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What challenges and opportunities has federalism held for countries like Germany, one of Europe's most `reluctant' states of immigration? Although the formal, constitutional division of powers between the German central government (Bund) and the federal states (Länder) has certainly shaped Germany's response to immigration and integration, federalism is only one aspect of a broader, `semisovereign' model of governance that has dominated German state-society relations for decades (Katzenstein 1987). This model sees a range of decentralized state actors, among them constantly negotiating with a set of highly centralized societal (or ˵parapublic″) organizations, such as churches, labour and employer associations, leading to at best incremental policy change over the years. While some observers argue that this model will endure and likely also impair Germany's ability to successfully navigate future immigration and integration challenges (Green and Paterson 2005), others argue that German political actors have been quite successful all along in shifting ˵venues″ to suit their policy preferences, be that ˵up″ (to the intergovernmental/EU level), ˵down″ (to the local level) or ˵out″ (to non-state actors) (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000). The chapter will argue that Germany's particular version of immigration federalism has facilitated both incrementalism and venue shifting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how people can acquire U.S. citizenship. It explains how U.S. citizenship can be acquired through birth to U.S. citizen parents, including birth of U.S. citizens before May 24, 1934, birth between May 25, 1934 and January 12, 1941, and birth between January 13, 1941 and December 23, 1952. The article also describes the automatic derivation of U.S. Citizenship through naturalized parents. An explanation on how to obtain proof of U.S. citizenship is also provided.

The article offers information on the steps to be taken in getting U.S. citizenship and the rights it accompanies. It says that granting of U.S. citizenship necessitates a person to attend a swearing-in ceremony held by the U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) twice a month. It mentions that being a U.S. citizen gives a person the right to vote in U.S. elections. It adds that getting U.S. citizenship approval allows a person to help the immigration process of certain family members.

The article focuses on the application for a citizenship in the U.S. It states that the application involves a form and a personal interview from the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS). It adds that an individual must have a citizenship application packet which includes a cover letter, the form N-400, and fee payment of 675 dollars. Moreover, the preparation for the Form-400 or the Application for Naturalization must be completed to give biographical information of an individual.

An introduction to the book is presented in which the editor discusses the content of each book chapter including the benefits and shortcomings of citizen application, U.S. citizenship eligibility, and tips in learning the English language.

Chapter 6 of the book "Your U.S. Citizenship Guide: What You Need to Know to Pass Your U.S. Citizenship Test," by Anita Biase is presented. It offers information on the attributes and significance of Form N-400 on one's application for naturalization. It also features fees paid and inclusions involved in filing the N-400.

An introduction to the book is presented in which the editor discusses an article on the eligibility citizenship rules, one on ways of applying for citizenship, and one on tips on how to prepare for an interview and citizenship tests.

