Offering a political optic on transnationalism, this article shows how the Partido Acción Nacional from Guanajuato, Mexico, seeks to reconstitute Guanajuatense transnational migrants as clients and funders of state policies, as political subjects with “dual loyalty” but limited political autonomy. To co-opt migrants into development projects designed bythe state but financed bythe migrants, partyelites reconfigure the meanings of “migrant,” “region,” and “citizen.” This is contested by migrant leaders whose views of extraterritorial citizenship, translocal community, and partyloy alty differ from views (...) of the partyelites. The migrants see the state as diverting their energies from true civil societyand local development initiatives across borders. (shrink)

Citizenship presents two faces. Within a political community it stands for inclusion and universalism, but to outsiders, citizenship means exclusion. Because these aspects of citizenship appear spatially and jurisdictionally separate, they are usually regarded as complementary. In fact, the inclusionary and exclusionary dimensions of citizenship dramatically collide within the territory of the nation-state, creating multiple contradictions when it comes to the class of people the law calls aliens--transnational migrants with a status short of full citizenship. Examining alienage and alienage law (...) in all of its complexities, The Citizen and the Alien explores the dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion inherent in the practices and institutions of citizenship in liberal democratic societies, especially the United States. In doing so, it offers an important new perspective on the changing meaning of citizenship in a world of highly porous borders and increasing transmigration. As a particular form of noncitizenship, alienage represents a powerful lens through which to examine the meaning of citizenship itself, argues Linda Bosniak. She uses alienage to examine the promises and limits of the "equal citizenship" ideal that animates many constitutional democracies. In the process, she shows how core features of globalization serve to shape the structure of legal and social relationships at the very heart of national societies. (shrink)