms do not detract from Bosniak's success in shining an intensely bright light on her subject and, specifically, on the contentious issue of where, if at all, the boundaries should be drawn with regards to the rights and privileges of formal citizens and noncitizens. Although it does not settle the matter, The Citizen and the Alien forces its readers to reflect deeply on the moral bases of the laws, institutions, and practices that, to a considerable degree, are failing both citizens and denizens within the liberal democracies.