Feeling like a citizen, living as a denizen: deportees' sense of belonging

Most scholarship on citizenship examines how rights are distributed within a polity, yet rarely considers how citizenship can function as a barrier to territorial rights - the right to live in a particular place. This talk draws from interviews with 30 Jamaican deported former legal permanent residents of the United States to address the question: What can we learn about the construction of citizenship in the 21st century through a consideration of people denied territorial rights? Addressing this question enhances our understanding of citizenship in two ways: 1) Tanya Golash Boza calls into question the assumption that citizenship rights are hierarchical and argue that social, cultural, and legal citizenship rights are non-convergent; and 2) she provides evidence that alienage is not always a salient aspect of the lives of non-U.S. citizens. Instead, it becomes relevant at certain points, and facing deportation is one of those points.