Transnational Citizenship Across the Americas

Mass migrations, diasporas, dual citizenship arrangements, neoliberal economic reforms and global social justice movements have in recent decades produced shifting boundaries and meanings of citizenship within and beyond the Americas. In migrant-receiving countries, this has raised questions about extending rights to newcomers. In migrant-sending countries, it has prompted states to search for new ways to include their emigrant citizens into the nation state.

This book situates new practices of ‘immigrant’ and ‘emigrant’ citizenship, and the policies that both facilitate and delimit them, in a broader political–economic context. It shows how the ability of people to act as transnational citizens is mediated by inequalities along the axes of gender, race, nationality and class, both in and between source and destination countries, resulting in a plethora of possible relations between states and migrants. The volume provides cross-disciplinary and theoretically engaging discussions, as well as empirically diverse case studies from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that have been transformed into ‘emigrant states’ in recent years, offering new concepts and theory for the study of transnational citizenship.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.