Paper Citizens

In this groundbreaking work, Kamal Sadiq reveals that most of the world's illegal immigrants are not migrating directly to the US, but to countries in the vast developing world. And when they arrive in countries like India and Malaysia—which are often governed by weak and erratic bureaucracies—they are able to obtain citizenship papers fairly easily. Sadiq introduces "documentary citizenship" to explain how paperwork—often falsely obtained—confers citizenship onillegal immigrants. Once immigrants obtain documents, Sadiq writes, it is a relatively simple matter for, say, an Afghan migrant with Pakistani papers to pass himself off as a Pakistani citizen both in Pakistan and abroad. Across the globe, there are literally tens of millions of such illegalimmigrants who have assumed the guise of "citizens." Who, then, is really a citizen? And what does citizenship mean for most of the world's peoples? Rendered in vivid detail, Paper Citizens not only shows how illegal immigrants acquire false papers, but also sheds light on the consequences this will have for global security in the post 9/11 world.

Paper Citizens is truly pathbreaking. It is probably the most impressive and important book ever written about illegal immigration within the developing world-a subject that tends to be glossed over in an immigration debate too narrowly preoccupied with population flows from poor to rich countries. More broadly, this book is one of the finest examples of how researchers can measure the unmeasurable and make the invisible world more visible., In these pages you will find the public policy dilemmas and the human tragedies, the conceptual confusion and the gripping stories that show how urgent it is to think more clearly about how foreigners becomes citizens. Anyone who cares about immigration must read Kamal Sadiq's excellent book., In Paper Citizens, Kamal Sadiq brings startling new empirical information and theoretical arguments to the mounting scholarly and political debates over citizenship. He shows that in many countries legal citizenship is far more complex and uncertain than commonly recognized, in ways that pose major challenges for how political governance, economic welfare, and national security should be pursued, within and across existing states. A seminal contribution., Paper Citizens has serious implications for two big public debates in North America and Europe: illegal migration and security. With a remarkable eye for detail, Kamal Sadiq covers material systematically ignored by the existing scholars of citizenship and migration. It is absolutely fascinating., In this impressive work, Sadiq lays bare alignments in the migration experience easily obscured by the analytical categories that dominate explanation in this field of research. He makes visible the extent to which these categories are empirically rooted in the Western experience. When one moves the lens to Asia, we begin to understand the need for a far broader range of categories. But perhaps even more surprising, is that he shows us that Asia's experience also illuminates features of the west that we have not recognized sufficiently.

Kamal Sadiq is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.