Paper Citizens How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries

"When we think of illegal immigrants, we typically think about people from developing countries - Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, Pakistan, Nigeria - entering developed countries - the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany. According to conventional wisdom, those who make this trek leave weak, poor states in search of a better life in wealthy nations that possess the ability to track and monitor them." "Yet as Kamal Sadiq shows in this groundbreaking work, the conventional wisdom about undocumented immigrants is wrong. In fact, most of the world's illegal immigrants are not migrating to the United States - they are relocating to countries in the vast developing world. And when they arrive in countries like India and Malaysia - all of which are governed by weak and frequently erratic, bureaucracies - they are able to obtain the documents and benefits of citizenship fairly easily. Once immigrants obtain "documentary citizenship," it is a relatively simple matter for, say, an Afghani migrant with Pakistani papers to pass himself off as a Pakistani citizen both in Pakistan and abroad. Who, then, is really a citizen? And what does citizenship mean for most of the world's peoples?" "Paper Citizens explores immigration and immigrant communities along the crescent of the developing world stretching from Pakistan to Southeast Asia. But Sadiq not only shows how illegal immigrants acquire citizenship; he considers the consequences this will have for the future of governance and global security in the post-9/11 world."--BOOK JACKET.

Kamal Sadiq is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Irvine.