In the previous chapter, I argued that changes in the history of black politics in the twentieth century – including the emergence of Black Power in the mid 1960s – were importantly rooted in changing understandings of black identity as these evolved among different groups of African Americans over the course of that century. Similarly, in this chapter I want to make a related claim about the history of activism around women's issues in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here too, political changes were importantly based in changing understandings of the meaning of female identity as these developed among different groups of women and men over the course of this period. Moreover, I believe that a focus on these changing understandings of female identity will necessitate a reconsideration of how we think about the history of those political changes. Since the early years of “women's liberation” in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US, many scholars, including myself, have talked about that history in terms of “waves.” The first “wave” supposedly encompassed the nineteenth-century women's movement leading up to suffrage. The period between 1920 and the early 1960s was then described as a time of relative calm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid 1960s, the slogan “Black Power” burst forth upon the US political stage, expressing an important transformation in African American politics. That politics, previously focused on the elimination of legalized segregation and discrimination, became something more. African Americans were no longer only demanding rights to work, eat, go to school, and reside where they wished; now black people were also expressing a pride in being black and a demand for greater control over black life. The phenomena associated with “Black Power” were complex: Black Panthers organizing breakfast programs for children; middle-class African Americans wearing African-style clothing and Afro haircuts; college students asking for the creation of African American Studies programs; residents of inner city neighborhoods calling for community control of school districts. But all of these phenomena seemed to possess at least certain elements in common: a pride in being black and a belief that this pride should organize African American political, institutional, and personal life. The identity this pride expressed was new. While it shared features with forms of identity that had existed within African American communities prior to the 1960s, it was not quite identical to these earlier forms of identity. From the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, two forms of identity were most open to African Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On or about December 1910 human character changed. Two stories predominate for characterizing the period from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century in western Europe and the United States. There is an older story, represented in this quote by Woolf, which sees changes in the early twentieth century as representing a radical break with late nineteenth-century ways of life. Many of those who were proclaiming themselves modern in the early twentieth century saw themselves and their lives as dramatically different from those of their parents in joyous and exhilarating ways. According to the account they and later chroniclers told of the transformation, late nineteenth-century middleclass life was characterized by sexual repression and moral hypocrisy. Members of the middle class shrouded sex in silence, while if male, nevertheless indulging secretly, or if female, becoming repressed and neurotic. Such repressed and hypocritical attitudes towards sexuality were part and parcel of lives which were overly regulated, motivated by conformity, and restricted in joy. Old fashioned and rigid understandings of women's ‘proper place’ placed unnecessary restrictions on women's intelligence and their contributions to society. Such understandings also placed unnecessary obstacles in the way of men's abilities to achieve companionate marriages. To those who came to call themselves flappers, who were taken with the ideas of Freud, or became excited about cubism in art, a new day was dawning. This new day was captured by the enthusiasts of all of these changes in the phrase, “the modern.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary usage, the categories of “race” and “sex” share a common, curious feature. On the one hand, these appear as neutral categories:“natural” ways of organizing the human race. Thus, theoretically, everyone belongs to some race or another; everyone has a “sex.” But, on the other hand, when examined more closely, the neutrality of the social organizing function of these categories dissipates. White men and women do not seem to belong to a “race” in quite the same ways as black men and women do. Similarly, men as a group are not defined by their status as men in quite the same ways as women as a group are. For both black people and women, their racial and sexual status appears to provide a richer, more elaborate content to their social identities than do the categories of “white” and “male” provide to white people and women. Generalizations about black people qua black and women qua women abound; many fewer such generalizations about white people qua white and men qua men can be found in our social lexicon. In this chapter I want to focus on the evolution of the social categories of race and of sex from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century in western Europe and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late 1960s, certain political phenomena appeared on the US landscape that altered the terms of public debate about social justice. The political movements on behalf of African Americans and women took a distinctive turn. Both of these movements had been a force in United States politics prior to the late 1960s, most visibly in the earlier civil rights and women's rights movements. In these earlier incarnations, these movements had fought for legislation aimed at expanding the access black people and women had to opportunities long denied them for reasons of race and sex. But in the late 1960s, a new kind of emphasis emerged within both movements. While many within these movements continued to work for the above goals, others, particularly those who were younger and angrier, began to articulate different kinds of aims. Those who started calling their movement “Black Power,” instead of “Civil Rights,” and “Women's Liberation,” as distinct from “Women's Rights,” created a politics that went beyond the issue of access and focused more explicitly on issues of identity than had these earlier movements. Other activists, such as those who replaced “Gay Rights” with “Gay Liberation,” made a similar kind of turn. The more explicit focus of these groups on issues of identity caused many to describe this new politics as “identity politics.” Identity issues had not been totally absent from the political movements of women and African Americans prior to the emergence of “identity politics”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the challenges for the future of digital citizenship and information inequalities. Role of information and communications technologies (ICT) in relation to people's ability to participate in society; Impact of ICT on civil society, participatory democracy and citizenship; Recommendations for consideration to policymakers and researchers.

This article studies Jean-Jacques Rousseau as an exotic botanist. As Rousseau stresses, naturalization not only satisfied the curiosity of virtuosi and natural philosophers. Rousseau questions the value of naturalization, noting that it yields often false observations. Rousseau's critique of exotic botany operates at two levels. On one it engages with other botanists about the constitution and horticultural practice of botanical gardens, in which naturalization experiments produced degenerated imported species. On a philosophical level, Rousseau understands exotic botany as one of the manipulations of nature that produce such monstrosities as the multiplication of petals to produce a showy, but sterile, flower.

