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"In Illegal, prominent political scientist Elizabeth Cohen explores the dark history of US immigration policy and proposes a major new plan for full-scale reform. As Cohen shows, the US has always maintained the right to exclude people from entry-from those deemed to have seditious intent to a broad category of "undesirables," which has at times included epileptics, prostitutes, beggars, and anarchists. Cohen traces the particular invention of "illegal" immigration to 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted to suppress immigration by "undesirable" peoples of the world. Later, through the 1924 National Origins Quota Act, Congress massively expanded the scope of racial immigrant exclusions. However, as Cohen points out, the Registry Act of 1929 quietly provided a way for people who had come to the US without legal status to eventually become legal and to naturalize. In subsequent decades, Congress began to distinguish legal from illegal immigration by mapping out the first roads to citizenry. Yet when the registry system was eventually undone in 1986 with the introduction of selective "amnesty" for documented immigrants, the problem of "the undocumented" snowballed into a legal and economic disaster. Employers kept hiring undocumented workers, incentivizing immigration, but a lack of papers could place migrant families in legal limbo. Thus, by 1996, we had a citizenship crisis -- one exacerbated when terrorism became linked with unlawful immigration, manufactured by a Congress that had allowed its citizenship -- related functions to atrophy"--

"Time is widely recognized as one of the most precious and finite resources required for the accomplishment of human purposes. Within the domain of the political, time is required for almost any exercise of liberty that people seek to protect through the enforcement of social contracts, constitutions, and laws. Time is therefore inextricable from the realization of any vision of political justice. All political subjects encounter myriad ways in which their time is structured, valued, appropriated, or freed by the state. In the United States, we wait to turn 18 to acquire political voice and full representation. Then we wait again, to turn 62 or 66, when we can retire from work and receive retirement benefits, if we wish. People file taxes on April 15; redistricting hinges on decennial censuses; and prosecutors specify when crimes were committed to determine whether statutes of limitation have expired. Around us convicted criminals are punished with prison sentences of varying durations, legal permanent residents refrain from traveling for long periods of time as they seek to naturalize, and election cycles run their course only to begin anew. Despite the significance of time for the satisfaction of people's ends, the legitimate power of the state to command the time of its subjects and set a political schedule is not generally contested"--

Waiting periods and deadlines are so ubiquitous that we often take them for granted. Yet they form a critical part of any democratic architecture. When a precise moment or amount of time is given political importance, we ought to understand why this is so. The Political Value of Time explores the idea of time within democratic theory and practice. Elizabeth F. Cohen demonstrates how political procedures use quantities of time to confer and deny citizenship rights. Using specific dates and deadlines, states carve boundaries around a citizenry. As time is assigned a form of political value it comes to be used to transact over rights. Cohen concludes with a normative analysis of the ways in which the devaluation of some people's political time constitutes a widely overlooked form of injustice. This book shows readers how and why they need to think about time if they want to understand politics

Ayelet Shachar's lead essay in The Shifting Border draws out dramatic transformations of bordering practices currently taking place worldwide. These have yielded spatial relocations for bordering, a privatization of enforcement, and legal innovations that tie the border to individual people as they move, among many other changes. Shachar argues in favor of a form of reciprocity, in which states that shape shift their borders are also compelled to recognize rights for people who require humanitarian assistance. In response, Shachar's interlocutors offer an array of reflections and friendly amendments.

Liberal democracy is often viewed by its supporters as a system of government that responds to the informed and rational preferences of the public organized as voters. And liberal democracy is often viewed by its critics as a system that fails to respond to the informed and rational preferences of its citizens. In this book Larry Bartels and Chris Achen draw on decades of research to argue that a "realistic" conception of democracy cannot be centered on the idea of a "rational voter," and that the ills of contemporary democracies, and especially democracy in the U.S., must be sought in the dynamics that link voters, political parties and public policy in ways that reproduce inequality. "We believe," write the authors, "that abandoning the folk theory of democracy is a prerequisite to both greater intellectual clarity and real political change. Too many democratic reformers have squandered their energy on misguided or quixotic ideas."

Discomfort with denationalization spans both proceduralist and consequentialist objections. I augment Patti Lenard's arguments against denationalization with an epistemological argument. What makes denationalization problematic for democratic theorists are not simply the procedures used to impose this penalty or its consequences but also the permanence of this type of punishment. Because democratic theory assumes citizens to be subject to developmental processes that can substantially alter a person's character in politically relevant ways, I argue in favor of states imposing only revocable punishments. Penalties removing people's rights and political standing must be accompanied by avenues for periodic reconsideration of such punishments in order to meet Lenard's standard of democratic legitimacy.

This Article takes up the question of "who counts?" with a three-part argument. The first part of the argument makes the case that citizenship in liberal democracies is subject to stresses caused by internal doctrinal conflict that result in the creation of semi-citizenship statuses that offer some individuals partial bundles of rights and semi-citizen statuses. Semi-citizenship is inevitable. The second part of the argument looks closely at how this affects the distribution of the political rights of citizenship: voting and representation. I make the argument that we ought not conflate voting and representation. Each is a distinct political right. People who cannot vote or do not vote are not necessarily entirely unrepresented. This is particularly evident if one takes seriously the trustee model of representation. The third part of the Article compares three different cases of semi-citizenship in which groups who are counted for the purposes of the census and legislative apportionment are not accorded the vote. I examine the cases of children, non-citizens, and felons, briefly illustrating how and why trusteeship serves the first two groups and fails the third. These conclusions bolster the case for treating trusteeship as a necessary component of a liberal democratic state and for treating it skeptically in circumstances in which the trusteeship is not clearly linked to the political capabilities of the population in question.

The uncertain political status of America's millions of undocumented immigrants and their children has exposed deep and ongoing disagreement about how US citizenship should be accorded to foreign-born persons. I identify the principle ofjus temporis,a law of measured calendrical time, that has worked in concert withjus soliand consent to construct citizenship law since the nation's founding.Jus temporistranslates measured durations of time such as "time in residence" or "time worked" into entitlement to rights and status. It creates temporal algorithms in which measured calendrical time plus additional variables (e.g., physical presence, education, or behavior) equals consent to citizenship. I explore recent scholarly references to temporal principles and trace the history of howjus temporiswas invoked by the nation's first Supreme Court jurisprudence on citizenship and the first Congressional debates about immigration and naturalization. Scholarly convergence on the principle ofjus temporisas well as its originalist pedigree imbue this principle with the potential to resolve contemporary disagreements about the rights and status of foreign-born persons in the US.

In the English constitutional tradition, subjecthood has been primarily derived from two circumstances: place of birth and time of birth. People not born in the right place and at the right time are not considered subjects. What political status they hold varies and depends largely on the political history of the territory in which they reside at the exact time of their birth. A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations—what I will call collectively jus tempus—creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through which jus tempus became a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of semi-citizenship beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points about jus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle of jus tempus is applied in a diverse array of political contexts.