The Scramble for Citizens: Dual Nationality and State Competition for Immigrants, Stanford University Press 2013) shows why dual nationality exists and what it means today from the perspective of states, as well as of people with and without multiple citizenship options. The book makes three fundamental contributions: 1) it shows that nationality laws are not solely the outcome of a competition among domestic policy interest groups, but at key moments have resulted from a scramble among nations to affiliate and gain the allegiance of migrants; 2) it also makes an empirical contribution to the literature on the meaning of citizenship by examining the process that individuals go through to get a second nationality; 3) finally, it demonstrates the importance of ethnically selective policies in the immediate and long term. Here’s a blogpost about The Scramble for Citizens.

Winner American Sociological Association’s Thomas & Znaniecki Best Book Award (2014) for the best book on international migration.

Culling the Masses: The Democratic Roots of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (co-authored with David FitzGerald; Harvard University Press 2014). The authors explore the unsettling relationship between liberal democracy and racially selective laws in the Western Hemisphere. By means of an unprecedented coding of laws in 22 countries of the Americas since 1790 as well as an analysis of six country case studies and a case study of international organizations, CTM explains the rise and relative demise of formal legal exclusions in immigration and nationality law, and consider the implications for contemporary policies. It also identifies the circumstances under which policies diffuse not only from North to South, and across similar epistemic communities, but also against political gravity. The book has is the subject of a symposium in Ethnic and Racial Studies (June 2015). Here’s a Page 99 blogpost about Culling the Masses and an interview about the book on Slate.com.

Culling the Masses received the American Sociological Association’s 2017 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award and the 2017 Midwest Sociological Society’s Distinguished Book Award. This book previously won the American Sociological Association’s Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award (2015) for the best book on international migration, the ASA’s Political Sociology Section Best Book Award (2015), the American Political Science Association’s Migration and Citizenship Award for Best Book in 2015, and Honorable Mention for the Theodore Saloutos Book Prize of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Temporary Migrants: Making Workers without Rights since Abolition is a book manuscript under contract with Oxford University Press. Temporary Migrants examines how states have used the importation of foreign workers for a contractually limited time – temporary labor migration schemes (TLMSs) – to manage labor and shape populations. Ideologically, TLMSs purport to reconcile the countervailing pulls of nationalism and capital. By taking a long view and comparing across countries, I show that contemporary TLMSs have antecedents that raise questions about the nature of labor and of permanent statuses like “immigrant” and “resident”.

Articles and chapters: Academia