The article explores the situation of Cambodian Americans in Cambodia as both dual citizens and Christians. It is noted that the Cambodian Americans acquired dual citizenship through naturalization and retained their original citizenship when they found that U.S. rulings were amenable to dual citizenship. Christians stressed the constructedness of Khmer ethnicity. Cambodian Americans in Phnom Penh resented the unequal distribution of visa privileges within their own community of dual citizens.

This chapter focuses on the marginal differences in consumer theory. Advertising as a whole has no meaning. It merely conveys significations. Its significations (and the behaviors they call forth) are never personal: they are all differential; they are all marginal and combinatorial. The real differences which characterized persons made them contradictory beings. Differences of the 'personalizing' type no longer set individuals one against another; these differences are all arrayed hierarchically on an indefinite scale and converge in models, on the basis of which they are subtly produced and reproduced. There is in "personalization" something similar to that "naturalization" effect people constantly meet in the environment, the effect which consists in restoring nature as sign after it has been eliminated in reality. The logic of personalization is the same: it is contemporaneous with naturalization, functionalization, culturalization, etc. It is important to grasp that this personalization, this pursuit of status and social standing, are all based on signs. That is to say, they are based not on objects or goods as such, but on differences.

THE EARLY JOURNALS OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS The early history of the Lords' Journals has been discussed several times. First came A. F. Pollard who in a well-known article debated what he called the ‘authenticity’ of the Journals and concluded that those beginning in 1510 started then as the clerk's private notebook and gradually underwent an ‘evolution’ or development towards a more formal record. He drew attention to the inadequate editing which produced the printed Journals and from his analysis conjectured various consequences for the history of the House, and indeed of the Parliament as a whole, especially that it was clearly still in a very unfinished state in the reign of Henry VIII. Pollard's article initiated the serious study of these materials, but it was not altogether satisfactory. Its age will readily excuse not only some odd attitudinizing about authenticity and evolution but, more obviously, the fact that he could not take account of manuscripts since discovered; it is more serious that he tied himself up in certain misconceptions about the purposes and history of the manuscripts available to him. Nor is it at all clear whether he himself really made the careful study of the manuscript Journals and later copies which he succeeded in suggesting lay behind his paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal has already been said about private bills and acts – their character, the distinction between personal and local, and the parliamentary time they occupied. Private acts matter in this analysis because they offered to individuals a definitive settlement of particular problems and thus extended the usefulness of Parliament beyond the concerns of the great agglomerates of Queen, Church and commonwealth. Though they cost money they often saved much higher costs of litigation. As a subdivision of parliamentary legislation, with its own rules and sometimes its own procedures, they appear to be a unique bequest of late-medieval representative institutions; other assemblies of estates and Parliaments enacted measures for similar purposes but did not distinguish them in their general law-making activity as the English Parliament did. It is therefore necessary to provide a brief conspectus of the kind of thing that was done by private act in these seven sessions. Most of the bills promoted for and by individuals caused no difficulties at all, but those for the settling of estate and local concerns could be troublesome because they involved more than one person or interest. It is within these last two categories that one finds a relatively high number of failed bills. RESTITUTION IN BLOOD In the first place, private acts served to restore people to normal legal rights lost through the attainder, by act or at law, of ancestors whose blood, as the phrase went, had become corrupted through condemnation for treason and very occasionally for felony. In theory at least a person through whose veins such corrupted blood flowed stood outside the law: though it could be used against him he could not himself use it or acquire property. Twenty-four acts of restitution passed between 1559 and 1581. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OUTLINE A man, or a corporation, or the Privy Council, having decided to promote a bill for enactment, then had to enter into the complexities of parliamentary bill procedure. The rules were well established by the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. The bills, written on paper, except that bills graced with the royal sign manual appeared on parchment, were given to the clerk of one House or the other who then passed them to his Speaker (or lord chancellor); he in turn was supposed to bring bills before the House in the order in which he had received them, except that bills coming from monarch or Council enjoyed precedence, but it seems that in this respect Speakers exercised a good deal of discretion. The bill received three readings in its House of origin, though as a rule the full text was