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Through an exploration of relevant legislation and court cases, this article discusses the contemporary constitution of neoliberal subjects via the devolution of select immigration powers to state and local governments by the federal government of the United States. Since the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the federal government has had plenary power over immigration, which has enabled it to treat “people as immigrants” (or as “nonpersons” falling outside of many Constitutional protections), simultaneously requiring that states and cities treat “immigrants as people” (or as persons protected by the Constitution). Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, the devolution of welfare policy and immigration policing powers has challenged the scalar constitution of personhood, as state and local governments have newfound powers to discriminate on the basis of alienage, or noncitizen status. In devolving responsibility for certain immigration-related policies to state and local governments, the federal government is participating in the rescaling of membership policy and, by extension, the rescaling of a defining characteristic of the nation-state. This recent rescaling is evidence of the contemporary neoliberalization of membership policy in the United States, and specifically highlights the legal (re)production of scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports in this issue including one about international migration and another about borders.

The matrículas consulares are identity cards issued by the Mexican government to its nationals living abroad. Since 9/11, businesses, local, and state governments in the US have started accepting them as a valid form of identification for undocumented immigrants living in their communities, who otherwise do not have any form of acceptable identification. In this article, I first outline the history and context of federal jurisdiction over immigration and naturalisation policy in the United States, and then expand upon the case study of the consular ID cards. I argue that the increasing acceptance of the matrículas consulares provides an example of how, in confronting the local impacts of undocumented migration, communities are formulating both "foreign policy" (as immigration policy is considered as foreign policy in the United States), as well as "citizenship policy," at the local scale. I conclude by taking the analysis one step further and arguing that this partial rescaling of membership policy enables the nation-state to better manage what political theorist, James Hollifield, calls the "liberal paradox," or the growing tension between neoliberal economic openness and the continued necessity of national political closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using non-citizen voting (or ‘alien suffrage’) as a case study, this article traces the long role which immigration has played in reshaping the boundaries around the citizenry and the population of eligible voters in the US. The paper discusses the gradual ‘territorialisation’ of citizenship and suffrage from the late 1700s to the mid 1960s and then addresses the current ‘deterritorialisation’ of these institutions vis-à-vis the growing population of non-citizens. It concludes with a discussion of contemporary attempts to reinstate non-citizen voting at the local scale, as a means of addressing the widening gap between popular and territorial sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]