In Brief: Linda Bosniak's The Citizen and the Alien

Abstract

Linda Bosniak's The Citizen and the Alien provides few answers, but it does elucidate a useful framework to approach the chimera of citizenship. How are we to understand who is a citizen and an alien and how are we to weigh the pertinent policy questions for the country and its people? Bosniak posits that much of the difficulty in dealing with the issues surrounding citizenship stems from a lack of clarity over the term. She begins by asking three cornerstone questions in the context of citizenship: what, where, and whom? Bosniak first categorizes citizenship into four types: status, rights, social, and identity. The first type, status, refers to legal classification; citizenship is equated with formal legal status.' The second type is the early Roman concept of citizenship as the enjoyment of rights and privileges; one is a citizen if he or she enjoys the rights of one.2 Social citizenship is the Athenian idea of collective self governance-of "ruling and being ruled"-citizens are those that engage politically.3 Finally, citizenship is also a form of identity and social membership; an example would be a citizen of the world or "a good citizen of Springfield.", 4 According to Bosniak, citizenship is either transnational--due to the emergence of transnational corporations and issues such as global warming or infectious diseases that are not confined to a single wation's borders--or a bounded national citizenship.6 Bosniak focuses on the latter and finds that it is the most applicable to contemporary issues of citizenship and immigration. Next, Bosniak proposes three ideas to explain who is a citizen: universal, bounded, and alien citizens. The first idea describes citizenship as aspirationally universal-that everyone within the jurisdiction of that