read out only on the first occasion; thereafter the summary breviate, which if it was not attached to the bill by the promoter the Speaker was expected to prepare for himself, sufficed. The effectiveness of the first reading may be gauged from the accuracy with which diarists recorded the essential provisions of bills which they can hardly ever have had a chance to see for themselves. Their descriptions are often much fuller than the summary titles used by the clerks in the Journals, and since so many failed bills are lost they often give us the best indication of the contents. Occasionally the bill was debated on first reading but practice was against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both bills and acts could be either public or private, but though most private acts originated with private bills and public acts with public, public or private origins could end in private or public outcomes. The only extant Elizabethan list of bills which distinguished between the two kinds gives proof of that. Among the private bills for 1576 listed there, five became public acts: those for clothiers, for the building of bridges at Rochester and Chepstow, for the paving of streets in Chichester, and for a bridge at Oxford. Among the bills not called private and therefore presumably public was that which produced the private act of naturalization for foreign-born children, but this could be a mistake in the list because naturalization acts, profitable to the officers of the Houses, always started as private. Two public acts of 1571 are explicitly stated in Journal to have started together as private bills: those for the paving of Aldgate and Ipswich. It would appear that a bill could in the course of passage be declared to be ‘general’, as happened in 1571 to the bill for coming to church which passed both Houses and was vetoed by the Queen. There must have been established criteria for declaring a bill public or private, general or particular, but we cannot be sure that later definitions already apply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to the consequences of their own deeds and the basic statutes calling for their arrest and expulsion, unnaturalized foreigners resident in the Indies had another major worry. The kings periodically issued decrees calling for special efforts to round up these illegal aliens and to send both the foreigners and their wealth to Spain at the earliest opportunity. These cédulas came, characteristically, when the crown was most worried about the potential dangers foreigners represented to the empire. Need for the money that might be forthcoming in the seizure of the wealth of these persons also played an important part in the timing of orders for direct action against foreign residents. These round-ups thus tended to come just before or during wartime when both the royal concern for imperial defense and the need for increased revenues were most in evidence. There were several such ‘reprisals’ (represalias) in the course of the eighteenth century. The last came in 1794 and 1795 when orders went out to arrest all Frenchmen and to sequester their holdings. Philip V directed the first roundup of the century during the War of Spanish Succession. In a cédula dated 24 July 1702, Philip told Viceroy Alburquerque of New Spain that England, Holland, and the Hapsburgs had declared war. Alburquerque was therefore to take ‘appropriate measures to embargo all Germans, Dutchmen, and Englishmen’ in his jurisdiction. He was to allow absolutely none of these foreigners nor any goods or estates pertaining to them to escape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the collective foreigner from the potential threat that he represented to crown interests, over the various hurdles to acceptance, and on to his death reveals a great deal about both the immigrants and the Spaniards. In the first place, foreign residents of New Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century represented neither a major threat nor an indispensable asset to the viceroyalty. On balance their presence was more positive than negative. Many brought skills, established families, and became loyal subjects of the crown. They were, or they became, or, at least, they pretended to be good Catholics. They did not introduce subversive ideas, and their limited economic impact seems to have been largely internal to New Spain, consonant with the values of the society in which they had come to live, and devoid of direct links with their mother countries. In most cases forbidden to be in the Indies at all, foreigners entered the official record for a variety of reasons. Some represented religious deviation or social problems, but almost as often they appeared as nothing more than witnesses or interpreters. In wartime, colonial authorities occasionally sought out natives of enemy countries, sometimes because of feared subversion, but more likely from a desire to seize their wealth. The same officials or their superiors, however, almost invariably released those aliens discovered in the round-ups. Real enemies were usually only a few poor prisoners of war captured elsewhere and interned in New Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secular clergy and missionary religious, each operating under their own organizations, shared responsibility with the Holy Office of the Inquisition for maintaining the faith in Spanish America. While the missionaries aimed at the conversion of pagan Indians and the seculars ministered to the faithful, the inquisitors dealt with religious deviation. Philip II had transferred the Inquisition to the New World in the sixteenth century for this specific purpose. In an empire