Paper Citizens is truly pathbreaking. It is probably the most impressive and important book ever written about illegal immigration within the developing world-a subject that tends to be glossed over in an immigration debate too narrowly preoccupied with population flows from poor to rich countries. More broadly, this book is one of the finest examples of how researchers can measure the unmeasurable and make the invisible world more visible.
Peter Andreas, Brown University
In these pages you will find the public policy dilemmas and the human tragedies, the conceptual confusion and the gripping stories that show how urgent it is to think more clearly about how foreigners becomes citizens. Anyone who cares about immigration must read Kamal Sadiq's excellent book.
Moises Naim, Editor-in-Chief, Foreign Policy, and author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy
In Paper Citizens, Kamal Sadiq brings startling new empirical information and theoretical arguments to the mounting scholarly and political debates over citizenship. He shows that in many countries legal citizenship is far more complex and uncertain than commonly recognized, in ways that pose major challenges for how political governance, economic welfare, and national security should be pursued, within and across existing states. A seminal contribution.
Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
Paper Citizens has serious implications for two big public debates in North America and Europe: illegal migration and security. With a remarkable eye for detail, Kamal Sadiq covers material systematically ignored by the existing scholars of citizenship and migration. It is absolutely fascinating.
Ashutosh Varshney, Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan, and author of Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life
In this impressive work, Sadiq lays bare alignments in the migration experience easily obscured by the analytical categories that dominate explanation in this field of research. He makes visible the extent to which these categories are empirically rooted in the Western experience. When one moves the lens to Asia, we begin to understand the need for a far broader range of categories. But perhaps even more surprising, is that he shows us that Asia's experience also illuminates features of the west that we have not recognized sufficiently.
Saskia Sassen, Robert Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University and author of Territory, Authority, Rights