It's true, as Alex and Jon point out: the number of immigrants seeking naturalization have in effect gone through the roof. The statistics look dramatic: the volume of applications from the mid-90s onward dwarf figures from earlier decades. More than 1.3 million individuals applied for citizenship in FY 2007. That's more in one year than the...
Cristina asks this question, and she has a good point in arguing, not necessarily. I agree that community affiliation is not a zero-sum proposition and that it is possible to be a fully engaged member of more than one polity. I have argued that plural citizenship should be not merely tolerated but embraced (here, for example). Autonomy...
Just returned from Peter's talk at the Woman's National Democratic Club. Peter gave a fine talk and it was a very enjoyable event. The questions were submitted in writing and my question wasn't asked, so I will ask it now. Is it possible to have democratic self-government without a nation-state or some other entity like a city-state, that has restrictions...
Thanks to Jon for his richly detailed post. It's true that the last great wave of immigration, at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, witnessed some of the same phenomenon, including circular migration and the flowering of immigrant enclaves. But there are at least two developments which make the current picture a very different one. 1. ...
[John Fonte is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for American Common Culture at the Hudson Institute.] Thanks to Peter for inviting me to participate. I am off to see Peter speak here in Washington at the Woman's National Democratic Club in about thirty minutes and will comment more when I come back. But first let me put forward a...
[Cristina Rodriguez is Associate Professor of Law, New York University School of Law.] First, thank you to Peter and to Opinio Juris for making this conversation possible. Among the many things that Beyond Citizenship illuminates is the curious absence of discussion within today’s immigration debate about the changing nature of citizenship. That absence, I think, is suggestive of the salience of...
[Jon Weinberg is Professor of Law at Wayne State University.] Thanks so much to Opinio Juris for hosting this discussion, and to Peter for making it possible. Peter's is a terrific and thought-provoking book, even if I do disagree with most of it. In this post, I want to talk about some of its empirical bases. Alex has...
[T. Alexander Aleinikoff is Dean and Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and the author of Semblances of Sovereignty: The Constitution, the State, and American Citizenship (Harvard University Press 2002).] Thanks to Opinio Juris for the chance to offer up a few thoughts on Peter's provocative book. Beyond Citizenship argues that the idea of citizenship as deeply...
Thanks to my fellow co-bloggers here at Opinio Juris for the chance to discuss my book Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization. It's been an honor (and a lot of fun) to be a part of this project with all of them in this ever-changing young medium. Thanks also to Julian for introducing the discussion on Thursday. I'll...
The first part of this post's title is also the title of a new article at Time.com. (Note: on CNN.com, they title the article "Time to Invade Myanmar?") And so begins the latest iteration of the humanitarian intervention debate. After a recap of the situation in Myanmar, the article notes:...
Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, has "demanded" that Iran let him bring a case against Israel in an international tribunal, according to an Iranian news station. Boyle is quoted as saying: "I am ready to represent Iran in an international tribunal for trying the Zionist regime on charges of genocide of Palestinians and the blockade...
In his January 2002 comments to then-White House Chief of Staff Gonzales on the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to detainees captured in Afghanistan, Colin Powell warned of the foreign policy consequences of abandoning long-accepted Geneva Convention practices, including: It will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva conventions and undermine the protections of the...
