Citizen & the Alien

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 with 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.