where religion was an aspect of citizenship at least as important as birth, this responsibility of the Holy Office was indeed a grave one. Non-believers might undermine the faith of Indians and other ‘ignorant persons’ and thus dilute the purity of America. The Laws of the Indies, accordingly, charged the governmental authorities and bishops to rid the Indies of foreigners and other persons ‘suspicious in matters of the faith’. The Inquisition stood as the first line of defense. Regarding religious conformity, all persons in New Spain were subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office. The only exceptions were the Indians, and they came under the less formal and reportedly more lenient episcopal inquisition in the hands of the bishops and the secular clergy. Religious, chiefly Dominicans well schooled in canon law, made up the core of the Holy Office itself. Laymen and churchmen alike aided the inquisitors, and the whole functioned much like any other government agency. The main exception was that Inquisition records and proceedings were closed to inspection by viceregal authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mercantilist legislation went beyond attempts at controlling balances of trade and encouraging shipbuilding. Good mercantilists recognized that people too were important to the economic power of the nation. These theorists held that large populations were good and that individuals, especially skilled, ‘useful’ individuals, were a valued national resource. It follows that the same kind of laws that strove to restrict the export of specie also tried to control the movement of people. The legislation of various European states aimed at keeping nationals, particularly skilled, valued nationals, at home while at the same time encouraging useful foreigners to settle. With certain restrictions, the British extended this policy to the New World, while the Spaniards, Portuguese, and French did not. Or so the colonial laws of these powers might seem to suggest. Yet Spanish law in Europe complied fully with the mercantilist rationale. The Laws of Castile required a royal license for anyone planning to leave Spain ‘with his house and family’, while foreigners might immigrate freely and receive for a period of years exemption from certain taxes and service obligations. With the exception of some offices from which they were excluded, foreigners in Spain were otherwise equal to the native-born in all legal matters. This attitude remained in the minds of most Spanish administrators from the king downward, and they persisted in applying it to the Indies as well as Castile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “naturalization” of black and female identity that developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States and other western countries remained a major current in popular consciousness throughout the twentieth century and even until today. But beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, certain new ways of thinking about identity emerged in Europe and North America to seriously challenge such naturalization. Most importantly, environmentalism became less the position of a small band of intellectuals and more a widely accepted current in popular consciousness. In the process, environmentalism became a more widely available antidote to claims about natural differences. Environmentalism became a widely accepted current in popular consciousness in part because it became elaborated by various schools of thought that wielded influence both within academic thought and within popular literature. In the next two chapters I will focus on two schools of thought that played an important role in this elaboration and popularization of environmentalism. One such school of thought was dynamic psychology. Dynamic psychology focused on the individual but portrayed individual development less as a function of inborn, natural givens and more as a function of environmental influences. Dynamic psychology was developed in a variety of ways and by a variety of thinkers in the early part of the twentieth century. But I focus on one particularly important contributor, Sigmund Freud, both because of the power of Freud's thought and because of its timing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of countries that approved dual citizenship that appeared in the "Your U.S. Citizenship Guide: What You Need to Know to Pass Your U.S. Citizenship Test" is presented.

The article introduces a series of topics on how to become a citizen in the U.S. These articles include "Before You Begin Your Journey," "What Does Citizenship Involve," "Are You Eligible to Become a U.S. Citizen?," "Eligibility Requirements for Naturalization," "Methods for Obtaining a Green Card,"Form N-400, and "The Interview."

A letter is presented from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Canisius on his opposition on that the constitutional provision of Massachusetts which covers naturalized citizen be adopted in other state and on the unification of Republicans and other oppositions.

The article presents a speech by General Ulysses S. Grant delivered during the 115th New York Chamber of Commerce annual banquet on May 8, 1883 in which he discusses immigration in the U.S., naturalization, and the privileges and obligations of a naturalized citizen.

The article presents a speech by former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson delivered at Convention Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 10, 1915, in which he discussed the free will, humanity and consciousness of newly naturalized citizens who made an oath of allegiance to principles and ideal of the government.